Tuesday evening the Lean Enterprise Institute hosted a talk by Dr. Kiame Mahaniah, CEO of the Lynn Community Health Center. His title for the talk was “God’s Work and Good Jobs: The Shared Space Between Social Justice, the Lean Movement, and Mainstream Business Practice.”
The notion of “shared spaced” is an important element of lean practice. We’ve been conditioned to draw boundaries between industries, companies, departments and individuals. Conversations for action are portrayed as each party negotiating in their narrow best interest, in the mistaken belief that all benefit when each prioritizes their own needs. It’s telling that strong families don’t draw these boundaries between individual members.
Lean practice invites us to break down boundaries and create shared spaces between the people and enterprises working together. That is why companies like Toyota teach their suppliers lean practices. We strengthen ourselves only by strengthening the web of work to which we are connected. A narrow view of our needs is incomplete, and self-defeating rather than self-serving.
This is an area where a small segment of the building industry has made great progress. Traditionally adversarial relationships can be transformed into a network of shared concerns, with all parties operating in a shared space. Work in the industry has demonstrated that lean practices have a great deal of power when practiced together by at times as many as a couple dozen different enterprises.
Kiame’s message is that communities need a similar transformation if they are to achieve big things like eliminating poverty and cultivating rewarding opportunities for work. Early in his talk he quoted Abraham Heschel’s remark “that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.” The invitation is to use our understanding of lean practices beyond our own enterprises, working with others in our communities to continuously improve the space we share with families, friends, and neighbors. We did not cause poverty and suffering in our communities. We are still responsible for improving the conditions in which all people therein live.
(A video recording of Kiame Mahaniah’s address to the Lean Transformation Summit this past May is available within this recent post from LEI Executive Chairman John Shook.)
