by Ted Eytan, on 01 Jun 2007 06:49 am
The Journey
Best way to learn is to teach
We had an interesting experience here the other day, when a sister organization’s leaders and care providers came here for a site visit. They are new to LEAN and wanted to learn more. What we did was prepare a “museum” tour of the visual systems around our headquarters building. And instead of myself and my business partner being the docents, we asked the teams that do the work to explain each visual system and ask questions.
We toured them around 5 visual systems that represented daily management, cross functional management, and strategy planning. It was great to see that we have all of these types of systems now operational, across different Divisions in our organization. In fact, we are running out of wall space (and 11 x 17 paper…). It was also great to see the teams doing the work doing the teaching. People sometimes say that LEAN takes away creativity, but I saw a lot of creativity in how the information was displayed and taught. There isn’t creativity in producing for the patient or working to keep people informed, that needs to be done, but may be done in different ways. When you teach it, you have to learn it, and they’ve learned it.