Karen Martin on “Is Lean Dead?” and the Future of Lean Thinking

Joining me for Episode #285 is my friend and colleague, Karen Martin. She was previously a guest on Episode #151, where we discussed her book The Outstanding Organization, and #190, where we discussed her book Value Stream Mapping. Her upcoming book is titled Clarity First: How Wise Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance.

Karen reached out with a provocative question that's easy to discuss, but hard to answer: “Is Lean Dead?” The reason she asked is that she's heard murmuring and read articles that ask “is it time for something new?” or if we're somehow in a “post-Lean” world.

Karen and I explore why some leaders dismiss Lean as ineffective, whether talk of a “post-Lean world” is credible, and what actually happens when organizations declare Lean a failure. We discuss:

• Why short-term thinking undermines Lean and other improvement efforts
• The risks of mistaking tools for the totality of Lean
• How leadership turnover and “flavor of the month” thinking distort Lean's impact
• The difference between superficial training (e.g., Lean Sigma Green Belt) and real capability-building
• Which books, practices, and perspectives provide a truer picture of Lean as a management system
• Why Toyota and other exemplars are still worth studying–and why blind copying is not the answer

Karen also shares how her upcoming book Clarity First builds on Lean principles while making them accessible to leaders who may resist the “Lean” label.

This is not a eulogy for Lean. If anything, it's a reminder that Lean is alive wherever leaders commit to long-term thinking, respect for people, and the hard work of cultural change.

I hope you enjoy the discussion where we explore this question and topic. We'd love to hear your thoughts about this if you'd like to leave a comment here on the post.

You can reach Karen through her website and you can also find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Streaming Player

For a link to use for this episode, refer people to www.leanblog.org/285.

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Topics and Questions

• Is Lean Dead? Are there more people saying Lean is ineffective and we need to try something new?
• “What's beyond Lean?” is something people have asked
• Are the reports of the death of Lean exaggerated?
• Do people try something and conclude it doesn't work?
• Is it about the methodology or the approach they took?
• What are the short-term and the long-term results that are seen and should be expected?
• Who decides what's “right” or “wrong” when it comes to Lean and the approach organizations take?
• An example of a “Lean Sigma” curriculum that doesn't include much Lean
• What books do you recommend for people who are learning about Lean?
• Is it hard for outsiders to see the totality of the Lean / TPS approach?
• Blog posts on “Motivational Interviewing“

PDF Episode Summary

You can download a 4-page PDF summary of this post:

• Low-res PDF (for reading on screen)
• High-res PDF (for printing)

Video of Karen Martin

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Transcript

Mark Graban:

Hi, this is Mark Graban. Welcome to episode 285 of the podcast. It's August 9th, 2017. Joining me today is a friend and colleague, Karen Martin. She is an author, consultant, speaker, whichever order those make sense to put those in.

She has been a guest on the podcast twice before: in episode 151 talking about her book The Outstanding Organization, and she was here again in episode 190 talking about her book Value Stream Mapping. So you can find those episodes in the podcast feed, or you can go to leanblog.org and search for “Karen Martin Podcast.” Today we're talking about a fairly provocative question that Karen brought up and proposed for discussion here in the podcast. Simply put, the question is, “Is Lean dead?”

Or I guess there are variations here: Is Lean dying? Is Lean fading? Can we generalize? If so, are there certain causes or factors here? So it's more of a conversation.

Hopefully, you'll enjoy and find it interesting. If you'd like to share comments on the podcast, you can go to leanblog.org/285. You can find show notes, links to Karen's books, and her website ksmartin.com. And Karen also has a new book we're going to do a podcast about in the coming months. I've had a chance to read an early edition of her book called Clarity First, which is a follow-up to the book The Outstanding Organization. So again, leanblog.org/285 for more information.

And as always, thanks for listening. Well, Karen, it's been three years. It's really good to have you back on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Karen Martin:

Thank you so much, Mark, for having me. Yeah, I couldn't believe it's been that long.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, time flies. We're both busy and doing a lot of interesting things. Can you introduce yourself for listeners who might not know you and your work?

