Lean Roundup #191 – April 2025

A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of April 2025.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here.  

 

Fluctuations on Continuously Moving Assembly Lines 3—The Value of Team Leaders - Christoph Roser talks about one key tool for reducing fluctuations on Toyota assembly lines is the team leader, the frontline support for operators.

 

No Substitute for Experience – Bruce Hamilton shares a personal story illustrating the lesson for why there is no substitute for experience.

 

Fundamentals of OpEx/Lean, Part 1 – Pascal Dennis shares four levels of Visual Management, in order of increasing power.

 

Starting a Lean Transformation: Building a Team of ACEs - Tyson Heaton and Noel Jarin talk about how activating, cultivating, and elevating a team of ACEs can drive lasting performance gains across any operation.

 

Want to Improve Your Product Development? Prioritize Organizational Learning  - Steve Shoemaker discusses why product development excellence depends on stable, cross-functional teams and a culture that learns from both failure and success.

 

Solving the Productivity Paradox - Jacob Stoller shares how leaders can drive real gains—not by cutting people, but by engaging them in redesigning work.

 

Multi-level Visualization: Engage Everyone in Problem-Solving to Achieve Business Results - Michael Ballé shows how leaders can use visualization to align lean problem-solving with business results.

The Difference Between a Lean Leader and a Regular Leader - Alen Ganic gives insight into what you can do to become an excellent leader—what we call a Lean leader.

Leadership by Fear Doesn’t Work — And Never Really Did – Mark Graban dispels the myth that fear is a performance enhancer.

Lean Isn’t Just About Cost: Stop Putting a Stick in Your Own Bicycle Spokes – Mark Graban explain why we should not sabotage our own efforts, take the stick out of the wheel — and keep moving forward, together.

The Lean Journey is Long and Winding Road

The Lean Journey: A Long and Winding Road Toward Continuous Improvement

How do you start your Lean journey? It begins not with a perfect plan but with a mindset shift—a decision to embrace continuous improvement as a way of life. The Lean journey roadmap is not a straight highway; rather, it’s a winding road filled with experimentation, reflection, and transformation.

For organizations new to Lean, the path can feel overwhelming. You’ll encounter challenges, detours, and even setbacks. But with the right mindset and culture, every obstacle becomes an opportunity to learn. That’s what makes Lean so powerful.

Understanding the Lean Journey Roadmap

At its core, Lean is not a destination—it’s a journey. There is always a gap between the current state and the True North—the ideal future you're striving toward. This gap represents limitless opportunities for improvement, and closing it requires action, reflection, and perseverance.

A complete Lean journey roadmap typically includes these key milestones:

1. Awareness and Education – Learning Lean principles, tools, and concepts.
2. Pilot Projects and Experiments – Applying what you've learned on a small scale.
3. Cultural Alignment – Beginning the process of changing organizational culture with Lean.
4. Process Standardization – Documenting and repeating successful processes.
5. Scaling and Sustaining – Embedding Lean into company culture for the long term.

These stages of Lean transformation require more than technical know-how—they require a transformation in mindset, leadership, and organizational culture.

The Role of Experimentation in Lean Thinking

Lean is not a one-time fix; it’s a system of continuous learning. This philosophy was born from decades of hands-on experimentation at Toyota, where even world-class performance is never considered “good enough.” In Lean, improvement never stops because perfection is never fully achieved.

Each day offers new opportunities for controlled, measurable experiments. These experiments are the heartbeat of building a Lean culture in your company. They sharpen problem-solving skills, improve cross-functional collaboration, and build resilience among teams.

Failures will happen. And that’s not just okay—it’s essential.

Lean culture vs traditional culture differs most starkly in how failure is treated. In traditional management environments, mistakes are often punished, leading to fear, silence, and stagnation. In Lean, however, failure is redefined as feedback. When an experiment doesn’t yield the expected result, it’s seen as valuable data—not a career-ending mistake.

