The Ultimate Magic Trick - Making Lean Disappear

Recently, I visited a site where we introduced Toyota Kata about two years before. In the meantime, I turned up there a few times, but my last visit was about a year ago. After we made the obligatory walk-through at all the departments with team-boards and talked to the team-members, sitting in the office of the lean manger he asked me, what I think.

I felt, in a way, strangely disappointed. Everything was in place, the initiative functioned flawlessly, it just felt like something was missing.  As we started to talk about it, it slowly dawned on me that I was missing the twinkle in the eyes of the team members, the pride, and the enthusiasm I saw earlier at each of those boards.  Gemba walks used to be the real highlights of the plant visits here, because of the excitement and the pride people took in their new achievements with their boards, with 5S or their improved problem-solving capabilities and the results were clearly visible everywhere in the plant.

This time it was different. People were friendly and helpful but in no way excited about our Lean tools or even especially proud of them. For a moment I was pondering whether the initiative failed in some subtle way. Then I realized that what I saw was the greatest achievement for a Lean Initiative, that we can think of.

To illustrate what I mean I need to go back to the early days of Lean Six Sigma. We had our second training at GE about LSS and had lunch with our, very competent, trainer.

• Do you know what keeps Jack Welch  (the legendary CEO of GE at that time) awake at night when he thinks of Lean Six Sigma? – asked us our trainer. Of course, we had no idea and sincerely, we didn’t care much. 
• It is not the number of trainings you will have – continued the trainer. – Even the number of projects, or the financial benefits of the projects is not what he worries about. The only thing he really cares about is whether you make the jump to integrate these methods into your daily work or not. If you have “work” and “projects” in two different compartments in your mind, then I failed as a trainer, and he failed as the CEO in introducing Six Sigma. In this case you can prepare the greatest presentations about projects, for visitors or year-end reports ,in reality, the initiative will have failed.
• But if you apply the thinking without even realizing that you are applying Lean Six Sigma, because this becomes the normal way of solving problems for you – then we all succeeded.

And this was what I saw at this plant I was visiting.  There was no particular emotion any more around our Lean tools and processes precisely because they became the day-to-day routine. Just as I would not be especially proud of my laptop I have been working with for the last 5 years, no matter how amazing I would have found that laptop 10 years ago, our Lean Implementation was everyday business to everybody I met. No one believed boards were anything special, or the daily routine at the boards or the regular flow of PDCA-s or even the quick feedback and positive reactions of the production management every time a problem popped up. It was just the way they normally did things around the plant. No one would even contemplate doing things otherwise anymore.

I remembered a Toyota quote that puzzled me for a long time: the purpose of Lean is to make Lean unnecessary. Now it became clearer what was meant by this. Lean all but disappeared from this plant, replaced by healthy daily routines that would continue whether they had a Lean Initiative or not. I am sure Jack Welch would have approved.

Does this mean that the job is done at this plant? Did my counterpart just work himself into a position of irrelevance?  Absolutely not. We managed to build the foundations of Lean culture here and the nature of the foundations is that they become invisible.  You will not see tourists around the Notre-Dame gazing in amazement at the foundations of the cathedral. Yet, without solid foundations one can build no cathedral. And without a cathedral above even the best foundations will be useless.

So, this is the next huge challenge to the team at this plant. They managed the ultimate magic trick of making Lean Basics disappear. Now, they will have to decide what their cathedral will look like. And then, for a while, Lean will become highly visible again, with the next, more sophisticated, achievement – until that too will become part of the foundations and they will start building something new again. So, the cycle will repeat itself over and over, getting ever closer to our north-star vision of a community of competent and committed people continuously improving their work and their life.