Lean is a funny word. In referring to the body it can mean slim, thin, slender, spare, wiry, lanky and skinny. Lean muscle mass for many people is something to be desired and a sign of fitness and good health. A lean body is healthily thin, having no superfluous fat. Lean can also mean meager, sparse, poor, inadequate, paltry and insubstantial. “Lean times” are to be feared as they are times when our economy is not prosperous and people face the prospect of limited work and limited income.
In the business environment the term lean and the language of lean was derived from a study of industry that initially focused on efficiency anchored in the reduction of waste. If a production or business process was relatively free of waste it was deemed Lean. Reading a few books about Lean, whether This is Lean, The Toyota Way, Lean Thinking, or any number of others it is quickly clear that Lean is much more than waste reduction. What exactly Lean is remains however a work very much in progress.
This is Lean by Niklas Modig and Per Alstrom is particularly provocative in the work’s effort to define Lean at a very high level. In their view Lean is and operational strategy focused on ever improving flow efficiency. It’s an important step forward in our understanding of Lean, and of course can only be a step as each advance in learning only clears the path for additional steps. The ideas behind Lean as improving flow efficiency beg the question as to what higher levels of Lean there may be.
We may have in Lean the beginning of a theory of enterprise physiology, which is an understanding of how groups of people work most effectively to produce shared results. While the idea that Lean systems are to a certain degree self-organizing and have parallels to living organisms is not new, the language of Lean in many ways still reflects machine metaphors for how organizations work. It may be time to more deliberately think about Lean systems metaphorically as living organisms, thus focusing on a language of Lean so as to shape our enterprises as fit and healthy in much the way we ought to shape our bodies to be fit and healthy.