This is the essence of lean culture change management: shifting from a blame-based environment to one that sees errors as stepping stones to excellence.

• To succeed in changing organizational culture with Lean, leaders must:
• Foster psychological safety
• Encourage daily experimentation
• Celebrate small wins and lessons from failure
• Coach instead of command
• Engage people at every level, from the frontlines to the boardroom

This change doesn't happen overnight. But when it does, the results are transformative.

Kaizen: Small Steps, Big Impact

A central pillar of any successful Lean journey is Kaizen, or continuous improvement through small, incremental changes. Kaizen isn’t reserved for large strategic projects; it thrives in everyday routines, everyday teams, and everyday thinking.

By encouraging everyone—from executives to operators—to suggest and test ideas, companies can achieve remarkable outcomes over time. This grassroots improvement culture lays the groundwork for lean mindset transformation at every level of the organization.

It’s not about massive overhauls. It’s about simple, practical improvements that add up—quick changeovers, error-proofing, visual management, or even cleaner, more organized workstations.

Building a Lean Culture in Your Company

Real Lean journey success stories often have one thing in common: a strong, unified culture. Building a Lean culture requires persistence, patience, and consistent leadership.

Here are some guiding principles to keep in mind:

• Lead by example – Leaders must model Lean behaviors and values.
• Communicate purpose – Everyone should understand the “why” behind the Lean journey.
• Make improvement visible – Use boards, dashboards, and visual cues to celebrate progress.
• Invest in learning – Provide training, mentorship, and cross-functional experiences.
• Reward learning, not just outcomes – Celebrate effort, insight, and growth.

Over time, this culture becomes self-sustaining. Lean behaviors become the norm, and improvements happen organically—driven by people, not just processes.

Lean Culture vs Traditional Culture: Why the Shift Matters

In traditional systems, top-down decision-making and rigid hierarchies often create silos, waste, and disengagement. In contrast, Lean systems foster:

• Respect for people
• Decentralized decision-making
• Continuous learning
• Transparent communication
• Proactive problem-solving

Final Thoughts: Starting and Sustaining the Lean Journey

If you're wondering how to start your Lean journey, remember that you don’t need to have it all figured out. Start small. Focus on one area. Try one improvement. Reflect and learn. Then try again.

The Lean journey is long, winding, and deeply rewarding. With consistent effort, a willingness to learn, and a culture that embraces experimentation, you can build an organization that thrives on change—and never stops improving.

Are you ready to take the first step?

Lean Quote: Leaders Need to be Proactive, Not Just Reactive

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency."   —  Arnold Glasow   

Leaders need to be proactive, not just reactive. If you find yourself spending all of your time trying to put out fires, then you aren't using your time effectively.

The success of a company can depends to a large extent on the ability of its staff to solve problems effectively, both in their day-to-day work and through innovation. We are all faced with problems to solve in our workday. We are often not in control of the issues we face at work or home. Problems just present themselves. And chances are the issues you're facing aren't so cut and dry. Having the right attitude can make the difference between success and failure.

The starting point for improvement is to recognize the need. Kaizen emphasizes problem awareness and identification. Once problems are identified, the problems must be solved consequently. Kaizen is a problem solving process which requires the use of various problem solving tools. In Kaizen, the mindset of “no problem” or “no opportunity” must be carefully avoided.

Opportunities for improvement exist in all aspects of every industry and can be identified by every person in any business. With the right culture of continuous improvement, problems, and technology, conscious identification of opportunities for improvement can transform a company into a more efficient, high-quality business.

Possessing good problem solving skills does not make people automatically use them to the benefit of the organization. They need encouragement, support and guidance in applying them to the organization’s problems.

A proactive leader identifies potential issues before they arise and takes steps to address them, actively seeking solutions rather than simply reacting to problems when they occur; this often involves anticipating challenges, gathering information, and engaging their team in brainstorming to develop preventative measures.