Karen Martin:

Sure. Thanks. So my name is Karen Martin and I'm the president of The Karen Martin Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in Lean management. We also sometimes do non-Lean work when clients don't really want to explore Lean, but we primarily are a Lean boutique consulting firm. Also author of almost five books, one coming out in January called Clarity First through McGraw Hill, and then also behind that is The Outstanding Organization, which is the predecessor to Clarity First, and then three other books–two mapping books, Value Stream Mapping and Metrics-Based Process Mapping, and one on when Kaizen events are an appropriate execution model.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, and we'll do a podcast about Clarity when the new book is due out. So it won't be two or three years between podcasts this time.

Karen Martin:

Good. I like that. Good.

Mark Graban:

To clarify, when you say you do some non-Lean work, you mean work other than Lean as opposed to going in and helping people do bigger batches and slower cycle time.

Karen Martin:

We love to insert waste into our clients' processes and have them lose market share as a result. No, yeah, I'm sorry. What I mean is sometimes people ask for very classic organizational development and operations design, and they don't really want to embrace and adopt a lot of the elements of Lean thinking, which is actually part of why we're talking today–that all organizations aren't adopting all aspects of Lean, and there's a problem with that.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, and we're going to talk about things that, you know, depending on whose judgment of what is Lean, what isn't really Lean, what is non-Lean or anti-Lean. Those are some of the things we'll get into in the discussion. But you had raised the possibility of talking about the topic today. So I mean, I'll just let you go ahead and frame the discussion and our topic for today.

Karen Martin:

Okay, great. So the title of the podcast is, “Is Lean Dead?” And it's because Mark and I have been noticing on social media there's been increased murmurings from people kind of dissing Lean and making comments about Lean not being effective. And it's time for something new. And there's one guy that's talking about the “post-Lean world,” and there's just so much interesting stuff out there that I thought it would be great to address it directly and head-on.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, and I've seen… I'd be curious to do a search. I think at least for 10 years, I've seen articles or people talking about what's, quote-unquote, “beyond Lean,” as if Lean is done. But the other thing that comes to mind is celebrity death rumors. And one of my favorite American icons and singers, Willie Nelson, you know, he's 84 years old. I saw him in concert again a couple of weeks ago. He's still releasing albums.

And one of his most recent songs, it goes, “I woke up still not dead again today.” And the song is all about these false rumors that spread on Facebook, fake news about Willie's death. I mean, is there something to this? If there are occasionally rumors of the death of Lean, is it fake news?

Karen Martin:

What do you think? You know, it's a great question. I don't think so. I mean, I don't think that it's fake news. I think it's real that people aren't experiencing tremendous results from Lean and therefore conclude that it doesn't work, and they're guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I also think we have a very short attention span, especially in business. Well, in pop culture. I mean, look at how restaurants come and go. Fashion comes and goes.

And I think people get like, “Okay, what's the next new shiny object that we can hang our hat on?” And, you know, I think those are the two… I'm just thinking off the top of my head right now, but I think those are the two big ones.

Mark Graban:

Well, and we have the opportunity to explore this. We'll give credit to my wonderful podcast listeners who I think at least sometimes listen to an entire 40- or 45-minute conversation. We can delve into that today in a way that gets beyond the limits of a Tweet or a LinkedIn post. So, I mean, you know, tell me… I think you raised two issues there. One is the idea that they try something and conclude that it doesn't work. And that's probably not just an issue with Lean. I probably think of people in healthcare who might have tried accountable care organizations in recent years and maybe too quickly concluded that ACOs don't work. Is it about the methodology? Is it about their approach to it? Is it a lack of patience? I mean, what do you think?

