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In the first half of their podcast Better Thinking Faster, Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley discussed solving problems just in time and how the speed of quality problem solving depends on the level of the organization and the types of problems to be found there. In this second half of the podcast, they examine unique traits of problem solving at Toyota that help employees — frontline to senior executives — solve problems better and faster, characteristics that many companies attempting to be lean fail to grasp. 

Create Experiential Learning 

Many leaders attempt to apply lean based on reading about it and the management processes and tools involved, says Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems. That’s helpful, but it lacks lean problem-solving experiences. For example, working on a line and solving many small problems daily provides formative learning within Toyota that’s carried forward as a team member advances into management and executive ranks.  

“Many of us who encounter these ideas later in life, when we’re at higher levels in our career and in our organizations, don’t always get that opportunity,” says Josh, LEI President. He admires Toyota for onboarding individuals, even white-collar executives, by throwing them onto the line “to work at that level of detail and all the opportunity that could be found therein, to just set a mindset that can be very useful to you even as you get into higher level, longer cycle time, more ambitious, more complex work.” 

So what is an executive, without Toyota-like onboarding and problem-solving experiences, supposed to do? Mark, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy and author of Managing on Purpose, says they can at least go to line, to where the work is done, and experience it by observing. He’s seen executives who, when going to the frontline, are astounded by “the amount of difficult, unnecessary, frustrating work that happens minute to minute, day to day.” That helps them to experience the precise nature of work and problems there, but they also must care “that people shouldn’t have to work that way, and people are working like that in many organizations. I think Toyota leaders cared, and not just about the shopfloor ... but about everybody in the organization and that everybody in the organization had value-creating work.” 

Art sees it as LEI’s purpose to close the learning gap among leaders not coming out of Toyota and somehow help executives gain the experiences he and Mark encountered when working there: “Mark and I got it through line work, working in Toyota, and in our careers of seeing it at various levels. Other people need to kind of come to that awareness, have the fish scales removed from their eyes in different ways.” 

Examine the Process behind Outcomes 

Toyota’s unique approach to problem solving includes an obsession with going well beyond the cause of a problem to determine how a process or processes contributed to the outcome and cause. Art cites the example of a failed launch at one of Toyota’s overseas plants. Equipment vendor problems contributed to poor outcomes. Instead of citing “failed vendor, not our problem” and moving on, every aspect of the business pertaining to precision equipment that went to overseas operations was thoroughly analyzed to ensure the next overseas launch would be better than the last. It turns out a variety of documentation, support materials, and training that accompanied equipment going overseas was poor, and Toyota worked for a year or more to make it right. 

“Toyota is very good about thinking about the process that led to the end result,” says Art. “Most people want to be critical and criticize the end result. Toyota will go back, back, back, back, back. What were our initial assumptions and thought processes and conditions that led us down this path?” 

Mark and Art say this approach is not for Toyota to find blame, but to ensure it does not happen again: 5 Whys not the 5 Whos. 

Solve All Problems, Big and Small 

The trio discussed how Toyota veterans on the frontline are capable of repeatedly finding and solving hundreds of small problems in the work they have been doing for years. That extent of problem solving on the frontlines is much less common outside of Toyota, where there is likely to be an overemphasis on bigger leadership problems and decisions. 

“A lot of organizations look at the decisions and the problems that leaders are solving as key,” says Mark. “Toyota sees that the team member finding those 120 issues in their job is as important to the company as the CEO and the decisions they’re making.” 

Toyota wants to be solving small problems fast before they can become big problems. “A lot of organizations tend to wait [and] only have a system to solve problems once they’re big,” adds Mark. “But, in fact, if we can solve a hundred problems fast, like at lower levels in the organization, those are things that won’t become big problems.” 

In bringing the conversation back to its beginning, the trio discussed the differences of solving problems better and faster at the line and doing so in executive suites. “When you’re closer to the frontline, it’s much more explicit about what you need to do, but only if you frame the top well and cascaded things down, and a lot of organizations just don’t do that well,” says Art.  

One challenge outside of Toyota is honing problem-solving capabilities among those at the top, where there are longer, slower cycles of learning for executives compared to short cycles at the frontline, according to Art. For example, when working on an annual plan, the leader may only experience the cycle two or three times before moving on, without having had enough of a learning experience to reflect and improve the process. At the frontline, the cycle is measured in seconds and experienced countless times daily. “We’re not good, I fear, at the slower learning cycles because people just move around, and we don’t have the standards mechanism to capture it and think about.” 

“I can’t tell you the number of companies I’ve had the chance to interact with where the idea that, as an executive in particular, if you’re a successful, high-performing, rising-in-the-organization leader and executive, if you’re in the same job you’re in now three years later, it’s almost viewed as if you’re a defect,” says Josh. “Something must have been wrong with you that you didn’t get promoted or deployed to another lateral move more quickly.” 

Without consistency of leadership and the experiences that affords, any lean transformation will be more difficult. 

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Jim Morgan and Sebastian Fixson about organizational implications for product development and what building your team’s product development capabilities looks like in the age of AI. Morgan is the author of Designing the Future and has spent over 30 years in industry as a product development leader including serving as a global engineering director at Ford Motor Company during the product-led revitalization under CEO Alan Mulally. Sebastian Fixson is Founding Faculty Director of the DBA Program and Professor of Innovation & Design at Babson College and author of The Innovation Navigator: Transforming Your Organization in the Era of AI.

The conversation explores: 

• What people-first leadership means in practice
• Why particular structures, processes, and practices are needed in product development to help people do their best work
• The trade-offs inherent in functional and product organizations
• The organizational and product development implications of new technologies including generative AI
• How today’s entrepreneurs are thinking about product development and how to invest in developing the next generation of developers

Time is relative, especially when it comes to lean problem solving. The LEI trio of Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley explored how the speed of quality problem solving really depends on the level of the organization in which the problem exists and the types of problems and thinking patterns in place at that level. In this first podcast of two, they examine what “better” and “faster” means in the lean world and how that manifests itself. 

There’s often a debate among management circles calling for fast problem solving and change vs. slow, deliberate decision-making. Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems, says, “We’re all trying to think better and think faster, respective to our level and the speed that governs it. But it’s overly simplistic to just say ‘think slow.’ You want to, all things equal, arrive at a better end result faster. In reality there are different types of problems, different patterns of thinking, and different mental gears that can be used.”  

Art discussed different types of problems and the different styles of work used in Toyota to address them. As outlined in his book, they are: 

• Type 1 troubleshooting problem, such as responding to the andon signal at a frontline workstation with a 45-second cycle time, needs to be solved safely and quickly, which will often occur countless times each day because these problems involve a known problem and known solution.  

• Type 2 problems are harder to solve and have unknown root causes and solutions, which require a more analytical mode of thinking.  

• Type 3 problems are actually continuous improvement efforts that seek to establish a new, better target condition. 

• Type 4 problems represent truly innovative new solutions (think hybrid powertrain technologies) that often require years of trial and error.  

The problem-solving work moves from convergent thinking, known standards, and highly skilled execution at the frontline to middle management using the eight steps of Toyota Business Practice that can take days or weeks, to innovation, which is slower, more deliberate, divergent, and exploratory.  

Josh looks back to his time at Starbucks and the problem-solving spectrum, contrasting the challenge of trying to transform a company of some 350,000 employees (“That’s going to take some time, and certainly the executives don’t want it to take too much time. It can’t take forever.”) compared to experiencing problems in a store during peak service time when there’s a new customer every 30 seconds. “The way that we were taught from our TPS and lean teachers to improve that situation, improve our performance for the customers, was to really dig into the details of what happens inside those 30 seconds.” 

Speed is only one facet of lean problem solving. Remember, the Toyota slogan is “Better Thinking, Better Products,” and so quality has to be part of problem-solving work.  

Mark (LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, author of Managing on Purpose, and also a Toyota veteran) says the quality of problem solving requires developing the capabilities of those doing the problem solving as well as the patience to take sufficient time to examine problems and come to better solutions: “We want to build the capability in the organization for leaders, for people, not just leaders, but for people at every level, to be able to produce good quality work. What’s unique about Toyota is that’s true in any function. We want good quality accounting work. We want good quality planning work. We want good quality work, of course, at where the products made and developed. And I think that does take time to build that capability to produce good quality, whatever function you’re talking about.” 

The trio also discuss the: 

• Cyclical nature of processes in which problems occur, be that a seconds-long cycle on the line, an annual cycle for formulating corporate strategy, or a decades-long span for replenishing capital equipment. At all levels, the process repeats but the problems will vary, such as market changes impacting the strategy development cycle one year to the next. 

• Use of process cycles as learning: From frontline to the executive suite, it’s not just about fixing the current problem and getting back to work, but taking the time and data to come up with better solutions and standards for future work. “There’s so much here to look closely at, to analyze, to scrutinize,” says Josh. “There’s so many details that we can question, and inside all of those details are potential solutions, potential improvements, kaizen points that we can make things better.” 

• Need to involve as many people as possible in addressing problems — the work of problem detection, notification, response, and solving. Considering the number of problems that exist throughout a company and at all levels and functions, it would be impossible to meet the problem-solving demand if only top executives, management, and engineers were doing the problem solving. 

• Toyota Production System was designed not as a system to produce things perfectly but as a framework knowing that things will not go perfectly, that there will be problems. “Build in a system that accepts and recognizes there’s going to be mistakes, therefore have a system that catches and flags those, and have layers of ability stacked behind that to deal with it,” says Art. 

• Different levels within the organization need to focus on the problem solving commensurate to their level. Josh recalls how a Starbucks executive came to a store that had transformed significantly using standardized work and structured problem solving. This leader, however, was obsessed over a low-priority Type 1 problem he noticed that eventually would be handled by the frontline team instead of giving his attention to building the store team’s overall capability to identify and handle more problems on their own.  

• The problem-solving approach of Fujio Cho, President of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky and then Toyota Motor Corp., and other Toyota executives: Art recalls a time when Cho refused to follow along on a plant tour and instead went off on his own and found a significant oil leak at a machine. Cho then immediately engaged the team in problem solving, asking questions about how it occurs and how leaders find such problems, and discussed a process to signal such abnormal and potentially dangerous conditions. He knew the plant tour was set up to be perfect, and he was looking for the right teaching moment, not to scold people, but to build the education into an actual problem rather than view a rehearsed problem on a flip chart. 

