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Showing posts sorted by date for query hansei. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Sweet 16 – Blog Anniversary



Another milestone. April 19th marks the 16th year publishing articles on A Lean Journey Blog.

Each year I take the opportunity to reflect. The act of "self-reflection" is called Hansei is Japanese. It is the practice of continuous improvement that consists of looking back and thinking about how a process can be improved.

First a few numbers

Since May 23, 2009 I have shared almost 2665 posts. The most popular ones are about leadership, best practices, empowerment and engagement. I shared more than 3750 tips on my Facebook site. Written/contributed to 1 book and over 15 articles. I’ve also had the pleasure of presenting at 6 conferences, doing 2 radio shows, and hosting more than a dozen webinars.

After 16 years I'd like to think this simple blog has been a success. It has been a valued contribution in the Lean Community with over 2.2 million visitors.  Many articles are frequently shared and many key word searches lead to A Lean Journey Blog. Less than 10% of the blogs I read 16 years ago (which got me started) are still publishing articles today. I get great feedback from many of you which motivates me to continue.

Top 5 posts this past year:

1)     Book Review: Flow Engineering

2)     Lean Quote: Set the Standard; Create and Live the Vision of How a Quality Leader Acts

3)     Lean Quote: The Role of Work in Employee Mental Health and Wellbeing

4)     Lean Quote: Integrity is Doing the Right Things Even When No One is Looking

5)     Lean Quote: Finding Meaning in Your Work

I am so grateful to everyone who has read my posts and/or followed this blog and my other blogs. Some of you have been with me since I began this journey.  Even though we have never met, you comment on my posts and continually send me words of encouragement.  Blogging has been a much more rewarding experience than I imagined it could be! 

I would like to thank all the visitors and contributors to A Lean Journey Blog this year and every year.  It has been a successful journey but we aren't done yet. Please, share your feedback so that A Lean Journey can be even more successful in the future.


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Wednesday, June 19, 2024

The Importance of Hansei



Hindsight is 20/20. The term “hindsight is 20/20” is often used to describe the phenomenon of being able to see things more clearly after they have happened. This phrase is derived from the idea that our vision is usually better when looking backward than forwards.

Despite many believing we should always look forward instead of reminiscing about our past, if done right, it can become less of a downer and more of a positive. If we only look back to highlight the success, rather than the mistakes, then that reflection loses its value. Whilst it’s important to celebrate the positives, you can only learn so much from them. If you want to continuously improve then you need to take into account, the negatives too. That’s where the real value lies.

For the past twenty-five years, I’ve helped to develop methods for implementing lean practices in factories and across supply chains. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that self-reflection is as relevant to lean practices as continuous improvement. In fact, it’s an integral and essential part of it.

John Dewey, the American philosopher and psychologist, said “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

To develop, we need to build on our experience. Whether it’s to improve our skills and abilities, become more competent, increase our performance or open ourselves to new ideas. But as Dewey observed, we do this through reflection, either on our own or with others.

In Japan, when someone makes a mistake, they will profusely apologize, take responsibility, and propose a solution for how they can prevent the same mistake from happening in the future. This process is referred to as 反省 – or Hansei. Hansei is a core concept of Japanese culture. It’s not about shame or guilt. Rather, it’s about admitting there is room for improvement – and committing to that improvement.

To paraphrase my friend, Jon Miller: “Han” means to change, turn over, turn upside down. “Sei” is the simplified form of a character meaning to look back upon, review, examine oneself. As a native speaker of Japanese “hansei” strikes me as both an intellectual and emotional exercise. With hansei there is a sense of shame, if that is not too hard of a word. This may come from having been asked to do a lot of hansei as a child, being told “hanse shinasai!” which in English might be “Learn to behave!”

The point is, when you do hansei it is almost never because you are “considering past experience” as if they were happy memories. You are confronting brutal facts about your actions and the impact they had, in hopes that you can learn from this and change your behavior in the future.

Toyota is known as a learning organization, and this is one of the reasons why Toyota has become so successful. Hansei has a strong role in being a learning organization. In Toyota, hansei is often viewed as a precursor to kaizen, and a pre-requisite to being a learning organization. This is best explained as below (taken from Toyota-Global website);

Hansei is both an intellectual and emotional introspection. The individual must recognize the gap between the current situation and the ideal, take responsibility for finding solutions, and commit to a course of action. The examination involves a review of successes and failures, to determine what works and what needs to be improved. Hansei leads to ideas for kaizen and yokoten, the sharing of best practices from one location to another.

