No Time To Waste

by LeanTeams

On Purpose: Clarify your organisation's ‘True North’

The best True North statements are short, inspiring, and easy to remember. it’s the ideal state you’re striving for.

Purpose → Why do we exist? People → What kind of culture and behaviours do we want? Process → How do we serve customers without waste?

A Lean Canvas can help simplify your business model onto one page.

Hoshin Kanri (Policy Deployment) → can translate your vision into measurable objectives, cascaded down into team goals and daily improvement activity.

Without a clear direction, improvement efforts are meaningless; Kaizen must be tied to vision

Masaaki Imai - Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success (1986). Tweet

Try this:

Can you explain your business model on one page? Download the Lean Canvas and complete it with your team. Identify one weak box (e.g. metrics, channels) to improve the current model.

On Process: See the waste in your organisation

Who decides what’s waste?
Not the business — the customer.

Overproduction is the classic example: creating reports, products, or services nobody asked for. The fallout? Files and stock piling up, needing storage, updates, rework, handling, and processing. Each step adds delay and cost — with zero customer value.

Waste is anything other than the minimum amount of equipment, materials, parts, and working time absolutely essential to add value to the product.

Jeffrey Liker - The Toyota Way (2004) Tweet

Try this:

This week, choose one process you do every day and break it down step by step. For each step, ask yourself: “Would a customer pay for this?” If yes, it’s value. If not, it’s waste. Every one of your team can spot at least one type of waste — such as waiting, overproduction, or extra motion — and take one small action to reduce it.

On People: Building psychological safety in teams

Words must align to actions.

Having company values without reinforcing behaviours is like having laws with no enforcement — meaningless in practice.

You can't talk your way out of a problem you behaved your way into.

Stephen Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (2006) Tweet

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