Look for the second part of the better-thinking-faster conversation to appear on July 28. Subscribe to LEI's newsletter at ean.org/newsletter-signup

Gene Kim, DevOps leader and co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization, joins Tyson Heaton, LEI Executive Director of LeanTech/AI, and Art Smalley, Toyota veteran and LEI advisor, for a lively, enlightening, and wide-ranging conversation about artificial intelligence. They discuss how AI is forever changing the work of individuals and organizations, and explore the good, bad, and ugly of AI today and tomorrow.  

One thing they all agree on: the use of AI is picking up, even among lean practitioners. Up to 80% of people in the lean community I suspect still have little to no understanding of AI (“What’s a model?”), estimates Art. But there are examples that the other 20% across industries have started running with it. Tyson mentions, “incendiary events,” like an interaction with a hackathon, that are fueling some of this momentum as individuals return to their work with new capabilities and an appreciation for the technology.  

“I've coded with chief medical officers, chief science officers, CEOs, CFOs, people in like revenue cycle management and healthcare,” says Gene. “And just to see these people all solving problems by themselves, you know, as they're using coding agents. It's just amazing to see.” 

Discussion highlights from this often-amusing podcast include: 

• AI finds things that humans alone will not: At a personal and corporate level, AI is uniquely useful at analyzing and finding desired information in any form (data, images, etc.) within unstructured data, says Art.     “One of the big angles of this LLM play into functions out outside of ops —  whether you're in purchasing HR, legal, finance ,ops, whatever — they're all sitting on mountains of unstructured data... Apple, of all companies, has this problem, too. There's unstructured data, structured data, and types, and suddenly we now have a way to ingest a lot of that and make it searchable in a way that was not before.” 

• Like lean standardization, AI removes waste from work that can open space for creativity: “Folks who are new to lean and standardization, they see a standard as potentially restrictive and limiting the creativity and limiting the potential,” says Tyson. Mature lean users, however, recognize that standardization removes constrains and allows them to create and experiment to produce better results.     “A decent chunk of [knowledge work] is basically pattern understanding, pattern synthesis, and pattern projection to get work done,” he adds. “And if you can take and offload that or pair with AI, which it's really good at, it unleashes your creativity.”  

• Negative reaction to improvements made possible with AI: Gene tells the story of an individual who would do many hours of Excel work each day on a highly specific “horrendous” task, and then AI applied a macro that could do it for her. “Her reaction was anger. She's like, ‘How dare you? I didn't ask for this.” AI removed something she held “near and dear.”     Tyson says a path to overcome this natural human reaction to someone’s work being removed is a better foundation of understanding of value-add vs. non-value add vs. incidental work from the customer’s perspective. 

• The fear of AI taking jobs is real for some individuals and in some companies: Art relates AI improvements back to early lean improvements, when removing non-value-added piece of work from someone’s work was viewed as taking away their job; they did not recognize the lean improvement was freeing them to think of the other ways they could be adding value to the organization.     Tyson says it’s critical to help rewrite people's identity as creators and improvers rather than lathe worker or spreadsheet specialist. “It's also kind of a tragedy that so many people and so many organizations aren't afforded the ability to remake their identity as an improver of their own work processes and workflows because of either the leadership structure or the behavior, the cultures of the organization.”  

• Overcoming resistance to AI: Pair coding/programming (when two people code together) and learning by doing together has real value in getting individuals to embrace what’s possible with AI, says Art. “If there's a respected person in the organization, sometimes there's peer learning that occurs. There's different ways people get influenced, different directions. And peer coding seems to me to be a very natural way of transfer of information that's often mutually beneficial, and you get a better result, learn by doing, low risk, high reward.” He adds the interest in AI goes from incremental to exponential.     Gene agrees, and points to examples of increased activation among individuals learning it and just doing it with respected members of their technical community. “We're now in a universe where it is easier to just do the experiment than it is to sort of like describe to someone else and try to justify the experiment. It's like, no, just open the laptop and try it, and we're all going learn something.” 

• AI weaknesses and role of humans: “It is difficult to overstate just how useful and expert these things are,” says Gene. “So that's on one hand. On the other hand, like these things are also like summer interns. They are prone to doing the most stupid things, right? They delete data, they don't follow instructions very well, they sometimes get confused, right? They forget things. So your job as a human right now —  kind of in this weird time where we know what how powerful the AIs are — sometimes it takes a lot of vigilance and supervision and judgment to make sure that are we really getting closer to the goal.” 

• The dangers of falling in love with AI: Art says AI has given him a sense of control, wonder, and fun in building things again that he has not experienced in years. Gene also says that solving problems — his own and those of others with AI — has been exhilarating and that he hasn’t “been this productive in a long time, maybe even ever.”     Tyson notes, however, that the way he’s working, too often task-switching and working on multiple projects while AI delivers outcomes, “was not leading to the result I wanted either in like the depth of work around a component of work that I was doing or my attention span. I think I'm getting a little shorter, and I think I'm losing some depth... I need to countermeasure the way that I'm working to be able to make sure that I'm kind of maintaining myself as a person of depth, as being able to dig in deeply into these issues that are important or into these work threads that are important, rather because otherwise I spend a whole bunch of time cleaning up the slop that came because of my poor custody as a workflow manager.”    Gene says that the critical personal constraint for AI has gone from the number of tokens a user has and the number of agents to how focused we can be on one thing. “Attention, focus is like the most precious constraint and constrained resource we have.” 

This week The Management Brief presents the second installment in our series on coaching across the lean community and the benefits of mutual learning — senior leaders with external and/or internal lean coaches as well as peer-to-peer relationships. These connections can deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when leaders try to go it alone.

Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, is joined by Desh Edirisuriya, General Manager, New Zealand Manufacturing and Business Excellence with Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, and Jim Luckman, LEI Coach and Partner in Lean Transformations Group. Fisher & Paykel is a manufacturer of respiratory care products based in Auckland, and the company is driven by an objective to improve care and outcomes for patients.

Desh was instrumental in setting up the company’s Business Excellence function. He was first exposed to lean during an extraordinary growth phase at the company, implementing tools and processes to solve the problem of scaling up. Desh has been with Fisher & Paykel for 25 years, along the way learning how to better understand his role as it has changed and where he must focus. Desh says Jim has helped him with that by “being sort of a mirror [to] get good feedback, reflect, and also help me see my role, my gaps, and then help me through developing a way to bridge those gaps.” Desh adds that he often does not know he’s being coached by Jim, but inevitably he ends up changing his behavior as a result of their conversations.

Jim spent 30 years with General Motors, including time at Delphi as a Chief Engineer, director of a site with 600 R&D people, and learning and practicing how to apply lean in R&D. He got involved in coaching after Delphi, and he sees coaching as a means to help individuals solve fundamental problems inside of their businesses from top to bottom, with “the right people solving the right problem at the right time.” He describes his experience with Desh as a “co-learning experience, it’s not one way. I don’t feel like a coach as much as a co-learner.”

Topics that Mark addresses with Desh and Jim include:

• Experiments run by Desh at Fisher & Paykel with leaders, direct reports, and shopfloor teams to build social connections and create respectful dialogue among respective groups, and the challenges Desh has encountered with those experiments.
• Asking good questions that get people to think about what’s actually going on instead of focusing on their own thinking and not listening to the person you want to do the thinking.
• Learnings achieved by Desh and Jim in their work together and their future plans.

Interested in bringing a coach to your organization? Learn more at lean.org/CLP

This week The Management Brief kicks off an extended series on the coaching and co-learning that is occurring throughout the lean community. We’ll be exploring the benefits of mutual learning in all its forms — senior leaders with their lean coaches, be they external or internal to the organization, as well peer-to-peer relationships — that deliver more value and open avenues of understanding and growth not possible when going it alone.  

Most if not all leaders are looking for guidance tailored to their positions, and that’s especially true of lean leaders seeking to transform themselves and their organizations. Effective coaching and co-learning relationships offer a “follow me and we’ll figure this out together” association that enables both partners to navigate a lean journey, establish a path for lean transformation, and achieve sustainable results. We will examine what makes lean coaching and co-learning relationships effective, and, in the process, provide insights into how to establish your own co-learning opportunities. 

Our initial installment in this series brings together Marco Lopez, CEO Dreamplace Hotels, & Resorts in the Canary Islands, which embarked on a lean “never-ending” journey 15 years ago, and Oriol Cuatrecasas, coach with the Instituto Lean Management in Spain and a lean practitioner for decades. Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer, Strategy, interviews the duo who discuss co-learning and the Dreamplace journey, including: 

• In 2009, Marco says he and others in the company asked, “What can we do to be more competitive,” and realized they had to do something new and that lean was an option. He is grateful they came to the decision to pursue lean, now seeing it as “the only way,” despite not recognizing early on that the journey would not be easy or fast and takes continuous attention and effort to sustain. 

• Marco recalls directors working on the first A3s with Oriol, with them being instructed to go out to the gemba and solve real problems. He realized this approach was going to take time, and he and directors would need to be patient and support people every step of the way. Marco recognized that lean was not a “plug-in solution.”  

• Oriol recalls what attracted him to working with Dreamplace. Around 2010, he was speaking at a public conference and, at the end of the event, advised attendees to take a problem, take a team, learn, apply lean, and share successes (as Jim Womack often advised). Five years later he received an email from an operations manager at Dreamplace who described doing precisely what Oriol had suggested, wanted to share with him what a team was working on, and asked, “When are you going to come?” Oriol went to Dreamplace and met the manager and Marco. A Dreamplace team had begun breaking down silos (lodging department, kitchen, housekeeping, etc.) that prevented flow in serving hotel guests better, and also was working to have a majority of business decisions made by frontline employees. “Immediately I fell in love with these people, and said ‘When do we start?’” 

• Marco and Oriol discuss how lean was meant for the hospitality industry, an environment that is purely value-added and in which every customer requires a customized experience. This environment requires a reliance on cross-functional teams to seamlessly support the customer’s journey throughout all aspects of their stay. 