At each key milestone in a project, and at completion, the people involved meet to reflect on their experience of what happened. However, successes aren’t celebrated. In true Japanese fashion, they are treated with humility and modesty. Instead, the focus is on the failures and what could have been better.

It goes without saying, but to perform hansei correctly you need to make sure you’re examining the past and what exactly went wrong. Then you must think about the situation and how it could have been improved or averted in the future. Ensure that someone else is responsible for hansei, and it should always form part of your performance management process, whether it’s on completion of the project or at specific review intervals.

The following structure can be valuable for following hansei:

  1. Pinpoint the problem – There’s no such thing as being flawless, so identify what the main issue is.
  2. Accept accountability – Make sure the individual holds themselves liable for what went wrong. From this, they can work on areas for improvement.
  3. Reflect on root causes – There could be more to the problem than meets the eye, so dig deep and reveal any belief systems, habits or assumptions that may be preventing success.
  4. Build an improvement plan – Action all the learnings, then you can stop the same problem from happening again. 

This isn’t about pointing fingers, issuing blame or scoring points. It helps to identify when things need to improve and prevent any of the errors that were made. Above all, it helps to instill the belief that there’s always room and always need for further improvement.

Hansei is one of the keys to kaizen, as the concept itself focuses on improvement as opposed to punishment. When we fail, we realize that we have done something wrong. So, it is important that we will learn lessons from it, and find methods to prevent its recurrence.  It is most important to consider also how bad we feel when we hurt others in the team by not performing to their expectations.

Why not take this opportunity to practice some self-reflection? In what areas do you need to improve? How can you take ownership of that need to improve? What can you do differently?


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Wednesday, May 22, 2024

15 Year Blog Anniversary


Exciting news! I’m celebrating 15 years of blogging this month. I launched, A Lean Journey in 2009 as a resourceful outlet to share lessons and experiences regarding Lean thinking, improvement practices, and leadership.

At the time, I knew nothing about blogging, the implications of choosing a catchy name, or how to develop a following. I opened an account on Blogger.com, uploaded the photo above to my profile page, and started to blog. I shared my perspective of Lean and chronicled my own “Lean Journey in the Quest for True North." Slowly, I even learned the basics of HTML, which was essential at the time.

Here are links to the first few posts, one to introduce the blog, the next one on DOWNTIME and the Eight Wastes, and the first Lean Quote.

Each year I take the opportunity to reflect. The act of "self-reflection" is called Hansei is Japanese. It is the practice of continuous improvement that consists of looking back and thinking about how a process can be improved.

First a few numbers

Since May 23, 2009 I have shared almost 2530 posts. The most popular ones are about leadership, best practices, empowerment and engagement. I shared more than 3500 tips on my Facebook site. Written/contributed to 1 book and over 12 articles. I’ve also had the pleasure of presenting at 6 conferences, doing 2 radio shows, and hosting more than a dozen webinars.

After 15 years I'd like to think this simple blog has been a success. It has been a valued contribution in the Lean Community with over 2.1 million visitors.  Many articles are frequently shared and many key word searches lead to A Lean Journey Blog. Less than 10% of the blogs I read 15 years ago (which got me started) are still publishing articles today. I get great feedback from many of you which motivates me to continue.

What have I learned? 

Blogging helped learn more and make great connections. This space allowed me to explore/express my own learning, experiment with best practices, and share this with all of you. This has been a tremendous learning process both from the great fans and other colleagues online that I exchange with as well as the process of distilling my own learning with you. I've been fortunate to meet so many great people from experts to layman (like myself) along the way who've taught me so much. These connections have led to great opportunities to write articles and books, present at conferences, and even a number of career roles.

I still can't even believe it’s been FIFTEEN YEARS! That is crazy. I had no idea then what I was getting into or that I'd still be doing this 15 years later.  Frankly, I wasn't sure anyone would read what I wrote never mind find value in it. It truly has been a wonderful experience and full of opportunities.

