No Time To Waste

by LeanTeams

On Purpose: Linking purpose to daily work

One way to keep organisational purpose alive is through regular team Stand-Ups — no more than 10/15 minutes, ideally daily depending on team size.

The team stands together to share ownership, learning, and any issues, and to agree on the support needed. This rhythm connects strategy to daily work, celebrates improvements, ensures alignment, and develops both individual and team performance.

The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.

As often attributed to Masaaki Imai (e.g. in SupplyChainToday and Prosci) Tweet

On Process: Make Work Visible with Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) or Customer Journey Mapping is a simple but powerful way to see how work really flows from customer request to delivery.

By mapping each step — and noting the time it takes, the handovers, and the delays — teams can separate value-adding activities from waste.

A good VSM makes the invisible visible: bottlenecks, rework loops, and waiting times jump off the page.

More importantly, it creates a shared picture that everyone can understand, so the team can prioritise improvements that cut lead time, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience.

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.

W. Edwards Deming The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education, 2nd edition, MIT Press (1993) Tweet

On People: Empowering people to improve their own work

Recognise that the real experts are the people who do the job every day. They know where the frustrations, delays, and workarounds live, and they often already see better ways of doing things.

Leaders create the conditions for improvement by giving people time, simple problem-solving tools, and permission to experiment.

When staff are trusted to question how things are done — and supported to test ideas safely — improvements are faster, more practical, and more likely to stick.

This approach not only delivers better results, it also builds pride and ownership, because people see their own expertise shaping the future of the organisation.

The person doing the job knows far more than anyone else as to the best way of doing that job, and therefore is the one person best fitted to improve it.’ Allan H. Mogensen often put it in his Work Simplification programs.

Allan H. Mogensen often put it in his Work Simplification programs Tweet

Try this:

Spend 15 minutes at the Gemba with one team member — ask “What’s one small thing that makes your work harder than it should be?”. Listen to understand, then commit to either supporting their improvement idea or removing the barrier they identify.

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