Karen Martin:

I think your point's well taken. There's a lot of “trying” out there that people falsely or prematurely conclude don't work. And you know, we live in the world where experimentation is the center of what we do to help organizations. So experimentation is very good. But what I do see a lot–and this is just even projects that companies attempt, classic project management–they're just not well executed, and so they don't get good results and then conclude it's the methodology versus it being the way that they approached it.

You have to do things the, quote, “right way,” or at least a smart adaptation way, in order for you to expect to get the results that something promises to give. And Lean promises to give a lot. And so it has to be done carefully, thoughtfully, smartly, wisely, et cetera.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, so when you talk about results, I guess there's short-term and long-term results. One thing that's always been kind of fascinating to me, if we look at the framework from Jeff Liker's book The Toyota Way, which is maybe one source of “rightness”–or I think maybe we'll come back later and talk about the question, who decides what's right? But you know, principle one out of the 14 principles there says, you know, to make decisions… I'm paraphrasing… but make decisions based on the long-term perspective, even at the expense of the short-term. That's principle number one. And I've seen recently Akio Toyoda, you know, the family member and CEO, I think was talking about 50-year time frames for decisions.

And I mean, maybe… I would be curious what you think. I cannot remember a single time when somebody reached out and said, “Our organization is struggling with how to be better long-term thinkers. How can we do that?” It's principle number one, but it seems to go completely ignored.

Karen Martin:

Yeah, it's a fundamental problem. I think part of it's because it's 2017 and we live in a chop-chop, bullet-point world. And I think part of it's Wall Street-driven, very short-term results orientation. Actually, I think a lot of it's Wall Street-driven. But even in not-for-profit, I see all the time people having a quarterly or annual timeframe for where they're looking. And yeah, that does fly in the face of making good investments and good decisions that are longer-term results-oriented.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, I mean, you're right, nonprofits, that includes a lot of hospitals. American hospitals are nonprofit. And you know, there's kind of a familiar storyline where a hospital announces layoffs.

Karen Martin:

Right.

Mark Graban:

And you know, the hospital spokesperson or executive says something to the effect of, “We had no choice, we were forced to do this,” which is factually, logically untrue. They chose to lay off people, so they're playing the victim. But it's usually not a case of, “We had to do this or we would have had to shut the doors.” It's often a case of, “Well, our margin was going to be 3% instead of 4%.”

Karen Martin:

Right.

Mark Graban:

And so some of that might come down to short-term performance incentives, even if not imposed by Wall Street. We can ask the board, “Why are you encouraging people to overreact to short-term incentives?”

Karen Martin:

Yeah. So we're very clear with clients when we go in that if there's even a sniff of a layoff on the horizon, we won't start. And we feel that there are two legitimate reasons to lay off. One is if there is a significant and sudden incident or occurrence in the marketplace that makes it so literally, you would have to shut your doors if you didn't do something quickly. And laying off is one of the quickest fixes there is–one of the least effective, but one of the quickest fixes there is from a bottom-line perspective.

And so in healthcare, that's unlikely to ever occur. There's unlikely going to be people suddenly not needing healthcare or not wanting health. So that kind of negates that thing. The second thing is really truly poor performers. But if you're a reasonable organization, then it's unlikely that you've hired a bunch of people that end up being poor performers.

Or if you have, then you need to really look at your whole recruiting and hiring processes. But it's unlikely that you've hired a bunch of dodo birds that aren't contributing to the organization. And if there's not one of those two conditions in place, then, you know, no way. No, no, no. Right.

Mark Graban:

So let's kind of delve in a little bit more when you… One other thing I was going to ask you to elaborate on. When you say, you know, there could be cases where organizations are not getting results in the short term or the long term. What types of results do you think they should be expecting? And are there some results that maybe are unrealistic expectations?

Karen Martin:

Oh, great questions. So actually, I want to start answering that by talking about it in reverse. We actually are working with a client right now that is not looking for business results. That's the first client ever that I've had–we've had–that isn't looking for anything financial at all to come out of it. He is looking 100% for people development, problem-solving capability development.