Thanks all the visitors and contributors to A Lean Journey Blog who make this such a successful journey. 


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Monday, June 27, 2022

Lean Roundup #157 – June 2022



A selection of highlighted blog posts from Lean bloggers from the month of June 2022.  You can also view the previous monthly Lean Roundups here. 

Three Most Important Metrics in a Continuous Improvement Culture – John Knotts shares 3 very simple measures that many organizations fail to collect, or if they do, they collect it at the wrong level.

Top 5 Trends to Track in the Future of Work – Katie Anderson shares what she believes are the top 5 trends to track for the future of work.

Eliminate Posters, Slogans, Exhortations – Christopher Chapman reviews Dr. Deming’s advice against the use of posters, slogans, exhortations as a tool for managing the improvement of quality and productivity.

Strategy is Not About Doing What’s “Important” – Pascal Dennis explains that strategy is about leader’s deciding and testing the plan.

Where to Start Your Kaizen? – Christopher Roser digs deeper into the possibilities and challenges of picking improvement projects, with a particular focus on systems that have multiple independent production lines.

5 ways to improve your connection with the gemba - Flávio Battaglia discusses the practices that can help us make the most of the traditional mantra “go see, ask why, and show respect”.

Post-pandemic hansei – Jim Womack reflects on how lean organizations have performed during the pandemic and addresses age-old misunderstandings about Just-in-Time.

Kaizen: An Exotic Word, Common Sense Principles for Healthcare – Mark Graban shares an article originally published 10 years ago regarding kaizen in healthcare and what has changed since he wrote the article.

Proven Lean Strategies for Optimal Business Performance – Maggie Millard shares a set of lean strategies that when used together provide even more value to optimize resource utilization, reduce waste, and delight customers.

Ask Art: How Do You Motivate Managers to Adopt Lean? – Art Byrne shares some tried-and-true strategies that leaders can deploy to encourage everyone at every level to adopt new approaches to their work.

Toyota: differentiation and vitality - Flavio Picchi shares a few examples of lean system foundations that seem to be perennial.


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Monday, April 12, 2021

10 Qualities of Successful Lean Leaders



There is often a missing link in many Lean organizations - which is, the set of leadership structures and behaviors that constitute a lean management system. People frequently equate ‘Lean' with the tools used to standardize processes and generate efficiencies; and organizations tend to focus more on the implementation of these tools. However, implementing tools only accounts for, at most, 20% of the effort needed in lean transformations. The remaining 80% should be spent on changing leaders' behaviors and practices; and eventually their mindsets.

Lean leadership bridges a crucial divide: the gap between lean thinking and lean tools. Lean leaders have an essential role to play in lean transformations.

I have had the honor to witness several fine Lean leaders throughout my career, and would like to share with you my thoughts on the qualities which make them successful.

1. Focused on the Journey

Lean is a Journey. It is not a quick fix nor a Program of the Month. Far from being a mere operational tactic, Lean should be an integral part of the overall business strategy. Only after identifying ‘True North’ and a strong sense of purpose can an organization understand how to apply Lean to enhance performance through the increase of value. All of this requires long-term thinking, patience and a sustainability mindset.

Another key leadership behavior related to this quality is the ability to perform Hansei, Japanese for ‘reflection’, often referring to critical self-reflection. Only when we deeply reflect on our mistakes and opportunities can we attempt to move forward in our journey towards perfection.

2. Relentless Pursuit of Perfection

This quality is the very essence of Kaizen thinking. The absolute embracement of continuous improvement and utter rejection of the status quo. The Lean Leader believes that ‘good enough’ is never enough! Burning inside the heart and soul of every Lean Leader lies a fundamental belief that everything can be made better and that we must constantly strive to achieve perfection, knowing full well that pure perfection can never actually be obtained. A key leadership behavior to enable this trait is Insatiable Curiosity. In order to improve one must be curious about possibilities and alternatives, as well as embrace the key concept of ‘Learning, not Knowing’. The Lean Leader constantly strives to improve themselves, and thus their organization, and never thinks they know everything.

3. Process-Oriented Thinking

Lean leaders aren’t ones to demand positive results no matter the cost. In their case, the end doesn’t necessarily justify the means. Instead, lean leaders have the ability to take a step back and examine the processes that can lead to the right results.

