Now that a couple weeks have passed since the Lean Construction Institute Congress finished it’s worthwhile reflecting on what was learned. One valuable session, because the content resulted from well crafted reflection and ideas, was the presentation by Chauncey Bell and Anne Miller Wednesday afternoon entitled Looking for Waste in All the Wrong Places. Here’s what I heard and subsequent thoughts.
Remembering that Lean is an anomaly in the building industry it’s important to understand that the big innovations in Lean are invisible to most as people get lost in process tools. A big idea in Lean is that it if founded on an enrichment of experience of working together and that human beings are at the center of what is going on in Lean enterprises. The process tools address the physics of the materiel world, which is great so long as the bigger focus is the impact that Lean has on relationships. A focus on relationships can result in unprecedented value.
It’s hard for some to have a discussion about Lean without addressing waste. If we are only addressing the TIMWOOD wastes that we see we are missing a much bigger opportunity, as the invisible wastes resulting from a lack of listening, a lack of trust, and a lack of understanding are the sources of waste, visible and invisible, that by addressing can unlock future value. I’m unsure how you would put listening, trust and understanding in a value stream (though the word may form the basis of a good song).
Continuous improvement requires learning, which is a biological, and linguistic and historical process that involves the whole human being. That’s why Lean initiatives require engaged leadership and coaching. If you are a leader in your enterprise you cannot just outsource this part of leadership. You need to be personally involved. And you need to be aware of the language you and the people in your enterprise use to create action. Chauncey’s and Anne’s observation that words are not picked by speaker, they are picked by the structure of reality in which we live, is particularly thought provoking. It’s another piece of evidence that we are not as much in control as we pretend to be.
Another important observation is that Value and Waste, even as discussed in Lean terms, are INVENTIONS. In other words the TIMWOOD wastes are such because they have been declared to be so. Future inventions of value and waste will dwarf TIMWOOD. Chauncey suggested managerial finance, given its dismal state of existence, as a place to start. All of us should be pondering how we are inventing value, and from what invisible places should we be seeking our clues as to how to move forward.