He believes, very much as do we, that business results will come when you get people engaged deeply and solving problems on a daily basis and all of those things. The only caveat I would say to that kind of very unusual CEO–he's the CEO and Chairman of the Board, by the way–the unusual place that he's at is that I do think that they sometimes think that everything's going to be magical for them with looking at big, strategic, innovative, kind of grand-slam kinds of decisions that are part of what a business should be doing. Not exclusively, by any means, but there needs to be a balance between that little incremental improvement and development that you get from focusing on people and some business needs that are big and really require some major rehauling.

Mark Graban:

But it seems like the things he's asking for fall more into the category of long-term results.

Karen Martin:

Yes. And he is a very long-term thinker. They've had the company for a long time and they plan to have it for a long time. So they're not looking to sell. And you know, that's again, if you have that, if you're in the M&A–merger and acquisition–mindset, or you're looking to just be the darling of Wall Street or whatever, it's just impossible to have that long-term thinking. It flies in the face of long-term thinking.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. So let's go back and maybe talk a little bit more about the rightness or the correctness when it comes to Lean and what it is. And I guess there are two dimensions: what it is and how organizations go about it in their Lean journey. What are some of the things that you would consider to be kind of core correctness about Lean, and maybe you can contrast that to some of the things that you see happening that you might question.

Karen Martin:

Good question too. Alright, so as far as how we view Lean, we do view it as a very comprehensive–both broad and deep–management methodology to get exceptional performance from everybody, from financial performance, people performance, customer satisfaction and delight, and all those things. So in order to get that, it's not a simple fix, it's not a simple transition to getting that kind of “you can have it all” kinds of results. We like to look at it as the people development piece of it, meaning that people who do the work are indeed viewed as the experts of that work by everybody. Not just one leader, by everyone.

And they're actively engaged in improving the work on a regular basis. Great problem-solving capabilities, no matter how big or small the problem might be, no matter how simple or complex it might be. So that whole people development part of it. And then there's the part that's more strategic in how are you positioning yourself in the marketplace? What kinds of products do you really want to provide? What is the compelling need for those products?

And what's the customer really valuing and wanting? I see a lot of organizations that say they do a lot of great strategic work that don't even really produce a valid strategic plan when we go in to start strategy deployment, for example. So the strategy part of it has been less vocal in the Lean community, but it's very much part of how Toyota and everybody else who's been successful with Lean operates. So there's that. Then there's the process design part of it. And I'm going to actually include facilities design, layout, and all those considerations in this as well.

Kind of the more mechanical, technical part of Lean. And that's the part that beginning people–and frankly, some of us in the Lean community–started with only seeing that part of Lean. A lot of people think Lean is just a process design technique, and that couldn't be further from the truth. And that's why they don't get significant results because they're viewing it very narrowly like that. Then there's the whole management practices piece of it.

There's the way leaders lead. The whole notion of going to the Gemba on a regular basis and being humble and having curiosity and learning what obstacles people have in the way, and really getting to know your customers intimately. What do they really value? Don't rely on those net promoter scores. That's not going to tell you really what's going on.

You got to find out what's really going on. So there's that whole intimacy part and the management practices that tie that together with operations. Then finally there's measurement. Organizations are woefully weak in measuring and really keeping the right scorecard and defining “winning” in a way that's healthy for the organization and for the people there and for customers. So that's a lot. But that's what it is, in my view. That's what it is.

Mark Graban:

Yeah, there's… I mean, there's multiple dimensions. What you were describing about people might only see it as one aspect of this… it makes me think of the old story about the blind man and the elephant. Right?

Karen Martin:

Yes, that's in my book. My next book coming up.

Mark Graban:

So how… Well, so on the topic of clarity, I mean, what are some ways that people can try to get clarity if they have either an incomplete view of Lean, which is I think what you were touching on here, versus something that's an incorrect view? How can people go about getting clarity on this?