• Coaching has helped Marco and managers within Dreamplace learn how to set goals, manage and empower people, and be honest and open with teams. For example, Marco learned to show up at the gemba and support staff without dominating the situation. Dreamplace started its lean journey internally, working on its own for five years. In hindsight, Marco advises others to ask for professional help from the beginning: “You will save at least two or three years.” Oriol says it helps to be coaching “the right executive,” someone who can make real decisions to change things, own the transformation, and accept that there will be moments of frustration that must be worked through to avoid failure. 

Interested in bringing coaching and co-learning to your organization? Schedule a call today.

In this special edition of the WLEI Podcast, hosts Lex Schroeder and LEI President Josh Howell sit down with former product development executive Jim Morgan to explore the lasting impact of The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology, the groundbreaking book he co-authored with Jeff Liker. Two decades after its release, the insights that revealed Toyota’s unique approach to product development remain a cornerstone for any organization striving to become a great product company.  

Together, they examine:

• The story behind the research that inspired The Toyota Product Development System, what drove Jim to uncover Toyota’s secrets of innovation, and how to apply them today
• The enduring principles engineering leaders still rely on to build teams that consistently design products customers love (and buy)
• How Jim translated lean product and process development (LPPD) lessons into practical action across his own career as a product development and operations executive, adapting them to diverse challenges and contexts.
• Common hurdles companies face when putting core LPPD ideas into practice—and where to begin the transformation journey.
• Why so many organizations hesitate to take those hard, necessary steps to develop their people and achieve genuine enterprise transformation.

Whether you’re new to lean thinking or deep into your own transformation, this conversation offers both history and insight into how timeless principles continue to shape the future of product development and provide the key to a lean enterprise.  

Learn more about lean product and process development at lean.org/LPPD

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with executive coach and engineering leader Sarah Milstein about how to keep teams focused on value creation by putting people at the center of work design. 

My conversation with Sarah explores: 

• How to create cultures of respect as a leader 

• How companies can simplify job roles, salaries, and raises to focus employees on high-value work  

• Sarah’s advice for how engineering and product leaders can successfully navigate this moment in tech, including the trends that will pass and the trends that will stick 

• How to work with teams of engineers to create the conditions for continuous learning 

• How to support people well so that teams build strong, sustainable lean product and process development systems  

About Sarah Milstein 

Sarah Milstein coaches executive and emerging leaders in tech. Previously, she held executive roles at a number of tech startups and in the federal government. She was also CEO and co-founder of Lean Startup Productions. Earlier, she was a freelance journalist writing regularly for The New York Times. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. https://sarahmilstein.com 

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Julia Austin about what the lean product and process development principle “Put People First” looks like in practice.  

An executive fellow at Harvard Business School, Julia is an executive coach with experience leading successful product teams in tech at companies like Akamai Technologies, VMware, Inc., and DigitalOcean. She is also author of the book, After the Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup.  

My conversation with Julia explores: 

• How to create effective collaboration across people and teams to support an excellent product or service 

• Where leaders and teams struggle in product development in 2025 

• How leaders can support people to drive high-performance 

• Standout moments of people working together vastly improve a product and service 

• How to leverage AI while keeping human beings at the center of work design 

• Why a culture of care and respect builds teams of responsible experts  

In this week’s edition of The Management Brief, Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, speak with Nelson Repenning, School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Nelson also is the co-author of There’s Got to Be a Better Wayi and the Co-Founder and Chief Social Scientist of ShiftGear Work Design, a consultancy that focuses on understanding the factors that contribute to the successful implementation, execution, and improvement of business processes. 

This month The Management Brief is presenting theories that are guiding organizational transformations, including Nelson’s dynamic work design, an “anti-initiative” approach for redesigning work to solve the right problems effectively and, in doing so, increase productivity, profits, and associate engagement.  

Dynamic work design helps organizations challenge the mindset that they can forecast and plan — budget, strategy, human resources, capital — with accuracy. Nelson’s alternative: “If we accept that the world is not perfectly predictable, we might go back and design some of our core processes a little bit differently to create an organization that not only plans but also is capable of learning from experience and adapting to the new information they get as they go.”  

Dynamic work design is based on five principles: 

• Solve the right problem: This principle is “a charge to focus on bite-sized pieces of important problems and use structured methods, whether it’s the A3 or DMAIC or whatever your preferred version is to make sure that you actually solve that problem in a fundamental way,” says Nelson. 

• Structure for discovery: This involves configuring every job in the organization so that the individual doing the job learns the right lessons and can get feedback to adjust behaviors to do work in the right way. 

• Connect the human chain: “Let’s leverage the collective intelligence of the organization by making sure that problems quickly get to the person who is in the best position to solve them,” instructs Nelson. “So it’s essentially a charge to wire together the information flow so that knowledge about a particular issue gets to the right place and gets there quickly.” 

• Regulate for flow: This is a version of Toyota pull that involves making sure there is the right amount of work in the system to prevent “traffic jams” of work. 

• Visualize the work: This principle helps to apply visualization usually found in physical work to knowledge work, which frequently lacks such signals. “If we can create a kind of digital twin or radar screen ...  so that we can see whether knowledge work is moving or not, it often unlocks a lot of that natural problem solving that you would get in other contexts if the work were a little bit more available to us,” explains Nelson. 

Nelson described how the Broad Institute, a research organization dedicated to understanding the roots of disease and closing the gap between new biological insights and impact for patients, successfully applied dynamic work design in a knowledge-work environment to improve research grant workflows. The institute had one grant process that was particularly problematic, time-consuming, frustrated staff, and required workarounds.  

Sheila Dodge, COO of Broad Clinical Labs, followed the dynamic work design principles in a direct manner and set clear targets: get grants approved in 10 days rather than the 20 or 30 days that it was taking. “They mapped the process pretty carefully so you could see all the steps that they went through. And then ... they created a really simple visual management system to plot how the work was flowing or track how the work was flowing,” says Nelson. Using a white board they depicted steps in the process, with a sticky note representing each grant moving through the process, which quickly revealed their poor design choices. They then reconfigured resources and the work started flowing dramatically. 

The trio also discussed Nelson’s work relating to: 

• The efficacy of face-to-face communications: When designing processes for getting work done, face-to-face communications should in place where most helpful, such as where there is ambiguity or uncertainty that needs to be processed. “We have discovered that often a daily meeting can replace, if it’s well designed, hundreds of emails a day if you design the meeting [to] bring all the uncertainty into the meeting,” says Nelson. 

• Seagull management: This refers to the uncomplimentary behavior of managers who, when there is a crisis, “fly in like a flock of seagulls and then sort of poop on everything and then fly away.” Nelson says that “as leaders get more senior, they really underestimate the symbolic impact of their actions... The thing that people don’t understand when they get to those corner offices is that everybody is looking at them to try to figure out what behaviors are appropriate in this organization. They are the chief role model, whether they like it or not. And so I think as a consequence, with the best of intentions, leaders often have really pathological impacts on their organization.”  

• AI will change work dynamics: “There’s no question that AI is going to change our lives in very material ways,” says Nelson. “But I actually think it is going to put an even greater premium on the kinds of things that we collectively do... It’s best captured by one of my former students [who] said, ‘You know, there’s few ways to lose money faster than automating a process you don’t understand.’ I think that’s going to be very true in the machine learning AI-enabled world, and I think it’s going to put a real premium on understanding how the work actually gets done. And then using these new tools in very strategic ways.”

This month The Management Brief will explore prominent lean theories that have been guiding organizations in their lean transformations. This week, Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, are joined by Dr. Steven Spear, renown lean expert and senior lecturer at MIT.  

Steven is co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification,1 which examines how some companies over the last 150 years have led markets by solving their most important problems better, faster, and easier than the competition. The trio discuss Steven’s work and his 30-plus years of lean learnings. 

Steven recalls his start at the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), when Mark was one of his mentors and sensei along with the Hajime Obha. He was thrust into all things lean and trying to grasp the Toyota Production System (TPS), without much clear instruction of principles and tools, instead just guidance to go and see and find things that were broken. “What I realized was going on is that they were teaching me to look for broken things, and the reason why they weren’t telling me how is they wanted to first see what was broken in my approach,” says Steven. “So there was this layer of see a problem, solve a problem. That becomes sort of a mantra in my work about how we organize our behavior, how we architect our processes, how we architect our processes so that we can immediately see where we’re wrong and use that as an immediate trigger to swarm onto the situation, figure out why it’s wrong, and how to make it right.” 

Steven grasped that TPS is a system built around the ability to see problems and respond to them quickly. “It’s a simple thing to say, but the hard work is to keep pushing and pushing and pushing so you can see problems in greater detail, with greater accuracy, at smaller scale, sooner before they have a chance to become big problems. And everything else I think I’ve done since that moment ... has been elaboration on those points.” 

The trio go on to discuss: 

• Steven’s immersion in Toyota led to the groundbreaking article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,”2 which puts forward rules for how to design systems that establish standards, capture understanding, enable individuals to see when things go wrong, and then fix the problems they find.  

• High-Velocity Edge,3 Steven’s first book, was built on the insights that the way for companies to compete is on solving increasingly more problems at greater depth and breadth and faster (velocity). He eventually wrote Wiring the Winning Organization, which states more explicitly that “winner’s win because they’re just much better at seeing and solving problems than anybody else.” 

• Steven describes three layers behind the slowification, simplification, and amplification framework: 1) compete on ability to see and solve problems, 2) understand the instrumentation and ingenuity through which individuals work, and 3) architect the social circuitry in all processes, procedures, and routines by which the work of individuals is integrated into collective action toward common purpose. 

• A problem-solving danger zone for companies is when iteration and experimentation are inhibited. To get into a winning zone requires slowification (committed time and space to solve problems), simplification (simplify problems at the operating level rather than moving them up and down silos), and amplification (see problems earlier and more often when they are small). 

• Leaders need to liberate people’s ingenuity rather than maximize efficiency, according to Steven. “There’s too much in society where leaders think their job is to somehow collect data, do analysis, and then tell other people what to do.” While a fan of AI, Steven fears that leaders who are predisposed to data collection, analytics, and command and control management will turn AI into “an unholy devil for the rest of us” and dismiss creativity, dismiss ingenuity, and commitment to mission. 