In their mind, the right process will lead to the right results.

4. Customer Focus Obsessed

In Lean, the Customer is at the beginning and end of everything. Without an intense focus on the customer and an understanding of what they value, a leader will not know where to focus their improvement efforts and may actually end up inadvertently carving out value from the organization.

A key leadership behavior to support this quality is the ability to create a Problem Solving Culture – an environment where problems are readily surfaced (note the Toyota saying of "’No Problem’ is Problem!") and subsequently solved by the teams closest to where the work is being performed. Without a near-fanatical priority on customer value, the customer journey and a problem solving culture, it will be nearly impossible to meet or exceed the customer's expectations.

5. Tackle Problems Immediately (Stopping the Line)

When a problem arises, Lean leaders set the example for immediately tackling the problem before it grows. This is called “stopping the line,” a practice taken from Lean manufacturing, in which an assembly line would halt production to resolve an issue, no matter how small. This practice holds everyone on the assembly line (or value stream) accountable for delivering a consistently high-quality product.

Stopping the line forces every part of the organization to swarm to resolve an issue, learn why it happened, and prioritize work to ensure that it does not happen again. Continuous improvement cannot be one executive’s job; it should be the means by which decisions are made at the personal, team, and organizational levels.

6. Clear Expectations and Accountability

Communication is obviously key to this quality. Lean leaders clearly vocalize their needs. They establish sets of expectations for a particular task or project and don’t allow ambiguity to creep into their communications. Vague expectations can cause duplications in work, miscommunications or just generally waste people’s time while they scratch their heads trying to figure out their leader’s meaning.

Once lean leaders set those clear expectations, they then have no issue holding people accountable. They expect those around them to take ownership of their tasks and complete them within the allotted amount of time.

7. Going to the Gemba

Gemba is a Japanese word that means ‘workplace’, or in practical use ‘where value is created’. Leaders need to spend less time in the office or conference room and more time at the real touch points impacting the customer and the employees. Only then will they truly understand the real situation so that they can take effective actions to improve performance.

The Lean Leader manages by Gemba instead of managing by powerpoint by proactively scheduling ‘point of impact’ walks where they can actively engage with the people closest to the customer, instead of relying on 3rd party reports and only going to the workplace when there is a problem. Lean Leaders provide continual coaching at the Gemba versus giving orders from the office, fully exhibiting the critical behavior of active questioning and listening to constantly develop and challenge the minds of their people.

8. Knowing When To Lead and When To Follow

Part of being a lean leader is an ability to read situations well. If there is a vacuum and leadership is needed, a lean leader won’t have an issue stepping up and taking charge.

But then again, a lean leader also knows when it’s time to step back and allow others to lead. Putting leadership on a project or task in someone else’s capable hands is a important act of cultivating leadership qualities in colleagues.

9. Be Free With Praise But Also Be Honest

Lean leaders are respectful and dole out praise far more than they criticize. Correcting issues is obviously important for the learning process, but lean leaders should aim for a 5-to-1 praise to criticism ratio when addressing colleagues.

That being said, lean leaders always aim for honesty. Sugarcoating the truth doesn’t help anyone involved.

10. Practice What You Preach

The old adage “practice what you preach” is particularly important for lean leaders. Nobody is going to buy what you’re selling if you’re not living it yourself, whether that’s lean principles, continuous improvement or any other concept.

Yes, the Lean leader should obviously act a role model for others, but they should also teach leadership and encourage those qualities in those around them.

These 10 qualities are by no means exhaustive, but I believe they do capture many of the behaviors that we have come to associate with Lean Leadership. They are generally distinct from the general leadership qualities and should thus be considered ‘additional’ traits above and beyond the foundational ones. It is important to cultivate these leadership expectations by institutionalizing them in your practices for leader development. But most importantly, leaders must build a lean culture by themselves adhering to the principles of lean leadership on a daily basis, thus generating the repeatable behaviors in the organization that will result in a high level of performance.

Just as a Lean transformation cannot happen overnight, a Lean management transformation is not something that can be turned on with a switch. For many leaders, this requires abandoning many of the principles that have gotten them to where they are.