Karen Martin:

You know, it's a great question because unfortunately, there hasn't been a single book–and it would be a tome if one was written–there hasn't been a single book that really touches on all these elements that make Lean so wickedly effective. I think Jeff Liker's gets closest to it, The Toyota Way gets closest to it than anybody. But these subjects are also meaty in and of themselves that they do require separate books. So you've got Pascal Dennis's wonderful Getting the Right Things Done, which talks about strategy deployment.

And you've got your wonderful book on just the way to apply Lean in healthcare, Lean Hospitals. My book on just one management practice or methodology, Value Stream Mapping. So it's a very complex management system with a lot of different layers. It's impossible… So I think we do need… I think the world is crying for a kind of quick read that executives could really grasp at least the elements of what makes Lean Lean and why it's so effective, that does list all these different areas.

But you have to be an insatiable learner. I mean it's taken me… I started learning Lean in 2000. You know, it's 17 years later and I still… Yesterday I heard… what was it? Oh, it was the way that Katie Anderson was framing good coaching questions. It was on Twitter and she was being a little finger-wagging toward the question “why” and talking about “what” and “how” being the more humility-filled questions. And I use the question “why” a lot in coaching in a non-finger-wagging way. But her point was brilliant.

Mark Graban:

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean I think the question “why” triggers some defensiveness. I don't think, you know, even if the question comes from a place of humility, sometimes people just don't respond well to that word.

Karen Martin:

Well, I agree. And the way I use it–and now I'm about to adjust a little bit seeing Katie's tweet. See, Twitter is valuable!–the way I've always fronted it is, “I want to ask a question ‘why?' And I don't mean this in a judgmental or finger-wagging way. I'm literally curious, why did you opt to do that?” Now that I am rethinking this, there's a much better way to frame that where I wouldn't have to give that caveat. And there's the risk that people won't believe me with that caveat, you know?

But again, you just… if you aren't constantly learning… you know, Lean is just not something you… You know, go back to the Green Belt programs and look at how much Lean you… You don't learn Lean. You don't have a clue what Lean is after you've come through. If that's all you've been exposed to is a Green Belt program, you don't have a clue what Lean really is about.

Mark Graban:

I agree with you there, and I say this to mean, you know, no disrespect–and I know you don't mean it this way–disrespect to the people taking the class. They're trying to learn and do something. But I've looked deeply, looked closely at quote-unquote, “Lean Sigma Green Belt” curriculum, and the Lean content is usually 5 to 10% of the topics. And people tell me that the amount of time spent on Lean is very short, and the topics are often just a couple of tools or something really…

Karen Martin:

Superficial. Value Stream Mapping and Kaizen events. That's what I see a lot. I look at curriculum as well, and that's okay. And I honor and respect people that go to get a certificate because we do live in a world where paper and letters behind your name matter, whether they should or not. It's a whole different discussion.

But they do to a lot of hiring parties. And so I applaud people for wanting to learn, but you just can't stop there. That needs to be like 0.1% of what your full body of knowledge will actually be after you've spent a decade learning this stuff.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. So you mentioned Pascal's book Getting the Right Things Done. Pascal's written a lot of excellent books. A lot, you know, very, I think, very, very readable, whether it's the more textbook books or he's written some business novels. You know, to me, well, it's a fact that he's a former Toyota guy. So to me, that's one filter for a source of correctness or rightness, you know, that he lived that for quite a while. But who are some of the other books that you would recommend to people that you think are good sources of truth on Lean?

Karen Martin:

Well, so I still always recommend The Toyota Way. But I also caveat it with it's not a book that CEOs… unless they're really into process design and operational maturity and organizational maturity. It's a thicker book. It's just a longer read, but it's still, I think, the most thorough book out there on it. I also actually recommend your book Lean Hospitals for non-healthcare clients all the time.

I mean, I said, “I know it says Lean Hospitals. You need to read this book because it's a much quicker read. It's a good, thorough, high-level view of Lean.” So I recommend that. Tracy Richardson has one coming out in a few months called… I hope I don't botch this. I think it's called The Toyota Engagement Equation.