• Steven and his co-author Gene Kim have tried to harmonize problem-solving ideas across different communities of thought. “We’ve all had the experience where someone says, ‘This must be a lean problem vs. a Six Sigma problem vs. a DevOps problem vs. an agile problem.’ Folks, it’s a people problem. That’s it. It’s people who are in a relationship and either relationships aren’t working because they can’t see problems, they can’t solve problems, or they can’t systematize what they learned. And so we thought we were doing some kind of service here to simplify the language so people could speak and collaborate across domains.”

• Optimism about organizations’ abilities to transform: “Outside in a personal life, [people are] striving so hard to be valued by others. This is not in sort of any kind narcissistic, weak way. It’s just this is what people try to do. This gets back to like our creative origins in that we want to do things useful and valuable to others. And then we bring them into the workplace, and we tell them none of that: we’re going to be demeaning of you, of your potential, your opportunity, your chance for appreciation. So all we’re saying is, what we've naturally been created or evolved to do, just extend that into the workplace. Mark, that’s my source of optimism because when you start having conversations with people that way and get them to talk about all the joy they have as coach of this, as head of that, as volunteer here, it’s like, don’t leave that at the door. Bring it in. And people, when you say, ‘Oh, that’s what you want me to do, yeah,’ they’re happy to do that.” 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, are joined by Jon Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of Do It American MFG Company, which produces goods for public utilities. Jon started the company in 2008 and is an advocate for U.S.-based manufacturing. Earlier in his career as a manager at Walker Corporation he learned about the Toyota Production System (TPS) directly from the eminent Hajime Oba while being assisted by the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC).  

This month The Management Brief explores how leaders transform and rethink traditional management approaches to achieve success with lean. Jon remembers the “wonderful experience” of working alongside Mr. Oba “that honestly changed my life and resulted in some successes and the company that we’re building today.” 

Jon learned TPS by doing and experimenting because Mr. Oba and TSSC staff would never directly advise a path to improvement: “One of the main things I learned real quick is — especially with Mr. Oba because he didn’t really say very much — you really had to work hard and pay attention to what he was paying attention to. That was the key thing, to try to understand in manufacturing and processes what was important. They would tell you, but they wouldn’t tell you by telling you. They’d tell you by paying attention to certain things.” 

Some of highlights of the trio’s discussion includes: 

• Leadership style learned from Mr. Oba: “I just loved being around him,” says Jon. “He seemed like a nice guy. He took things so seriously, and there was such a sense about him of really caring — about not only the process and transferring the knowledge, but also a real caring for the people that were working within the process. I just really appreciated that. I try to do that as much as I can moving forward with the folks we’ve got here.”  

• Living the TSSC mission: Mark, who was a general manager at TSSC, says that Jon has realized the mission of TSSC to help organizations improve and keep manufacturing in the United States. Jon replies, “From TSSC, what they really gave me is that the learning I had gave me the confidence that we could do a manufacturing company and do it better than the people we were competing with. If you apply TPS — just some of the principles — and you do a good job of that, people using traditional methods are not going to be able to compete with you.” 

• Kaizen learnings from TSSC: The purpose of kaizen is not the improvement that is generated but learning how to improve. Jon says, “People think the way you improve is you do kaizen events; the kaizen event is the improvement. It wasn’t. Those are really training events. The kaizen event was to teach us how to do improvement.” 

• Respect people and promote problem solving: Josh recalls his visit to Do It American MFG, where he saw an “abundance” of respect for the people doing the work. For example, the company uses an andon system to assist employees when problems arise, to which leaders try to respond rapidly with assistance, not blame, to encourage the identification of problems. “If you’re responsive and you don’t blame them, they are much more willing to share and help become part of the problem-solving solution. It works really well. One thing we’ve done is we have taken the fear away.” Some employees have come from companies with a bad culture and, says Jon, “it’s fascinating how long it takes to unlearn what goes on if somebody works in a bad culture where they get beat up for making a mistake or causing a defect.” 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, talk with Carl Klemm, former General Motors and Toyota executive (including six years as President and CEO of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Poland). After retiring from Toyota in 2015, Carl founded Carl Klemm Management Solutions so he could continue to work with companies and share what he has learned about lean through the years.  

This month The Management Brief explores how leaders transform and rethink traditional management approaches to achieve success with lean. Carl’s management thinking has certainly changed since he started as an apprentice with General Motors. Early in his career at GM, he saw that virtually everyone had a “dreadful” relationship with industrial engineering that wanted to improve processes, and then, when studying NUMMI, the Toyota-GM joint venture, realized that did not have to be the case.  

After 24 years Carl left GM, joined Toyota, and was excited by what he could learn there. “I really wanted to join. I wanted to learn. I wanted to understand. I wanted to be able to do it, not just understand it, be able to do it and make it work.” 

Carl, author of The Balance of Excellence,1 also discussed: 

• Toyota compared to GM: Senior executives at Toyota were more communicative with employees down through the organization, more management maturity on Toyota shopfloors, the long-term perspective of Toyota management, and “the planning and strategic activity is much more intense” at Toyota. 

• Importance of management to achieve results and develop people concurrently and in harmony: “Management’s job is to keep those wheels aligned. That’s a true key difference between Toyota and other organizations I’ve come across.” 

• The operational and cultural benefits of pulling the andon: The process of pulling the andon allows standard work and throughput to be maintained while a problem is addressed, and frontline members can see that they immediately get support for their work rather than “waiting for ages” for assistance to come. 

• Four levels of management maturity: The four levels of maturity — reactive, stabilizing (getting control of processes), proactive (beginning to do kaizen), and progressive — ultimately get leaders to a place where they understand that the organization underneath them is independently performing kaizen and they can focus on what the organization needs to achieve “in the coming five, 10, 15, 20 years. And, of course, Toyota does that. Toyota is thinking 25, 30 years ahead always.” 

• Advice for those getting started with lean: “First establish the situation of mutual trust and respect, because without that everything is difficult.” 

In this special dual-release edition of The Design Brief and The Management Brief, Josh Howell, LEI President, is joined by LEI veterans Jim Morgan, Senior Advisor, and Mark Reich, Senior Coach and Chief Engineer Strategy. These two lean heavyweights discuss two fundamental lean processes that are absolutely critical to transform and grow an enterprise: lean product and process development (LPPD) and hoshin kanri. 

Jim is a former Ford Global Engineering Director and Rivian Chief Operating Officer. He co-authored The Toyota Product Development System and Designing the Future, both of which elements of LPPD, a system for developing new products and services and their required value streams. Jim co-authored The Toyota Product Development System and Designing the Future, both of which explore elements of LPPD, a system for developing new products and services and the processes needed to produce and deliver them. LPPD surfaces and resolves issues across the product-development value stream in order to minimize time- and profit-consuming wastes and rework. 

Mark, a 23-year veteran of Toyota, including work in Corporate Strategy at the automaker, recently authored Managing on Purpose, which explores hoshin kanri and how it aligns enterprises at every level — C-suite through the frontline — via a shared common purpose, problem solving, and continuous learning. Since 2011 when he joined LEI, Mark has successfully helped many executives apply hoshin kanri and transform their companies in a variety of business sectors.  

For executives not yet familiar with LPPD and hoshin kanri — especially those leading and growing enterprises — this discussion should be eye-opening. Jim and Mark reveal these two processes as not operations-only tools but game-changing methods for corporate leaders to transform their organizations. They describe the importance of these powerful processes to overall business success, their successes at Toyota and other lean organizations, and how the processes can significantly help any business, big or small. 

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In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Eric Ethington and Matt Zayko about how to build strong teams and robust product and process development systems, and why doing so takes a skilled chief engineer. Eric Ethington is a senior coach and Chief Engineer, Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) at The Lean Enterprise Institute. Matt Zayko is global head of the Lean Office at GE HealthCare. Eric and Matt are also coauthors of the book, The Power of Process: A Story of Innovative Lean Process Development.  

The conversation explores:  

• The key skills every chief engineer needs to be effective and “lead with responsibility, not authority”  

• How chief engineers can begin the work of “designing the value stream” 

• Why conflict is necessary to create good products and how to manage conflict with care  

• System integration and how chief engineers optimize work at the product level, balancing the inputs and needs of product development and manufacturing, for example 

• Real stories of product and process development where Eric and Matt have seen teams persevere and use LPPD thinking to innovate and achieve success  

Read Eric and Matt’s article “9 Tips to Better Process Development” here. 

Get Started with Lean Product & Process Development 

Improving how you develop and deliver products doesn’t require a full transformation to start—it begins with learning to see problems clearly, involve your team, and improve how work gets done. 

Explore your next step: 

• Read Designing the Future or The Power of Process 

• Take the 60-minute Lean Product and Process Development Overview course 

• Join the coach-led online Designing the Future Workshop for hands-on practice, and the in-person Introduction to Lean Process Development course Oct 7 

• Bring a coach into your organization for customized support 

Let’s take the first step—together. Learn more at lean.org/LPPD » 

Two leaders of the Cleveland Clinic’s lean improvement function — Dr. Lisa Yerian, Executive Vice President and Chief Clinical & Operational Improvement Officer, and Chad Cummings, Vice President of Lean Transformation & Continuous Improvement — speak with Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy. The podcast continues our focus this month on the role of continuous improvement (CI) groups in lean management. 

The Cleveland Clinic consists of 23 hospitals, 280 outpatient locations, approximately 83,000 caregivers, and nearly 16 million patient encounters annually. The vision at the not-for-profit healthcare system is to be “the best place to receive care anywhere and the best place to work,” says Lisa. “We have integrated the expectation of excellence, the aspiration for excellence, in everything we do right in parallel with being the best place to work.”   

Chad came out of manufacturing and first encountered lean in the 1990s, working for a Japanese-owned auto supplier, and has been working in healthcare for more than a decade in a CI capacity. Lisa started her career in healthcare, after growing up in a rural area that did not have access to high-quality healthcare and wanting to change that. At the Cleveland Clinic she was getting pulled into meetings about recurring problems, and eventually got connected to an internal team focused on using lean principles. “I saw lean as an opportunity to do what I had initially wanted to do, which was make a bigger difference for more people.” She then landed a new medical director role with the improvement team and began learning through “small amounts of coursework and books but really through doing, a lot with Chad and others on our lean team and with members of LEI.” 

