regards, craig larman Craig/Bas: Thanks so much for posting this primer.  I found it thought provoking and an accurate de_script_ion of Lean but not very insightful into why Lean works or how to transition to Lean.  No doubt if you get great people trained in working together you will have a better company.  But the question is, how do you go from where you are to there? I believe you may be misjudging those who* … over the years there have been some ostensibly `lean' promoters that reduced lean thinking to a mechanistic superficial level of management tools such as kanban and queue management. These derivative de_script_ions ignore the central message of the Toyota experts who stress that the essence of successful lean thinking is `building people, then building products' and a culture of `challenge the status quo' continuous improvement. * I am not sure if I am included in with these folks, but suspect I am – I've asked you earlier to clarify this on this list but have received no reply. Let me explain how our focus on Lean-Thinking is not an over-simplification of Lean at all.  First and foremost, many of us state up-front that the basis for Lean is Deming.  Deming's system of profound knowledge has respect for people as its foundation.  Hence, respect for people is also our foundation.  But Deming goes further than respecting people.  He demonstrates how you can help people by attending to the systems in which they work.  Respecting people is nice.  Helping people by improving their workplace and therefore their work is respecting people in action. Taichi Ohno, the man acknowledged with implementing TPS, calls the two principles of Lean Just-In-Time and Autonomation.  Both of these are geared towards removing waste.  He doesn't mention respect for people, because that was the foundation on which he worked (like air to the birds, water to the fish) and was therefore understood.  I would suggest Lean is a combination of people and systems and that if one works on one without the other, one misses the essence of Lean entirely. This is especially true when one has to transition to Lean. I am not an academic so knowing what people should do has little value to me unless there is a transition path for them to get there. I remember my attendance at a Scrum Gathering years ago – several years into being a Scrum trainer/coach but just as I was getting into Lean software.  Throughout the gathering everyone was speaking about the importance of trust and respect – and bemoaning the lack of it in their companies and the industry in general.  I remember thinking that trust and respect was good, even essential, but you couldn't wait until you got it to take action.  If you did, you'd never get started.  The only problem was everyone seemed to think you needed it to make Scrum work.  I started asking – what could you do without trust and respect that would increase both our effectiveness and the levels of trust and respect? The answer?  Proper action. Unfortunately, at the time, I hadn't read David Mann's book – Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions (actually, his book didn't exist at that time). In his book, Mr. Mann describes how management actions can be used to modify the culture of an organization: * Should a company target its culture in its efforts to transform its production processes and all the positions – high and low – associated with it? It is tempting to answer: Yes! But that would be a mistake.* *Culture is no more likely a target than the air we breathe. It is not something to target for change. Culture is an idea arising from experience. That is, our idea of the culture of a place or organization is a result of what we experience there. In this way, a company's culture is a result of its management system. The premise of this book is that culture is critical, and to change it, you have to change your management system.* *So, focus on your management system, on targets you can see, such as leaders' behavior, specific expectations, tools, and routine practices. Lean production systems make this easier, because they emphasize explicitly defined processes and use visual controls. * But, fortunately, I have studied human nature and have a background in Deming from the 80s. I was confident that a focus on improving the system one was in would improve their work and work environment. This was when I jumped into Lean Software fully – and got more insights into how to do this and no longer had to rely on just my instincts and intuition. I tend to focus on the actions that Lean suggests one takes not because I believe that is all there is to Lean but because that is where an organization has to start.  By taking actions _base_d on Lean-Thinking, one positions teams to be coachable by their managers.  Lean creates transparency into how teams work – allowing managers and team members to work together. Lean provides a transition to an organization creating a culture of management and individuals working together.  One where both people are respected and the organization is effective.  The two go together. Continuous process improvement implies that there is something to continuously improve.  This, of course, is the work a team does – either in manufacturing as on the floor of a Toyota plant, or in software development in the developers' cubicles or open space. Ultimately, you must get to continuous process improvement to be doing anything remotely similar to Lean. But Deming, which underlies the Toyota way, says one must focus on the system that people work in. This system lies on a body of knowledge that must be understood.  The team's standard work is how they translate the principles that drive their system into the practices that best fit their particular situation. At the Lean-Kanban conference, experience report after experience report demonstrated that teams that were focused on well-defined workflows transitioned to continuous process improvement significantly faster than one would normally expect.  In particular, after Chris Shinkle's experience report where he humbly remarked that the team really hadn't done that much, David Anderson commented that all they had done in six months was achieve continuous process improvement – something equivalent to CMMI level 4. No small achievement. The beauty and elegance of Lean is that it is neither flow / pull management on its own nor is it respecting people / continuous process improvement on its own. Rather it is the integration of both.  This is a revolutionary idea, the heart of which is Deming.  Having teams develop their own method of working which is _base_d on systemic thinking opens the door both for their own improved learning and for management to assist them in this process.  It creates transparency into their work – enabling themselves and management to see, assist and work together in the development and improvement of this system.  This creates a new paradigm for managers and teams– transcending the micro-management or craftsmanship models previously possible. So, although many of us start with Lean-Thinking, that does not mean we are limiting Lean to this. Lean-Thinking enables Lean-Management and continuous process improvement.   I look forward to your comments. Alan Shalloway CEO, Net _object_ives Achieving Enterprise and Team Agility  __._,_.___ Messages in this topic <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/leanagile/message/3654;_ylc=X3oDMTM1Z2Y... 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