Mark Graban:

Yes, Tracy. Tracy and her husband Ernie, who are both former Toyota people from Kentucky.

Karen Martin:

Right. I've read it and it's phenomenal. And so I think that that book is good. I haven't gotten through Jeff and Karen Ross's–Jeff Liker and Karen Ross's new Lean Service… I don't know what the official title is.

Mark Graban:

The Toyota Way to Service Excellence.

Karen Martin:

Right. So I haven't read through the whole book. But the part that I've been through already looked very good. You know, I actually try to get people to also watch my webinars because I try to cover everything, and I have one coming up on Daily Management in August. So I try to cover everything, and for people who don't like to read, they can just listen and watch.

But you have to watch all of them, you know, or at least a large part of them to be able to start assembling a body of knowledge around Lean. And it's only a one-hour webinar, so you're not going to be building skills by doing it.

Mark Graban:

Yeah.

Karen Martin:

What else? I know I'm missing…

Mark Graban:

I mean, I would add, I think there's, you know, there's at this point sort of the classics, which are maybe the equivalent of classics in literature. The books by Ohno and Shingo, Masaaki Imai's book Kaizen.

Karen Martin:

Yep.

Mark Graban:

I think at this point, you know, Norman Bodek's first books on Quick and Easy Kaizen… you know, sort of part of that direct from Toyota or one degree distilled from Toyota to have a lot of those books. So there was also a generation of books that were, you know, I think one of these different parts of the elephant. You had books on Just-in-Time. You had books on certain Lean tools or concepts that didn't perhaps capture the totality of it. But I mean, I think Liker definitely contributed to this with The Toyota Way. I think Womack and Jones, with their book Lean Thinking, were trying to create a book that would encapsulate some of the totality. And that's been 20 years now since that book was released.

Karen Martin:

Right. You know, I think that Lean Thinking is a wonderful book for someone to really understand what Lean thinking is about. And even I've heard Womack speak and he's admitted that it's not all-inclusive, given what we now know. And when people make derogatory comments about it being not the full picture, I say, “Yeah, but come on, that was in the late… was it the early '90s? Late '90s?” I forget what year that was that came out, but it was when a research team went in and they saw what they saw. They weren't in there for a decade studying Toyota. They were there for years, but not a long time. And our Western minds–I believe this–that our Western minds couldn't comprehend what actually we now know back then.

I just think that it took a lot of taking layers out and trying things and seeing that those aren't successful and say, “Hmm, well, why is that?” and starting to look at Toyota again and again and again. I hear people kind of saying, “Enough with the Toyota.” But you know what? They are still the organization to study when it comes to what an organization could do to truly achieve excellence. They're still my go-to company.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. And I think it's hard as an outsider to see the totality of the Lean approach. I feel like we're still scratching the surface. Every time I meet with former Toyota people or active Toyota people, there's some kind of new layer that gets revealed at some point.

So, yeah, I mean, it's probably tough to encapsulate. This kind of makes me think back to the debate… you know, originally, supposedly Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo were… I think it was just mainly Ohno's comment. They were hesitant to write anything down because they were afraid that that would stop progress, that it would carve things in stone and create permanence. You know, eventually toward or into retirement, they did start writing some things down. Norman Bodek helped them with translations and bringing those books to the U.S. But I think it raises another point. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the difference between learning enough from Toyota that we can then carry forward through our own thinking and experimentation and synthesizing of different methods versus, “Well, we need to learn every little detail at Toyota so we can try to copy them with high fidelity.”

