Learn Lean by Doing Lean
Posted on November 13, 2009 Comments (6)
In response to: Developing Your Lean Education Plan
If you actually let the lean leaders practice lean management you are probably doing more to help them learn than anything else. Reading is great, but 10 times better when reading to find solutions you need to deal with issues you have in place. Same for going to conferences. Consultants can be a huge help, but if you just bring in consultants without allowing the changes needed to improve they are not much use.
Far more damaging than not approving training, or giving the lean leaders any time to learn, is not giving them freedom to adopt lean practices and actually make improvements in your organization. That is what kills learning, and the desire to learn.
A great lean education plan: give them opportunities to apply what they know. As they gain knowledge and have success give them more opportunities. I think often lean leaders (and management improvement leaders) have to spend so much effort fighting the resistance in the organization they don’t have the energy to seek out much new knowledge. If you can reduce the effort they have to spend on fighting the bureaucracy most lean leaders will naturally focus on learning what they need for the current and future challenges.
Related: Building Organizational Capacity – Helping Employees Improve – People are Our Most Important Asset – Respect People by Understanding Psychology
Categories: Career, Education, Lean thinking, Management, Respect, Systems thinking
Tags: Career, coaching, curiouscat, Education, John Hunter, Lean thinking, management, managing people, respect for people, Systems thinking, training
6 Responses to “Learn Lean by Doing Lean”
Leave a Reply
RSS Feed
November 15th, 2009 @ 5:00 am
Good Response,
I couldn’t agree more. It is a very liberating and powerful thing when people are allowed to do their job outside, or despite the political environment and internally accepted limitations. I often see “neutered” Lean experts who have tons to offer, but are restricted by self or others from really contributing at the levels they could. In my experience it’s not usually a lack of book knowledge, but rather a “culture of continuous stagnation” and negativity that holds people back as much as anything. Too much punishment for shaking things up. People can only take so much and they just give up.
All the Best,
Bill
November 25th, 2009 @ 11:09 am
[...] Hunter strolls onto the scene with a post from the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog called Learn Lean by Doing Lean. For his charity, John submits Kiva an organization which he promotes on his [...]
July 13th, 2010 @ 10:31 pm
[...] opportunities. Also have people learn new tools to attack more problems with. I firmly believe you learn lean best by doing lean. So getting quick successes is great training – better than classroom training. But in doing [...]
January 17th, 2011 @ 9:43 am
There are several things that destroy your ability to be effective. Thinking you have all the answers (which leads to stopping learning) is probably at the top, along with any other reason for stopping learning…
April 4th, 2011 @ 10:45 am
Lyrics: “Managing by results, it don’t work anymore. Don’t stand in your office, go to the shop floor… to really improve you must iterate, see our problems as treasures before its too late, and eliminate waste, whether little or great…”
December 5th, 2011 @ 5:06 am
[...] control of quality is not for the timid and the halfhearted. There is no way to learn except to learn it and do it. You can read about swimming, but you might drown if you had to learn it that [...]