I learned about Lean – like most other people – Lean backwards. I started with the tools and much later came to the understanding that Lean is a nascent social construct that addresses how people best relate to each other through work. There is a prevailing conviction among people that study Lean that the construct is anchored by two principles: Continuous Improvement and Respect for People.

The first principle is commonly associated with process improvements, and the daily practice of making the value creating actions we take ever more efficient. The second principle, much more than being nice to people, is commonly understood as the need for developing the capabilities of the people that do the work. There remains a hefty amount of paternalism in this second principle as it is usually expressed, with leaders responsible for developing “their people” and little regard for the possibility that “their people” can play a role in developing their leaders.

The principles of Continuous Improvement and Respect for People need to be tightly integrated. What ought to be continuously improved is the human condition, with work processes largely a vehicle for this improvement.

I say I learned Lean backwards because the human relationship aspect of this new social construct is much more important to understand than the tools. Yet it is the tools that fascinate and attract many people to Lean. Our rational minds want so much to believe that by integrating tools like A3 Problem Solving, Value Stream Mapping, and Pull Planning into our work we have found some cool tricks that will allow us to work more productively with less effort. This belief is no different that expecting someone to hand us a paint-by-numbers canvas with palette and that we will then be able to create a masterpiece worthy of the Metropolitan if not the Louvre.

We need to understand that while what we call Lean has as its most significant influence the Toyota Production System; Lean has roots in Ford Motor Company’s early manufacturing processes at Highland Park and the Scientific Management movement launched by the work of Frederick Taylor. The shift that Toyota was able to make in this continuum is the much broader engagement of line workers in the thinking about and improvement of the work leveraged a shared intelligence unavailable to elites in management and engineering.

Without discounting the value of financial capital, what Toyota was able to thereby achieve was the cultivation and growth of pragmatic capital; the skills, capabilities, and knowledge of a workforce that thinks critically about the work rather than mechanically complete a series of steps designed by an expert. Whereas the typical production worker was akin to a recreational runner comfortably jogging the same three miles everyday at a nine-minute per mile pace, the Toyota production worker became more aligned with the elite runner seeking through daily training to shave five seconds off their pace so they can complete a marathon at a record pace.

This cultural change may appear subtle. Toyota is very much a hierarchical enterprise. Rank still exists. The subtle difference is that the people working in the company are thought of as part of the company, as opposed to resources available at the company’s convenience. Thus, the company has a reputation for employing production layoffs only as a last resort, preferring to use workers to focus on long term process improvement.

There is an economic rationale for this apparent benevolence. While incurring short term costs, the longer-term benefits from plant improvements and a committed workforce outweigh the temporary pain. It is a clear statement that addressing the concerns of the workforce as people is as an important consideration as addressing the concerns of shareholders and customers.

While concern for employees was addressed in part by early Lean investigations, the Respect for People principle was not cited with the same emphasis as waste elimination, flow production, pull planning, and continuous improvement. And to this day Lean advocates cite as a fundamental principle the importance of understanding value as specified by the customer. Certainly the customer is important as a provider of revenue. So is the shareholder as a provider of financial capital.

Despite the shareholder’s importance the Milton Friedman view that the only concern of a business is to maximize profits falls short of fulfilling the Respect for People principle and needs to be dismissed. The Lean principle that celebrates the customer as solely responsible for the specification of value may soon follow – bowing to a growing awareness that Respect for People means that the enterprise must balance the interests of employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, and communities.

As if you already didn’t have enough to do.

Here is the challenge for the current crop of Lean practitioners. We were attracted to Lean because the logic of continuous improvement and flow efficiency, even when not understood in those terms, was compelling. This logic appealed to our desire to understand ourselves, at least in the work context, as rational and scientific thinkers.

This whole Respect for People thing, taken in the direction of its full potential, is very much about all the people in an enterprise participating in the continual invention and re-invention the future through conversation; not simply for a better way to work, but a better way to realize the potential of humanity through our work. The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle cannot keep up with this re-invention. When the scientific method fails the enterprise a different sensibility is needed.

The search for our potential requires not only the best of our intellectual traditions. It also requires the deeper thinking that comes from our physical, artistic, and theological traditions.