The two executives discussed the many challenges facing healthcare today. Chad cites macro issues of high demand for care, fiscal difficulties, and finding skilled labor. The pandemic contributed to those challenges, says Lisa, resulting in high turnover and a subsequent need to develop people for their changing roles and build the capability for effective problem solving, huddle management, and understanding data. She also says workplace violence has risen in healthcare, contributing to burnout and turnover and adding security costs to fiscal woes.  

Lisa and Chad also discussed: 

• How to work with those in healthcare who have rejected the efficacy of lean: “If you are asking someone to support or believe, that’s too big, it’s too broad. Nobody knows what that means,” says Lisa. “What is it that you really need to get out of this interaction? Do you need them to commit to going on a gemba walk with you? What is it that your ask really is?... You need to get specific quickly in order to try to address that. And then what are you trying to accomplish here?” 

• A need to revisit some lean improvement practices following COVID: “We did a lot of work to develop a culture of improvement prior to COVID; we had built a tiered daily huddle system, kaizen system, a lot of problem-solving capability and awareness,” says Lisa. “In my role I realized we need to go back and reinvigorate some of that work, repeat some of that work, redo some of that work,” and re-educate leaders on how to perform their roles. 

• How an adherence to the lean transformation framework helps to point CI actions to problems that need to be addressed: This starts by asking, “What is the problem we’re trying to solve, what’s our true value-driven purpose?” notes Lisa. 

• The importance of developing people: “If we want to make a change in our culture, we have to really think about what behaviors, right behaviors or correct behaviors, we want to drive, but even prior to that thinking about routines,” says Chad. “Do we have the right routines in place that help to establish those behaviors. And to establish those routines you have to build capability in people. You have to give them the knowhow of what good looks like.” 

Want to take these ideas further?  

Go beyond the page and see lean leadership in action. The Lean Leadership Learning Tour (Nov. 10–13, 2025) takes you inside Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers to witness real-world problem-solving, leadership development, and transformation at scale. Bring a colleague, align your vision, and return ready to accelerate change.  

Learn more » 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, talk with Rich Calvaruso, Senior Director of the Lean Management Office for GE Appliances. Rich — with GE for 36 years and the leader of GE Appliances’ continuous improvement (CI) group for 15 of those years — has been instrumental in driving lean thinking and practice for the company. He says the purpose of his group is to “develop people and improve process at the same time.” 

GE Appliances started its first lean activities in 2005, says Rich, and applied lean to a model line and got good results that impressed leadership. This was at a time when the company was using overseas contract manufacturers and concluded that in addition to designing products they needed to again make things back in the U.S.  

In 2009 GE Appliances began to build back its U.S. manufacturing capability and reshore products to Louisville, KY. “[After] two years of planning, we launched that first plant. It did not go as great as you’d want from a launch standpoint,” Rich concedes. “But, I think, in retrospect, it was about as good as we could have done, considering the fact that we had lost a lot of capability over the years in this space, and we were having to build that back. You can build a plant and bring a product back, but there’s a lot more that goes into manufacturing than the product and the building.” 

From that humbling restart as a lean manufacturer, GE Appliances proceeded to become the No. 1 appliance maker in the U.S. Each time the company reshored a product, it took actions to continuously get better. “We tried to get our costs right. We tried to get our quality right. We tried to get our lead times down,” says Rich. “We are a U.S. manufacturer that supplies our products to the U.S. market. So for us, making products close to the customer is super important because shipping this stuff around the world is tough.” Rich likes the LEI-coined term of “leanshoring,” because “you’re not just bringing back what you lost. You have to do it differently. You have to think about it differently.”  

Rich also tells Josh and Jeff that: 

• Kaizen events are beneficial and do provide change and learning, but they lack the “stickiness” to change culture and leave a lot of people out of lean capability development. GE Appliances moved from events to systems, such as standardized work and how to improve the work, and focused on getting results and developing capabilities of people across production. 

• Leader lean capabilities were developed at the company through the Immersion training program for senior leaders and plant managers. “It was humbling for them,” says Rich. “We made them experience the work of a team member on the line. It created some empathy. But also they go to see not only how the tool works but the whole social aspect of how you make change.” 

• Those trying to spread lean broader throughout their organizations have to have perseverance and expect some things won’t go as planned. Rich encourages those supporting lean to “learn as much as you can and do as much as you can... Go do it with them. If you really want to spread this, go find somebody who has a business problem and partner up with them and try to solve it together. That’s the best way to get people on board.” 

• He looks for certain characteristics for those on his CI team: “You don’t have to know really anything about the lean toolset or lean thinking, but you do have to be humble and you have to be a learner. If you have those two characteristics, I’ll hire you. Then we’ll basically put you out on the floor and start to teach you the process, and it takes a while.” 

 Want to take these ideas further?  

Go beyond the page and see lean leadership in action. The Lean Leadership Learning Tour (Nov. 10–13, 2025) takes you inside Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers to witness real-world problem-solving, leadership development, and transformation at scale. Bring a colleague, align your vision, and return ready to accelerate change.  

Learn more » 

Simon Rowley and Julian Ball join Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, and continue this month’s discussion about the role of continuous improvement (CI) groups in lean management. Simon is Senior Manager at the Toyota Lean Management Centre (TLMC) in the UK, and Julian is Section Manager. TLMC was started by Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK in 2009 to support companies in the UK interested in implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS). 

The two TLMC executives describe the startup of the center and how it initially enabled Toyota UK to employ and improve staff during a financial downturn. “They saw this as an opportunity for development of their own people, going out to clients and helping them and coaching them in TPS and the Toyota Way, develop them to then go rotate back into the business and make our business stronger,” says Julian. The best way to get better at TPS, adds Simon, is to practice, and TLMC offers team members opportunities to practice with diverse industries, people, problems, and environments. 

On the podcast Simon and Julian also talk about: 

• Training programs they bring to clients in the UK, including Rolls Royce, and their work in industries beyond manufacturing, such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and high tech. “The thinking way can be implemented into all of these sectors,” says Julian. 

• The approach of TLMC team members with clients compared to staff at Toyota’s internal CI group, the Operations Management Development Division (OMDD): “When we’re here at Toyota and having a discussion about TPS, it’s OK to assume that everyone has some level of knowledge and you can start using terms and think of activities you’re going to do and everybody is kind of on the same page,” notes Simon. “If you go to an external enterprise, first of all you have to change the way you communicate to people.” 

• Advice for companies new to TPS and wanting to get started with improvements: get at least some advice from a lean expert, don’t get too ambitious when starting with lean, begin small in an area and with people who have expressed an interest in lean improvements, make sure of who needs to be on board to make it work, and don’t worry about getting it wrong. 

• People development and TPS: “Unless you’re developing your people in your organization, you’ll never maximize the potential of TPS, you’ll get just little bits of improvement,” says Simon. 

• The importance of standardized work: “Standardized work allows us to build high-quality vehicles safely every single cycle,” say Julian. “The other part of that is it’s the members’ safety net. We’ll train you how to do something and, of course, if you do it this way every single time you will stay safe and you will build that quality vehicle. We’re avoiding any of these conflicts of who did it wrong and why didn’t you do it like this. We just follow the standardized work... If I work this way, I can’t do anything wrong.” 

Want to take these ideas further?  

Go beyond the page and see lean leadership in action. The Lean Leadership Learning Tour (Nov. 10–13, 2025) takes you inside Toyota, GE Appliances, and Summit Polymers to witness real-world problem-solving, leadership development, and transformation at scale. Bring a colleague, align your vision, and return ready to accelerate change.  

Learn more » 

Josh Howell and Mark Reich, LEI President and Chief Engineer Strategy, respectively, speak with Jamie Bonini, President of the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), a not-for-profit corporation affiliated with Toyota Motor North America. Since 1992, TSSC has shared Toyota know-how with more than 500 small- to mid-sized companies, government entities, and non-profits.  

This week’s discussion kicks off a month of The Management Brief content around the role of continuous improvement (CI) groups in lean management. As the leader of TSSC, Jamie interacts with many organizations’ CI groups as they apply basic concepts of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and helps others develop CI groups for that objective.  

Prior to Toyota, Jamie worked at Chrysler and DaimlerChrysler, spending a decade applying TPS there and believing he understood it well. “I was absolutely stunned and amazed by how much more there was to TPS than I was able to learn by reading externally and even working with former Toyota people that were helping us when I was at Chrysler and DaimlerChrysler.” While at TSSC he’s found there is often a similar big gap in what those outside of Toyota think of TPS — frequently narrower than the Toyota approach of developing “a culture of highly engaged people that are solving problems and innovating to drive performance.”  

On the podcast Jamie discusses: 

• Toyota’s internal CI group: Operations Management Development Division (OMDD) works with plants, suppliers, logistics, dealers, and other entities connected to Toyota for TPS support work and to develop people (“TPS is 80% hands-on learn by doing, experiential learning, it’s learning through practice,” says Jamie). OMDD also will be involved by adding resources needed for quick-hit plant changes as well as new plant design and layout. 

• Differences between OMDD and TSSC: OMMD focuses mostly, but not exclusively, on the technical tools and practices of TPS because the Toyota Way philosophy and the managerial roles and structures are regularly reinforced throughout the automaker and its partners. Outside of Toyota, TSSC must address not only the technical side but the philosophy and managerial aspects (design of the organization) of TPS. 

• Perspective of CI groups: When Jamie started with Chrysler, just as TPS and lean was becoming known, most organizations did not have CI groups. Today most have established some form of CI group, and “now the need for that function is recognized and staffed.” The CI groups today, however, typically are a training and coaching support function (needed and helpful), “but, in most cases, I think more can be done.” There is an overemphasis on “tools to be installed” and not enough emphasis on a building a culture of highly engaged people to solve problems and working with very senior leaders to solve problems.  

• Building capability in leaders and managers: As TSSC works on a nine- to 12-month pilot project with an organization to achieve a specific business result, it’s also developing leaders who can then sustain and spread TPS. During that time senior executives undergo a three- to four-day workshop where they solve actual problems on the frontline and learn how to coach problem solving. “Almost all the time we get the same feedback, which is, ‘Wow. We have a lot more problems out there than I had realized that can be solved. There’s a lot more improvement tension than I realized. This problem-solving method is pretty simple ... but the actual practice is difficult. If we want our people to be able do this type of problem solving on a regular basis, we’re really going to have to provide management that is going to support and develop them in that.” 

