<h1>Sustaining lean management</h1><p class="deck">How to transform lean into the corporate culture</p><p>You completed the initial rapid improvement events and worked with your leader to develop a path for your organization's lean transformation. But to fully capture the benefits that come with a successful lean transformation, the entire workforce — from senior management to the shop floor workers — must be engaged and dedicated to continuing the lean education. The best way to allow for this ongoing transformation is to build a complete lean culture.</p><p>But how do you do that?</p><p>It's fair to say, no easy solution exists to answer this question. Often, the first instinct is to hire a staff devoted to continuous improvement and assume that the job is done. Given that most organizations have little lean knowledge at the onset, delegation often leads to lean transformation failure.</p><p>There are several approaches an organization must take to meet this goal. Here, we outline a handful of tips to ensure a continuous lean transformation.</p><h2>1. Identify your cultural model</h2><p>Culture answers the question of "how do we do things around here?" and is actually the accumulation of leadership behaviors.</p><p>Any organization serious about "becoming lean" needs to identify its cultural model and determine how to close the gap from the current cultural state to the ideal future cultural state. Once the base of improvement action works to build new principles, values and behaviors into the organization, you must then define the ideal culture you aspire to and begin to work on organized progress toward that ideal state. In the end, your organization's culture determines the ultimate success of any lean transformation.</p><h2>2. Build a process improvement culture</h2><p>Once you identify this model, build a culture that practices process improvement as part of daily life. After all, changing from a reactive culture to a process-improvement culture requires embracing an "opposite" approach. The key here: Focus on training people in order to change the culture. The Toyota practice emphasizes changing "what we do" behaviors first, which leads to changes in values and attitudes. This, in turn, results in a transformed culture.</p><h2>3. Establish a practice of leadership involvement</h2><p>Oftentimes, senior leadership commits to lean improvement only to drop off after the implementation gets started. Bringing leaders to the point where they recognize how to seek out waste before removing it drives the success of lean transformation. The only way to achieve this understanding is through participation in the rapid improvement events, which then allows you to identify how much non-value-added work exists in your processes and then remove a large portion of this work in as little as a week. By practicing these lean behaviors, people gradually understand this new way of doing things, and this awareness helps leaders transform lean thinking into action.</p><h2>4. Continually engage in rapid improvement events</h2><p>While these events serve as the building blocks toward your organization's initial lean transformation, they do not end once your sensei leaves. The most effective way a manager or manufacturing engineer learns how to apply lean tools and concepts is through participation in the initial week-long improvement event. The next step is to establish a series of these events as you develop new processes and uncover additional areas of waste, which will help you incorporate lean into every aspect of the business. This idea of continuously applying new tools, new principles and new practices to portions of your existing work drives individual learning curves and begins to build a new culture. These rapid improvement events do three things at the same time. They redesign processes and delivery results, but they also are the key way anyone learns to understand the practice of lean, and they accumulate into building a new culture — a learning culture.</p><h2>5. Study every process at least five times</h2><p>The key to sustaining the tools learned through the improvement events requires you to study every process from beginning to end at least five times. As daunting as this may seem initially, this step becomes easier over time. This begs the question, why five times? Typically, you can remove about half of the waste in a process each time you study it. However, it is impossible to see all the waste in the process at any given point.</p><p>If you think about going through every process in your firm at least five times, you begin to understand several things:</p><ol><li>You will need to organize to support this effort over a long period of time.</li><li>This will perhaps take a decade to complete.</li><li>You will get better at every step along the way.</li></ol><p>The real reason behind this practice is to help you realize as an organization that improvement never ends. Many of us find it difficult to truly comprehend the phrase "continuous improvement." When we think of the term "improvement," we imagine it as a one-time step.</p><p>After five or so passes through every process, however, you will build a new culture that believes in continuous improvement. Once you establish this new culture, sustaining lean becomes second nature.</p><p><i>Ed. note: Tim Whitmore, vice president of Simpler North America, oversees large-scale performance improvement deployments for North American commercial clients. He has mentored and facilitated executive teams to lead business process improvement and culture transformations in both the commercial and public sectors. His expertise is built from over 27 years of progressive experience in operations leadership, leading large-scale lean enterprise transformations. Whitmore trained under the coaching of the Shingijutsu Group, original architects of the Toyota Production System. For more information visit www.simpler.com.</i></p>