Leadership is as much about behavior as it is about strategy. By embodying the qualities you value, you inspire your employees to emulate these behaviors, fostering a workplace where respect is a natural byproduct of exemplary leadership. When you consistently act with integrity and professionalism, you set a high standard for your team to follow.

Unlocking the Hidden Factory

A “Hidden Factory” forms when a defect flows downstream. When the defect is caught, a workaround is created as it is removed from the line, fixed, and placed back on the line. This may solve the problem in the short term, but when you do the same thing over and over again, the workarounds add up, and a hidden factory ultimately develops.

A hidden factory is rarely the result of one problem in a process–if this were the case, it would be easy to solve. Rather, it is usually caused by multiple problems in a mixed system that must be solved at the same time.

If a product goes through a hidden factory, it not only costs more to produce, but also decreases the value that the customer receives. The Hidden Factory creates a long, slow feedback loop when you would rather have shorter, smaller ones.

A sure sign that hidden factories are appearing is when inventory or WIP begins stopping because the system can’t keep up with demand–just like in this famous clip from the show I Love Lucy, when Lucy and Ethel can’t wrap the chocolate quickly enough and must deal with additional chocolate as it comes down the line.

Ironically, when we ask people to work faster as demand rises, the work actually slows down because the amount of inventory that diverts into the hidden factory increases.

You can solve or reduce a hidden factory by shortening the feedback loops within it. In order to reduce the hidden factory, you need a system in place to quickly identify what needs to be fixed and how to fix it quickly.

A few specific approaches to fixing hidden factories include:

Engage as many employees as possible. From the top of the company, Executives need to be involved in this work. They can provide necessary investment and properly measure outcomes. But strong leadership is not enough. Because hidden factories tend to be dispersed across many parts of a system, crafting an effective solution requires engagement with a large swath of a company. Importantly, when searching for hidden factories employees should focus on how time, not cost, is spent.

Focus on risk, not productivity. There is a conventional view of risk and productivity as tightly coupled: greater productivity implies greater risk, and vice versa. This is based on the assumption that the system is operating at its ‘efficient frontier,’ which is rarely the case. If you tackle risk in the right way — addressing the parts of a system that are overtaxed — then you can reduce the risk while increasing productivity. Hidden factories left untended, meanwhile, are both unproductive and unsafe.

Invest in the system, not new technology. Technology can, of course, help to shrink hidden factories, but at its root this problem is about culture and information, not technology. Before anything else, knots in the system must be worked out, and the informational gaps that led to those knots repaired. New technologies or algorithms can’t help if the system and the culture it has nurtured remain broken.

Look for duct tape, clamps … and spreadsheets. The hidden factory has its own set of tools – of the “get-'er-done” variety. In operations, it consists of duct tape, C-clamps, crescent wrenches, and the ratchet extension that someone bent using a blowtorch. In the office, the major culprit is the spreadsheet, where work that falls outside the workflow application — be it Jira or an SAP or Salesforce application — is funneled into the hidden factory of office work. This hidden work is then protected from detection by PowerPoint waterfall diagrams, meticulously prepared to smooth out any disturbing information that would be useful for addressing the factors behind the formation of the hidden factory.

Encourage open communication. Workarounds and quick fixes are unavoidable. Building a system free of defects would be prohibitively expensive, if not impossible. The key is to have rapid and routine feedback when workarounds occur, and to then respond accordingly. To this end, open and honest communication is essential. If you have a culture where employees are expected to report only good news to senior leadership, then they’ll just filter out information that they think they shouldn’t share. To paraphrase W. Edwards Deming, “You’ve just created the perfect system to institutionalize hidden factories.”

To maintain a competitive edge, manufacturers must constantly find ways to cut costs and improve efficiency. Hidden factories are actually good things because they are the system’s way of telling you where to focus. Correcting your systems by finding and eliminating the root causes of rework will result in a much smoother workflow. This will translate directly to bottom line improvements.