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Sebastian Fixson, PhD, of Babson College, on mentoring the next generation of leaders in lean product and process development (LPPD). Sebastian is the founding faculty director of the doctor of business administration) program and professor of innovation and design, at Babson, where he focuses on helping people and organizations build innovation capabilities. 

Jim Morgan, senior advisor on LPPDat LEI, joins Sebastian and me for this wide-ranging conversation in which we discuss: 

• How to get emerging product leaders to slow down and leverage LPPD to build stronger teams and better businesses 

• How engineers can use LPPD to become more effective business leaders by understanding how the larger business works  

• Sebastian’s advice to product leaders on how to understand both the physical and digital side of the business (as well as how LPPD supports this effort) 

• How to build “process thinkers”, not just product development leaders 
• Where Sebastian sees hope for innovative product development processes, organizations, and/or new ways of working to solve global challenges 

Get Started with Lean Product & Process Development  

Improving how you develop and deliver products doesn’t require a full transformation to start—it begins with learning to see problems clearly, involve your team, and improve how work gets done.  

Explore your next step:  

• Read Designing the Future or The Power of Process  

• Take the 60-minute Lean Product and Process Development Overview course  

• Join the coach-led online Designing the Future Workshop for hands-on practice, and the in-person Introduction to Lean Process Development course Oct 7  

• Bring a coach into your organization for customized support  

Let’s take the first step—together. Learn more at lean.org/LPPD » 

Jim Lancaster, Owner and CEO of Lantech, talks with Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, about his lean journey and the decades-long transformation at his packaging-solutions company. Lantech, a lean pioneer, was highlighted in Jim Womack’s and Daniel Jones’ 1996 book Lean Thinking, and has steadily improved, growing the business 75% since 2020 despite economic and market factors that have derailed other companies.  

Jim, author of The Work of Management, started at Lantech in high school when his father, Pat, was CEO. After college he worked in the financial industry, and then came back to Louisville to help run the family business. “I was very involved [as a participant] in the very first part of the lean transformation that we made back with Shingjutsu and consulting firm TBM way back in the early 90s... I grew up in the sales side of our business for the first four or five years before taking over and running the company in 1995, which is when I really started leading the charge on lean as opposed to just participating in the workshops... I’ve been around [lean] since the early 90s, for a really long time through its various terms and various epics. The core principles have not changed, and the value has not changed.” 

In this frank, engaging conversation, the trio discuss: 

• Jim’s growth as a lean leader and how important it is to bring others along in their learning, giving them the confidence to make change, especially as Lantech grew and he could no longer be personally involved with every process and problem.
• The need to accumulate incremental improvements and prevent successes from deteriorating so that each “chunk” of improvement adds to what has already been accomplished.
• Lantech’s management system, which consists of a problem-escalation process; 90-day rolling averages for quality, cost, delivery, and safety, with performances compared daily to trigger problem-solving; and process improvements using A3s and key task monitoring.
• The power of experiential learning, especially as changes fail and individuals “stub their toe” and cope with difficulties, and, as a leader, the need to patiently let them face their frustrations and work to “see the problem differently.” 
• How the company survived the pandemic and had to reteach many lean principles to get over the necessary workarounds that were put in place to get through COVID. 

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we continue our series on AI in product development with an interview with Mari Zumbro, Co-Founder and COO of the tech startup Filament. An active participant in the open-source community, Filament describes itself as a new communication platform with the goal of accelerating global innovation with leaders who are thinking deeply about “how different communities and organizations can mutually benefit and look for arrangements that benefit the public good.” 

In this conversation, we discuss:  

• How to build high-performing product development teams that effectively leverage AI to achieve exceptional results. 

• What it takes to create work cultures where teams feel “safe to create.” 

• Why “product development is a team sport.”  

• The larger benefits and hidden problems of AI, including its impact on the environment. 

• Leadership behaviors and practices that keep teams in a generative space, putting people before AI and keeping them at the center of work design. 

Josh Howell and Mark Reich, LEI President and Chief Engineer Strategy, respectively, speak with Scott Heydon, former VP of Global Strategy at Starbucks, McKinsey & Co. consultant, and a Senior Lean Coach with LEI since 2014. They discuss Scott’s efforts to transform Starbucks with lean thinking, learning lean methods and new ways of problem-solving along the way, and how he’s taken that knowledge to other organizations.  

Scott says at Starbucks he evolved his own problem-solving from that of a top-down, MBA-style focused on financials and strategic analysis to include a recognition of problems from the bottom up and a need to develop the capability of others to incrementally improve and problem-solve at the local level to “get better every day.” His work at Starbucks included a four-store lean experiment, which involved then Starbucks colleague Josh and was eventually expanded across the coffeehouse chain. The effort was revised midcourse, says Scott, as his programmatic approach shifted to a better understanding of the processes and problems that need to be solved specific to individual stores and asking store leaders, “What problem are you trying to solve?” 

Scott offers two pieces of advice for those in leadership positions progressing with their own lean learning and working to develop and support others who are learning with them: 

• “Spend more time where the work happens. That can be challenging as a leader because people will operate differently” and the perspective viewed may not always be authentic. Scott worked in a local store as a barista for a few hours each week, and told people on the line he was trying to learn and was not there to judge. It also helped that he had an idea of what to look for, a key skill learned from LEI coach Jeff Smith while at Starbucks.  

• Turn off the problem-solving in your brain as you talk to someone, and instead ask questions to learn from them about what they are doing and ask questions that can help them become a better problem-solver. “To develop that capability in others and to create improvement by supporting others is a really important capability for leaders.” 

In this episode of The Design Brief, we speak with Fabrice Bernhard. Fabrice is cofounder and chief technology officer of Theodo, a leading tech consultancy in Europe, and coauthor of The Lean Tech Manifesto. Fabrice discusses what it takes to create great digital products, how high-performing teams can use AI with care, and how LPPD (lean product and process development) thinking works with generative AI to strengthen businesses and teams. 

The conversation explores:  

• What intentional use of AI in product development looks like (while keeping human beings at the center) 

• Where Fabrice and his team have focused their energies helping companies make the digital transformation 

• How AI helps teams practice the LPPD principle of “building in learning and knowledge reuse” to create better products 

• How business leaders can use AI to “translate” legacy systems into the modern systems we need to do value-creating work now 

• Common pitfalls leaders run into when experimenting with AI in product development 

Get Started with Lean Product & Process Development 

Improving how you develop and deliver products doesn’t require a full transformation to start—it begins with learning to see problems clearly, involve your team, and improve how work gets done. 

At the Lean Enterprise Institute, we help organizations: 

• Focus on customer-defined value 

• Reduce delays and rework 

• Build learning into the development process 

• Align people, processes, and purpose 

Whether you're exploring Lean for the first time or want to improve your development system, we’ll meet you where you are. 

Explore your next step: 

• Read Designing the Future or The Power of Process 

• Take the 60-minute Lean Product and Process Development Overview course 

• Join the Designing the Future Workshop for hands-on practice 

• Bring a coach into your organization for customized support 

Let’s take the first step—together. Learn more at lean.org/LPPD » 

Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, join Olivier Larue, President of Ydatum, and discuss the Toyota Production System (TPS), the three elements embedded within TPS that make it more than just a production system, and the ability of TPS to foster problem-solving and creativity. Olivier worked with Mark at the Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC) in the late 1990s and has led Ydatum since 2000, assisting companies in implementing its version of TPS. Olivier recently authored the first of three volumes of The Toyota Economic System, which will present the three elements of the “Toyota triangle” — philosophical, technical, and managerial — and their necessity in making TPS an economic system for growth. 

TPS has enabled mass production to accommodate customization, which had been minimized in the pursuit of lower costs for large quantities of standardized goods, says Olivier. TPS allows companies to “build a product affordably and very much customized to the desires of the customer, one without compromising the other.” Yet when attempting to apply TPS it remains difficult for many organizations to simultaneously achieve the primary goals of TPS — highest quality, lowest cost, and shortest lead time.  

Josh and Mark explore with Olivier the importance of the Toyota triangle in achieving TPS goals, especially longer-term goals, and examine the relationship of the triangle to the better known TPS “house” (the roof of three goals, supported by jidoka and just-in-time columns, etc.). The house embodies philosophical, technical, and managerial elements throughout, notes Olivier, but they are not specifically called out in the house. Human development, also not shown in the house, is at the center of the Toyota triangle. Olivier says human development is critical because despite advances in artificial intelligence, currently only people can solve complex problems, human problems. “TPS at the end of the day is trying to solve a human problem using people through the human creativity and the human intelligence.” 

Olivier also discusses the organizational problems he encounters with problem-solving. For example, he often sees people gravitating toward problems they know how to solve instead of solving the right problem. This occurs because it’s not always safe to solve the right problem and individuals don’t have the courage to take them on. “It’s very important for companies to realize that if they don’t provide an environment where it’s safe to solve problems, two things are going to happen: problems are not going to get solved, or if some problem gets solved it will be the wrong one... As management and leaders, you have to be able to encourage the people to solve difficult problems without fear of having negative consequences if they fail.”

Learn more about TPS and lean leadership at lean.org

Josh Howell and Mark Reich, LEI President and Chief Engineer Strategy, respectively, talk with Sal Sanchez, a Toyota veteran and TPS coach with LEI. Sal’s Toyota career began at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), the GM/Toyota joint venture and Toyota’s first automotive footprint in the United States, and continued with roles at Toyota North American headquarters and TSSC (Toyota Supplier Support Center, where he worked with Mark in the late-1990s) as well as Dana Corp. Across his career he’s learned from Toyota leaders and other notable lean mentors, including Gary Convis, which has, in turn, enabled him to help many organizations apply the Toyota Production System (TPS) and TPS fundamentals such as problem-solving and daily management. 

