With so much emphasis on the importance of incremental daily improvement as part of Lean thinking, it is important to keep in mind the value of look far ahead of the next day’s Plan-Do-Study-Adjust cycle.

Those improvements should be moving toward a future state, closing the gap between today’s reality and a better future.

There are plenty of ways to imagine the future, ranging from A3 problem solving methods to physical prototyping. Automobile companies will do the latter – building concept cars that will never be marketed, yet test features that when successfully developed find their way into vehicles to be designed, manufactured and sold.

Imagining, and then inventing, the future need not be limited to products and processes. We can also imagine and invent better ways to design and build the relationships that increase the joy as well as productivity of work.