Dodo-Lean | Darrell Mann
I’m fortunate to be invited to lecture on a number of Lean programmes. My usual job is to provoke Lean professionals so that they’re able to recognise when it is appropriate to deploy lean-thinking, and when it is not. The main times it is not appropriate is when systems find themselves at the top of the S-curve. Top of the S-curve means that a system has hit a fundamental limit and as such ‘optimization’-based improvement techniques won’t work any more.
For the most part, my words, I’m sure, fall on deaf ears. Especially when I suggest that, thanks to several decades of lean-thinking and continuous-improvement activity, nearly every enterprise on the planet finds itself sitting at the top of an S-curve.
About ten years ago we started to identify three different phases of Lean. The first phase is what we called the ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ Phase. This is the time when it is relatively easy to find examples of waste inside an organisation. And, when we take steps to eliminate that waste, there are no adverse consequences. The waste was genuine waste.
The second phase starts when attempts to eliminate waste begin to deliver unexpected adverse consequences. This is what might be thought of as the Whack-a-Mole or ‘Lean-With-Consequences’ Phase. This is the period when Lean improvement professionals increasingly find themselves spinning around in circles, gradually realising that every time they think they’ve solved one problem, another one pops up.