Sal describes his pursuit of all things problem-solving while rising up through Toyota, including his role as a team leader supporting others with problem-solving issues that surfaced throughout the day, especially when an andon cord was pulled and solutions needed to be developed and applied quickly. Sal counters some misconceptions regarding andon pulls, noting that it does not necessarily stop a line; it does, however, create urgency for team leaders to quickly assist and, in many instances, gives team members a brief window of opportunity to solve the problem on their own. Sal says the andon was frequently pulled where he worked, which was a good thing, and reminds Mark that most companies don’t focus on problems until they get big while at Toyota many little problems are being addressed “minute to minute and day to day so that they don’t become big problems.” 

While a team leader, Sal also sought to more deeply understand the problems team members were going through and learned this by doing the jobs they did and experiencing what they went through, earning respect of team members along the way. He carried that approach beyond Toyota and has supplemented it with additional ideas to engage and empower team members, including basic problem-solving skills for frontline associates and giving team members trend charts and templates to support their problem-solving. As Sal works today with companies trying to apply TPS, he continues to encourage a focus on culture and developing people and frontline leaders — “invest in your people.” 

Learn more about lean thinking and practice and lean.org.

Josh Howell, LEI President, talks about the relationship of problem-solving and daily management with Jill Miller, Manager for Global Learning and Development at MillerKnoll, a maker of office furniture, equipment, and home furnishings. Jill supports the development, use, and expansion of the MillerKnoll Performance System (MKPS), which she says is designed to meet customers’ needs by engaging and developing people to daily surface and solve problems. “At its heart, it’s really about building capability across the organization.”  

Josh and Jill describe their experiences with how an effective daily management system makes it easy and straightforward for organizations to know what problems they should be solving. “One of the most powerful things about MKPS is that it helps make problems visible every day, right where the work is happening,” says Jill. “So when people ask, ‘What problem do we need to solve?’ the system actually helps answer that by revealing the problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. I think at that point, the problems are plentiful. There’s no shortage of problems.” 

MKPS intentionally sets up both the system and culture to support daily problem-solving by: 

• Designing work to clearly show abnormalities and make them visible in real time,  
• Making it easy and safe for individuals to quickly highlight problems (people are not blamed or ignored),  
• Providing a prompt, supportive reaction to an associate’s call for help (an “andon call”), and 
• Ensuring the problems that are surfaced actually get solved; team leaders (called “facilitators” at MillerKnoll) are developed to be skilled in practical problem-solving, identifying root causes, and eliminating problems in ways that keep them from recurring.  

The two also discuss the development of ongoing MKPS expertise within MillerKnoll: building capability in a way that is standardized so that MKPS is effectively executed in a consistent manner. This involves a partnership between the MKPS leadership team, operations leaders, and the human resources group that supports operations for selecting individuals to train (“students”), creating alignment based on behaviors and characteristics, and reflecting on the learning process and its effectiveness. Jill says students have called the development program “life changing” — who they are as a person, how they think, how they see their roles, how they interact with people, and how they approach their careers within the company.  

Josh Howell, LEI President, Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, and Art Smalley discuss the four basic types of problem-solving. Art is a well-known expert in leadership, management, and the Toyota Way. He worked at Toyota Motor Corp. in Japan; helped to transform Donnelly Corp. in Michigan; was a consultant with McKinsey & Co.; and has authored several award-winning books, including Four Types of Problems.  

The trio set out to discuss how the framework of the four types of problems maps onto the lean management system explained in Mark’s recent book about hoshin kanri, Managing on Purpose, as well as daily management in Toyota, leadership, culture, and other related topics. The systematic intersection of these topics is a complex subject beyond just the simpler notion of “tools.” Art and Mark share respective viewpoints from their time at Toyota in Japan and what made the system so unique while trying to connect the dots of four types of problems, hoshin kanri, and other areas. 

Josh kicks off the podcast by asking Art and Mark to examine in detail troubleshooting — the most frequent and possibly most misunderstood type of problem-solving. A good troubleshooting environment involves quickly attacking known problems with known solutions to get operations back to normal (i.e., how to mitigate issues that prevent achievement of near-term goals). They also review troubleshooting’s relationship with the other types of problem-solving and the “flavors” of the types — gap from standard (how to prevent a problem from recurring by eliminating its underlying root causes), target condition (kaizen to elevate the standard), and open-ended (innovations and breakthrough thinking) — as well as the complex interaction of the four types with daily management and hoshin kanri. 

Learn more about a lean management system and the connection between problem-solving, daily management, and hoshin kanri: lean.org/LMP

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Sandrine Olivencia, author of Build to Sell: The Lean Secret to Crafting Irresistible Products, co-founder of Taktique Academy, and partner at Lean Sensei Partners. This is the second time Sandrine has joined us on the WLEI podcast, and in this particular conversation, we discuss why lean product and process development principles are crucial for entrepreneurs in today’s rapidly shifting market demands. 

The conversation explores:  

• How Sandrine found her way to lean and agile and how early work by lean product and process development thinkers Al Ward, Jim Morgan, Durward Sobek, and more have influenced her career trajectory; 

• How to get started when it comes to building a product-led organization, in part by moving from “feature frenzy” to a focus on value-driven, performance-based product development; 

• What startups should be thinking about if they want to make it past those very challenging first five years;  

• Where leaders tend to stumble with lean product and process development in tech; 

• What excites Sandrine most about the future and the kinds of products and companies that inspire her. 

Learn more about lean product and process development at https://www.lean.org/explore-lean/product-process-development/

Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer of Strategy, and Karen Gaudet, LEI Senior Coach, talk with Michael Duncan, President of Viwinco, about his efforts to establish a robust daily management system in the family-owned window and door company and connect it to the company’s hoshin kanri process.

Michael grew up in the company and, after rising into leadership, spearheaded the company’s transformation, implementing lean principles and tools while developing people. This enabled the company to more efficiently manage its challenging business model of customized products, varying demand, short lead times, and no finished-goods inventory. Success via lean recently has been enhanced by developing an improved strategic planning process and supporting it with a daily management system that develops a regular cadence and structure to elevate problems to manage performance, including achievement of KPIs and progress made with strategic projects. Learn more about how LEI can help your organization.

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with product leader and angel investor Phil Green about product-centered entrepreneurship and what it takes to truly create value for customers. Since 2020, Phil has been the senior advisor for B2B and technology at Harvard Innovation Labs. Before the i-lab, Phil spent over 30 years working at various startups as a CEO, COO, CTO, and a product manager.

The conversation explores: 

• Some of the most exciting products and services Phil has seen come out of Harvard’s entrepreneurial community
• What it takes to create a solid MVP (minimum viable product)
• Why Phil teaches “minimum valuable process,” not just “MVP”
• The different types of challenges teams face in large, distributed organizations versus smaller startups when it comes to lean thinking
• How to focus on lean and agile principles rather than rituals to move fast while staying responsive to customers and market demands

Learn more about lean thinking and practice at lean.org

Josh Howell, LEI president, explores the topic of daily management with Joe Seestadt, Director Lab Outreach for Bronson Healthcare and a faculty member and coach with LEI. Joe trained as an industrial engineer and worked in manufacturing, and has now spent some 18 years in healthcare. He was instrumental in developing the Cleveland Clinic’s daily management system, which has been recognized across the industry.

Joe is unique in that he is both a lean guide to others as well as an owner and user of a system and concepts that he’s helping individuals grasp as they try to transform their own organizations. He describes the importance of daily management as having the ability to know every day if you are ahead or behind, having a mechanism to solve problems at a daily beat in any type of operation (healthcare, service, or manufacturing), and as a means to bring strategy/hoshin kanri to fruition. 

Josh Howell, LEI president, talks with Dr. Sarah Womack, an eight-year veteran of Toyota and author of Toyota’s Improvement Thinking from the Inside. Sarah discusses how her transformation and that of other individuals within Toyota collectively contributed to organizational improvements and high performance. Her Toyota experiences exponentially advanced her learning and today enable her to successfully impart lean values and mindsets to organizations that are very unlike Toyota. Learn more about lean thinking and practice at lean.org

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we speak with Steve Spear, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and associated faculty member at Adriane Labs of the Harvard School of Public Health. Spear is also author of The High-Velocity Edge and Wiring the Winning Organization and principal of SeeToSolve.

The conversation explores: 

• Stellar examples of product development innovation (and the learning cultures that made these achievements possible)
• What Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, DevOps, and more schools of systems thinking and management all have in common
• What business and product leaders across hardware and software can learn from each other
• Key ideas and core principles you should take away from his latest book 
• What kind of leadership Steve believes is needed now and what good leadership looks like in practice, given all of the organizational challenges companies face today

In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Amy Smith, Founding Director of MIT’s D-Lab, an innovative university-based program in international development and a senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Cynthia E. Smith, Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and author of Design for the Other 90%. Cynthia speaks about design as a catalyst for change and what it means, as she says, to be in “the collective work of building capacity and agency in communities across the world.”

In this edition of The Management Brief, Mark Reich sits down with Isao Yoshino, a 40-year veteran of Toyota and a driving force behind the company’s success with hoshin kanri. Yoshino shares the impact that hoshin kanri and A3 problem-solving has had on him professionally and personally.

Key takeaways include:

· Multiple roles over four decades at Toyota shaped Yoshino’s management beliefs and career.

· Yoshino discusses working directly with Mikio Sugiura, who was instrumental in developing Toyota’s hoshin kanri process.

· Hoshin kanri can positively impact a company as it has Toyota, notes Yoshino, but it’s not without a few challenges.

· Delivering bad news first and an earnest desire to learn from failures were commonplace for Yoshino and Toyota executives and fostered the improvement mindset that still thrives in the company today.

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, we sit down with Mark Dolsen, President of TRQSS, a seat belt manufacturer that supplies Toyota and other automakers in North America. Mark shares insights into TRQSS's lean journey and the critical role of frontline supervisors in driving continuous improvement. 

Key takeaways include: 

• TRQSS has evolved its lean practices over decades, starting with the influence of Japanese coordinators and later adopting TWI principles. 

• The company's "TPS for Team Leaders" program focuses on developing supervisors' capabilities in areas like flow, standardized work, and kaizen. 

• TRQSS's quality management approach is rooted in the principle of "mizenboushi" — proactively maintaining process conditions to ensure good parts every time. Read more about how TRQSS applies mizenboushi in this paper.