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Monday, February 4, 2019

Hansei: Importance or Self-Reflection


For the past twenty years, I’ve helped to develop methods for implementing lean practices in factories and across supply chains. One of the most important things I’ve learned is that self-reflection is as relevant to lean practices. In fact, it’s an integral and essential part of it.

John Dewey, the American philosopher and psychologist, said “We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.”

To develop, we need to build on our experience. Whether it’s to improve our skills and abilities, become more competent, increase our performance or open ourselves to new ideas. But as Dewey observed, we do this through reflection, either on our own or with others.

In Japan, when someone makes a mistake, they will profusely apologize, take responsibility, and propose a solution for how they can prevent the same mistake from happening in the future. This process is referred to as 反省 – or Hansei. Hansei is a core concept of Japanese culture. It’s not about shame or guilt. Rather, it’s about admitting there is room for improvement – and committing to that improvement.

To paraphrase my friend, Jon Miller“Han” means to change, turn over, turn upside down. “Sei” is the simplified form of a character meaning to look back upon, review, examine oneself. As a native speaker of Japanese “hansei” strikes me as both an intellectual and emotional exercise. With hansei there is a sense of shame, if that is not too hard of a word. This may come from having been asked to do a lot of hansei as a child, being told “hanse shinasai!” which in English might be “Learn to behave!”

The point is, when you do hansei it is almost never because you are “considering past experience” as if they were happy memories. You are confronting brutal facts about your actions and the impact they had, in hopes that you can learn from this and change your behavior in the future.

Toyota is known as a learning organization and this is one of the reasons why Toyota has become so successful. Hansei has a strong role in being a learning organization. In Toyota, hansei is often viewed as a precursor to kaizen, and a pre-requisite to being a learning organization. This is best explained as below (taken from Toyota-Global website);
Hansei is both an intellectual and emotional introspection. The individual must recognize the gap between the current situation and the ideal, take responsibility for finding solutions, and commit to a course of action. The examination involves a review of successes and failures, to determine what works and what needs to be improved. Hansei leads to ideas for kaizen and yokoten, the sharing of best practices from one location to another.

At each key milestone in a project, and at completion, the people involved meet to reflect on their experience of what happened. However, successes aren’t celebrated. In true Japanese fashion, they are treated with humility and modesty. Instead, the focus is on the failures and what could have been better.

This isn’t about pointing fingers, issuing blame or scoring points. It helps to identify when things need to improve and prevent any of the errors that were made. Above all, it helps to instill the belief that there’s always room and always need for further improvement.

Hansei is one of the keys to kaizen, as the concept itself focuses on improvement as opposed to punishment. When we fail, we realize that we have done something wrong. So it is important that we will learn lessons from it, and find methods to prevent its recurrence.  It is most important to consider also how bad we feel when we hurt others in the team by not performing to their expectations.


Why not take this opportunity to practice some self-reflection? In what areas do you need to improve? How can you take ownership of that need to improve? What can you do differently?

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Monday, May 22, 2017

8th Year Blog Anniversary

It is hard to believe but tomorrow marks the 8th anniversary of A Lean Journey Blog and as tradition here each year I take the opportunity to reflect. The act of "self-reflection" is called Hansei is Japanese. It is the practice of continuous improvement that consists of looking back and thinking about how a process can be improved.

I’d like to think that I turned my naive endeavor to share learning along my own journey into a successful contribution in the Lean community. As I have said before this labor of love has been a tremendous learning process both from the great fans and other colleagues online that I exchange with and from the process of distilling my own learning with you.

I love statistics, so with this milestone, here are some numbers from the blog:

Total Posts: 1465

Most read post:  DOWNTIME and the Eight Wastes with over 27,000 views

followed by The Six-Step Problem-Solving Process (with over 27,000 views)


Number of countries/territories who have visited this blog:  223

Top 3 Countries with the most views:
U.S.A. – 49%
United Kingdom – 7%
Canada – 5%

Total views:  Over 1,103,907 and climbing

Unique visits: Over 848,087

Total comments:  Over 1,500

Total Facebook Fans: Over 1,981

Total Twitter Followers: Over 3,414

LinkedIn Members: Over 1,206

Total Tips Shared: Over 1665


I would like to thank all the visitors and contributors to A Lean Journey Blog this past year.  It has been a successful Journey this past year. Please, share your feedback so that A Lean Journey can be even more successful next year.

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