How to Start Your Lean Journey

What's a Lean Journey?

Lean Journey Success Paths

Where to begin your lean journey depends on:

1. Your Continuous Improvement skill level
2. The Continuous Improvement skill level of your boss

If your boss's CI skill level is higher than yours

Do whatever your Coach guides you to do.

He or she will appreciate it when you also do independent learning, and maybe bring some new ideas, tools, and methods to creatively apply never-changing lean principles to the ever-changing unique challenges that you and your Coach overcome together.

You and your Coach can be like a roller derby team — whipsawing each other to be faster and stronger than you could ever be alone.

If your CI skill level is higher than your boss

Then there is one path to follow that can lead to 3 possible outcomes.

One path to follow

• Use the Lean Methodology yourself

  Approach every challenge as a scientific experiment

• Do what you can to try to help your boss master his or her own coaching Habits

  Tactfully, patiently, respectfully...
  request your boss to schedule a daily coaching session with you, and 'next step' coaching sessions as needed

Three possible outcomes

1. Your boss grows to appreciate what you are doing and how much more successful you are than your peers. Your boss becomes an avid Lean Learner, and starts encouraging his or her own boss to start managing him or her in the same way. The two of you enjoy a rewarding and successful career journey together.
2. Your boss's boss notices your consistently superior performance and you get promoted.
3. Your boss is actively resistant to your efforts to improve processes and apply systematic problem solving methods. You use the tools and skills you have been learning to land a better job with a more supportive boss.

If neither you or your boss have much experience

Option 1) Hire a consultant

Convince your boss (and maybe your boss's boss) to hire a consultant.

Option 2) Start using a few simple tools & methods

and then study, study, study, and practice, practice, practice

and in a few short months, your skill level will no longer be that of a novice.

If you are the top level executive

Choose your consultant

The place for you to start is to choose your consultant:

If you are already an accomplished experienced lean guru, then you already know that (no matter how good you are)
every sensei needs a sensei, and you already have one.

If you don't, then you need to hire one.

If you suspect that you might be outgrowing your current advisor, then it might be time to start your search for a better one — to lead you through the next phase of your lean journey.

Contact us to request a referral to a consultant who owns, uses, and is competent to help you become competent using your Systems2win templates.

Start your Lean Journey

And then your next step is to start your Lean Journey.

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LMS

Lean Management System

How to Get Started the Right Way

An excellent approach to starting your Lean Management System is to establish an Advance Group as instructed in Mike Rother's book, Toyota Kata, Chapter 9: Developing Improvement Kata Behavior in Your Organization.

 

And his website expands the instruction even further in the discussions about Scouts, Slices, and the Rotation Model in the chapter titled Roles and Structure for Daily Practice in the Toyota Kata Handbook

 

This requires enthusiastic commitment of top-level executives.

 

If you don't have that, then you will need to use one of the other Lean Journey Success Paths prescribed above.

See suggested readings for Lean Management