• Mark's leadership philosophy emphasizes coaching, teaching, and empowering employees to make decisions and contribute to the company's lean culture. 

In this edition of The Management Brief, Mark Reich sits down with Geoff Miller, CEO of Grand Rapids Chair, to discuss his company's lean transformation journey. Geoff shares how the adoption of hoshin kanri and A3 problem-solving has helped the company maintain strategic focus and build organizational capability. Geoff offers a candid reflection on his leadership transformation, underscoring the importance of perseverance and continuous learning, even in the face of significant disruption. 

Key takeaways include:

• Hoshin Kanri enabled Grand Rapids Chair to build stability in critical daily management measures like safety, quality, and reliability.
• The catchball process for cascading strategic goals fostered alignment and buy-in across the management team.
• A3 problem-solving empowered employees across departments to tackle large, complex challenges and drive meaningful change.
• Sustaining a lean transformation requires personal commitment from leadership to model the problem-solving mindset and tools.
• Developing human capability in problem-solving is essential for realizing the full benefits of lean.

In this edition of The Management Brief, LEI President Josh Howell sat down with Charlie Murphy, Senior Vice President at Turner Construction, to discuss the company's remarkable lean transformation journey. Charlie shares how the organization leveraged core lean principles and practices to drive a dramatic improvement in safety performance and build a culture of continuous improvement.

Key takeaways include: 

• Turner's safety performance improvement, from a recordable incident rate of 5 per 200,000-man hours down to under 1, driven by fact-based problem-solving and a rigorous management system.
• Building problem-solving capability and implementing hoshin kanri connected high-level priorities to daily problem-solving and operational improvements.
• The shift from "relentless" to "co-learning" safety incident reviews fostered a more collaborative, fact-based approach to addressing safety issues.
• Standardizing daily management systems and empowering middle managers were critical steps in scaling lean practices across Turner's 1,500 active projects.

Subscribe to The Management Brief for free.

In the latest edition of the Design Brief, we sit down with Jay Hill, the Vice President of Advanced Technology at GE Healthcare, to discuss the company's approach to product development in the complex healthcare technology space.  

Jay offers insights into:  

• GE Healthcare's deep engagement with clinicians at all stages of product development, from needs identification to prototype evaluation.  

• The "lead program integrator" role and its importance in managing the integration of complex, multi-disciplinary healthcare systems.  

• GE Healthcare's structured approach to monitoring technology trends and matching them with clinical problems to inform their product roadmap.  

• Exciting applications of AI in healthcare, from automating workflows to supporting clinicians in making better diagnostic and treatment decisions.  

• Advice for medical students and early-career clinicians on embracing the evolving relationship between their practice and advancing technologies. 

In the latest issue of The Management Brief, host Mark Reich sits down with Marcia Brey, the Vice President of Logistics at GE Appliances.

Marcia shares her extensive career journey at GE Appliances, spanning roles in design, customer service, distribution, quality, and eventually leading the company's lean enterprise transformation. 

Key points discussed include:

• Marcia's initial exposure to lean principles like value-stream mapping and kaizen events while leading the warehouse network.

• Her transition to plant manager of a complex refrigeration factory and the importance of daily management and engaging the team to solve problems.

• The creation of GE Appliances' lean enterprise team in 2016 to implement new processes and drive strategic alignment using hoshin kanri.

• How hoshin kanri is used to cascade objectives, enable cross-functional collaboration, and develop leadership skills through reflection.

• Marcia's advice for leaders struggling to implement strategy and daily management systems, emphasizing the need to start somewhere and continuously improve.

• Her current role in logistics and the opportunities to further explore customer problems and strengthen the value stream by breaking down traditional organizational boundaries.

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we're joined by Dr. Carlos Frederico Pinto (aka Dr. Fred), a medical oncologist with over 30 years of experience leading transformative changes in cancer care. Dr. Pinto shares insights on using lean thinking to dramatically improve patient outcomes and access to care.

Some highlights from the conversation include:

• How redesigning patient pathways allowed breast cancer patients to receive all necessary tests and treatments in a single visit. 
• Dr. Fred's current work with public healthcare institutions in Brazil reducing wait times for prostate cancer patients from over 1,000 days to less than two weeks.
• The importance of daily management and developing leaders with the right behaviors and values to drive lasting change.
• Dr. Fred's upcoming book, "The Systems Architect Manifesto," which shares his insights on organizational transformation.

In this episode of the WLEI Podcast, we sit down with Jose Ferro, the founder of the Lean Institute Brasil and co-author of LEI's new book Daily Management to Execute Strategy: Solving problems and developing people every day. José shares his insights on how companies can effectively connect their high-level strategy to frontline operations and the importance of developing a problem-solving culture. 

Some key takeaways from the conversation include:

• Daily management is a structured process to align an organization's strategy with its day-to-day work.

• Solving problems at the operational level is fundamental to an effective daily management system and developing people.

• Leader behavior can enable effective problem-solving and destroy effective problem-solving.

• A clearly defined help chain connects frontline daily management to managerial-level daily management and provides systematic support to frontline operations.

• The approach to implementing daily management should be tailored to each organization's specific needs and context.

Order your copy of Daily Management to Execute Strategy: https://www.lean.org/store/book/daily-management-to-execute-strategy-solving-problems-and-developing-people-every-day/

Discounts up to 20% off are available for large orders.

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, we speak with Karen Khachikyan, CEO of Expper Technologies, and Mineh Badmagharian, the clinical and product development leader. They shared the remarkable story behind Robin, a robot designed to provide emotional support and comfort to pediatric and geriatric patients in hospitals and care facilities.  

What stood out most was the team's relentless focus on truly understanding their end users - the children, seniors, and medical staff who interact with Robin. Insights from the discussion include: 

• The importance of understanding your customer. The team spent years carefully observing how children reacted to different iterations of Robin, refining details like the robot's age and favorite animal to create a personality kids would love. 

• Integrating the technical and clinical needs. The two teams weren’t always aligned, but they found creative solutions by keeping the user experience as the north star.  

• Understanding the human element of robotics. - Perhaps most inspiring was the team's deep personal connection to Robin, treating it as a beloved member of the family, a sentiment shared by nurses and patients with access to a Robin. 

Before listening, check out videos of Robin in action.

• https://youtu.be/FwZuUkjoj4M
• https://youtube.com/shorts/fkBHxs2aUA4?si=mK2eKW_5lL8vyBw1 

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, we explore the LPPD principle: Understand Before You Execute. Too often, companies commit to a product design before assessing their customers’ needs, leading to development churn and failed products. The conversation examines how to avoid that trap by precisely identifying customer needs before development and features a case study of a company that did just that.

However, people did not engage in this conversation. Artificial intelligence, specifically Google’s NotebookLM, generated the entire discussion based only on this six-minute video clip. The result is astonishing.

Tune in and share in the comments what you thought of the conversation.

In this episode of WLEI Podcast, we welcome Sandrine Olivencia, author of Build to Sell and expert in applying Lean principles to software development. Sandrine shares her journey from waterfall to Agile and eventually to Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD), which she sees as a more holistic and sustainable system for building great products and lasting businesses. The conversation explores: 

• The importance of Gemba and why leaders at all levels need to stay closely connected to customers and the problems they face. 

• How Lean thinking can help companies avoid “feature frenzy mode” and maintain a clear focus on delivering customer value. 

• Why even mature tech companies often struggle to develop people and the steps leaders can take to build a culture of problem-solving and continuous improvement.  

• Practical advice on where to start implementing Lean principles, including Sandrine’s three key strategies for building a more product-led company.  

• The limitations of so-called “founder mode” and “manager mode” and how an alternative “Lean management mode” addresses the shortcomings of both. 

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, we speak with Regis Megina, a software industry veteran who has undergone a journey from Agile to Lean. Regis shares insights on:  

• How he transitioned from early frustrations with waterfall development to embracing Agile and Extreme Programming 

• The challenges he faced in spreading these new ideas, and why he ultimately sought a deeper understanding of Lean principles 

• Regis' current work applying Lean Thinking to startups and scale-ups, including creating educational materials and training programs 

• The importance of continuous learning, technical mastery, and developing team capabilities - rather than just focusing on process improvement tools. 

For more insights into Lean Thinking applied to product development, subscribe to the Design Brief newsletter. 

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, LEI speaks with prolific author and business leader Art Byrne. 

During the discussion, Art shares his decades-long journey leading lean transformation, from running kaizen events with the first wave of ex-Toyota consultants in the US to leading manufacturer Wiremold to record profitability.

For a decade, Art wrote 100 "Ask Art" columns, answering the lean community's most pressing questions. He has compiled the best of those into a new book, The Lean Turnaround Answer Book: 40 Years of Lean Observation. 

Our conversation covered: 

• The transformative impact of implementing the Toyota Production System to improve efficiency, quality, and customer service.
• The critical role of leadership and involving top executives in driving successful lean transformations through setting stretch goals and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• The challenges of traditional accounting methods in a lean environment and the need to transition to lean accounting practices.
• The strategic advantages of reducing setup times and lead times in manufacturing, allowing companies to gain a competitive advantage.
• Practical insights from the author's experience writing a book to provide answers to common questions about implementing lean principles across various industries.

In this episode of the WLEI podcast, LEI speaks with software industry veteran Robert Martin. Robert is one of the original signers of the Agile Manifesto and the author of several influential books, including Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. 

During the conversation, Robert shared insightful perspectives on some of the biggest challenges facing software development today. From the demographic problem of perpetual inexperience to his pioneering approach to development dubbed "software craftsmanship" that aims to promote quality work, Robert covered a wide range of issues impacting the industry. Some other topics discussed include:

• Balancing speed and quality in development and emphasizing a quality-first mindset.
• The benefits of test-driven development, such as providing freedom to change code safely.
• AI's potential impacts and appropriate uses of AI-generated code.

Be among the first to get the latest insights from LEI's Lean Product and Process Development (LPPD) thought leaders and practitioners. This podcast was delivered to subscribers of The Design Brief, LEI's newsletter devoted to improving organizations' innovation capability. It is the second of four in a series focused on craftsmanship or pursuing perfection in products and people. Craftsmanship embodies simple elegance, precise execution, and a deep, personal connection to work that transforms both the creation and the creator.