Medicine or Poison?

“The same substance can be medicine or poison, depending on how you use it.”  This was our sensei speaking - teaching us one of those fundamental lessons about lean.

We were eagerly learning all we could about lean - tools, concepts, thinking - and rapidly transforming our plant.  We were proud of what we were doing - so why would he say this now? Because employees had highlighted a problem on a communications board, and there was no helpful response. Just a blank status.

Lean tools essentially make abnormal look different than normal, right now.  It is this quick visibility of problems that makes lean so powerful - we can address the problems quickly after they occur, making root cause analysis simpler and more accurate (no guessing as to what happened last week that caused us to miss our shipment - the evidence is right here, right now!)

This sounds great, but if you have not defined a response system, standard work around problem response and escalation - then you have effectively installed lean tools to show you have problems and have no intention of doing anything about them.  This is the “medicine” becoming “poison”.  Would you be better off leaving the problems hidden?

Don’t be discouraged; don’t stop your lean implementation - just be certain to include a response mechanism in your system design too.  The goal isn’t to install the lean tools - it is to highlight and address the problems.