Lean Thinking Won’t Make Your Organization More Equitable
There’s a conversation happening about whether or not lean thinking and practice helps make work more fair and equitable. This matters to me because as a queer woman who has worked to create space for more diversity (and just diversity of thought) in the lean community and who has aimed to adapt Lean for non-manufacturing and in new contexts, it feels important to discuss what Lean is and what it isn’t… what it can do and what it can’t.
Lean thinking and practice is a way of thinking about and designing work that puts the emphasis on creating value, minimizing waste, and solving problems (with methodical processes for solving problems). It’s not a panacea; it’s not a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging strategy; and it’s not a way of showing up in more human ways in the moment with another person who is experiencing oppression. If anything, while Lean encourages people to show much more care for each other in terms of respecting everybody’s work, it is primarily a way of putting aside emotion to create healthy distance from the work at hand and simply look at the “flow of value” from the organization to the customer (aka community member).
It can be hugely helpful in this way, as I’ve learned over the years from my teachers and colleagues at The Lean Enterprise Institute and Lean Transformations Group, so that you can just look at what is currently happening and the work to be done. Why? It is difficult to look at the problems in the design and delivery of work without resorting to blame. Most people care a great deal about their work, and 9x out of 10, it’s not one individual’s fault that an error (big or small) happens. Problems are usually a result of poorly designed processes based on too little information or the wrong information or little to no intentional process design. This is why people need better ways of designing work, improving work, problem solving, thinking systemically, communicating/hearing each other, and thinking together.
Lean thinking helps you focus on these things in partnership with your fellow team members. It can help you focus on collecting just the facts and see “problems as treasures” (as Toyota says) because the minute you can see a problem, you have a chance to fix it. This approach to problem solving certainly has the potential to contribute to teams’ well-being and health, but by itself, it does not advance gender or racial equity.
In her piece, “Why Don’t We Just Call Agile What It Is: Feminist,” Hannah Thomas Uose explores some of these ideas, making connections between Lean and Agile to feminism and other movements for justice. About the creators of the Agile manifesto, she writes:
“The men who wrote the manifesto are unclear on whether they invited any women. Even so, the thing I notice from both the manifesto, the accompanying principles, and the fact that these 17 men call themselves ‘organizational anarchists’ is that what they came up with is inherently subversive, anti-authoritarian, and feminist. There is an emphasis on self-organising, collaboration, experimentation, welcoming change, and building high-trust and supportive relationships.”
Here’s to high self-organization, collaboration, experimentation, etc. The problem is, you can have all of these things and the organization can still treat people unfairly in other ways.
- A team can talk about the lean idea of “respect for people” and respect the frontline worker in terms of respecting their work and contribution of “value”, but not their leadership or personhood. And that organization can be all white or 95% white, with a 95% white male leadership team and Board.
- You can have some diversity on your team and practice lean principles in ways that boost collaborative problem solving, but shy away from or ignore the really hard work of listening to womxn when they speak, following the leadership of Black and brown leaders (not just including them into existing structures and teams), putting an end to discriminatory behavior, and designing for accessibility.
- Leaders can still decide to not pay people a living wage or listen to people when they say they are hurting (or see another person/community hurting).
As an editor, perhaps what I appreciate most about lean thinking is all of the ways it helps information and knowledge flow. As the late systems thinker Donella Meadows wrote (without using the word lean):
“A decision maker can’t respond to information he or she doesn’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that 99 percent of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of faulty or missing information… You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information.”
This is where I believe Lean can potentially help elevate meaningful work around equity: giving people a way to look at what is happening or what’s been happening systemically forever. This truth telling may help create change and boost accountability. As my colleague Jim Luckman says, “lean thinking has the ability to shift mindsets to fit a new set of values, policies, and practices.” Lean can also make new (or old, repeatedly ignored and discounted) knowledge and new thinking more visible.
I’ve aimed to use lean thinking this way for 10+ years now, exploring and applying these ideas more recently with CV Harquail, Gwendolyn VanSant, and Adrian Gill. I’ve used A3 thinking and coaching to help teams do knowledge management, develop new programs, solve problems, and work more effectively. The goal in these instances is to help teams see/remember what they know, think together, and use a process for problem solving (Plan, Do, Check, Act), which helps folks focus on facts and run experiments, which can (sometimes) make it easier for individuals and teams to do courageous work around advancing equity. “Albeit not a direct diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy, A3 thinking not only aids in problem solving and program development (with efficiency built in), it establishes goals and benchmarks progress,” VanSant says. “In strategies that create more safety and belonging, applying lean thinking becomes an invaluable tool for results-based accountability like no other tool or process I’ve encountered.”
But nothing about lean thinking itself is inherently just or equitable. Working to make an organization more equitable is its own highly valuable work, and it is almost always under-resourced, questioned for its value, and/or invisible. Unsurprisingly, this work typically falls on womxn and folks of color.
In the way that it helps us understand systems, think systemically, and move work along more effectively, lean thinking can help organizations become more equitable by design and in practice, but like anything, it only gets teams so far. Similarly, lean strategy is only made stronger by designing for equity with or without lean tools.
As my colleague Adrian Gill, Brand Experience and Creative Director at Harvard Innovation Labs, says, “At the end of the day we all want to have a positive experience creating successful outcomes at work. Lean is part of this, but it can’t create alignment around new initiatives (DEIB-related or not) without teams first getting aligned on values… We need to use our minds to create effective systems and processes, but we also need heart.”
