DailyKaizen

Once or twice a week I meet with various leaders in the organization for an hour or so to provide some consultation on “what LEAN would do in their situation.”  The meetings are a great opportunity for me to stay in touch with what is happening at a strategic level and hopefully some of the nuggets of education I provide will stick.  Often the leaders bring with them the latest models for management, process or structure that they have developed (most based on benchmarking or academic research) and they ask me to provide them with feedback.  I always ask them the same question: “was their model developed in the content of the work.”  Most often I get the same answer back: “no, I made it on my own.”  So I always suggest that they go to the place where the work is being done; observe how the work is being done; ask lots of question on why the work is being done the way it is; and then see if their model is still valid.

While I believe that benchmarking and academic research is important it should never trump what we can learn by spending time learning from and testing in our own operations.  All organizations are different and what works in one organization might be informative to another, but this does not mean that it can be successfully replicated without first adapting it to fit the culture and current state of the organization. 

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