If you check out the photo above you will notice that Ed was a bit more elegant with his language than I was with the title. Ed’s message is a reminder that many of us have a tendency to get possessive about the stuff we keep in our boxes.

If you are a construction colleague of Ed’s he wants you to know that his tools are off limits, at least without asking (though apparently along the way he decided to share with Red). Where’s the trust?

Boxes aren’t limited to construction sites. What about the boxes, albeit figurative, in which you keep your spreadsheets, financial reports, production charts and the like? How often do we tell people not to mess with the stuff in our boxes?

Boxes like these are indicators of silos, or resource islands, disconnected from the collaboration needed to establish flow in value creation work. It’s not the boxes themselves. Boxes can be useful as ways to organize resources and even send signals that work is needed. It’s the claimed ownership and exclusivity of the boxes that is the problem.

From a Lean perspective our challenge is understand that boxes are only useful when owned by the value stream and not by any one person or team. If you want to improve the performance of your enterprise, one place to look is at the writing on the boxes in your workspace.