Karen Martin:

Yeah, it's a big question. It's a good question. Well, what we absolutely don't want to do, which many organizations have attempted, is to try to copy Toyota. And I know you've talked about that in your blog posts a fair amount, and we do see that a lot. I see it. This is why I get very worried about benchmarking, is that we took a client recently to another fairly mature Lean organization and we kept preaching, “You're not going to come back and copy things. You're just going to look at what they're doing and look at why they're doing it, ask questions and learn about the thinking behind it, and then come back and now look at your environment and figure out what you need to be doing and what problems you need to solve and all this stuff. And then maybe adapt some of the…” And bam. Copy, copy, copy.

Literally to the management practice we saw, to the tool we saw being applied. It was copy, copy, copy. So it's frustrating. I think that we need to keep reading, people need to keep writing, and we need to keep adapting. I don't know how people feel about this, but The Outstanding Organization, which was my third book, and now Clarity First coming out, which is my fifth book, are both books… I call them “Lean in drag” because I intentionally kept Lean out of the title and the subtitle because there are a number of people out there that are just kind of eye-rolling, “Oh, enough about Lean.”

And I didn't want to scare them off, and I also didn't want organizations that have experienced some bastardized version of Lean and go, “Ugh, that didn't work. I don't want to read that book.” But really what's in my book, Clarity First, is all about the clarity-enabling benefit of the various management practices and to some degrees, some of the tools. But it's mainly a management practice-focused book for leaders and what kinds of benefit there is in operating with greater clarity through these things. But it's all, you know, taken from the Lean playbook, more or less.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. But distilled and restated in a different way.

Karen Martin:

Right.

Mark Graban:

And with your own thoughts too.

Karen Martin:

Right. And for example, with strategy deployment or Hoshin Kanri, Hoshin planning, whatever term you'd like to use for it, I have a very unique homework stage that clients need to go through. Well, actually you went through it with me with a client, and I'm finding it wickedly effective, wildly necessary. And yet Toyota would never do that because they don't need to. They're just a well-oiled machine to begin with. And so they don't need to. So yes, I've definitely adapted a fair amount of Lean practices to be realistic and practical for today's businesses that we're working with, at least.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. So you know, when you talked earlier about results, and maybe we can make an assumption that business leaders, hospital leaders want results short-term and/or long-term, and they may sort of barf on the idea of Lean or different buzzwords or Japanese terms. I get that. But I think, you know, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. If people are asking why they should practice Lean or whatever term we're going to use… I think you raised an interesting counterpoint of, “Well, why would you not do this?” What are your thoughts on some of that?

Karen Martin:

Yeah. So people… if people don't ask, “Well, why do it?” then I will insert, “Why would you not?” Because, and this is getting back to “Is Lean dead?” When I hear this, I sometimes will message people and say, “What's up with this? Why are you approaching this as though Lean is an ineffective methodology? What about Lean is offensive to you?” And they can't answer because there's nothing offensive. And so I don't know, it doesn't make sense to me that people want to just toss something aside when they don't know much about it and they haven't been able to get either an environment that will adopt it correctly or they just are not effective in their own methodology for helping an organization. When it comes to results, I want to be very clear on this.

We definitely work with a lot of clients that have significant financial pressure and they need to get better financial results, and we use Lean management to achieve that. So just saying that now. The way we achieve it isn't through layoffs, it isn't through rapid cost-cutting and ridiculous things. It's a very methodical, well-thought-out, waste-elimination-focused way to get financial results. But there are companies that are bleeding financially and have to quickly turn things around or they will be in dire straits.

Mark Graban:

Or they're in markets that are changing radically and dramatically. Right?

Karen Martin:

Yeah. Or they're in the case of healthcare, they're not able to sustain the losses or the small margins anymore because of a variety of pressures coming from the outside. So you might be able to have a 3% margin for the first 20 years of existence of your hospital and no longer be able to do that. So there are legitimate reasons to reduce expenses and work toward earning revenue. But the way you do that is through using Lean practices, which are longer-term.

They may take a little bit longer to get those financial things. But you also… you can pick a smart project and you can approach it using Lean thinking. And if it's the right project with enough money hanging off of it, you can get a pretty quick hit that has significant… Like if you have, for example, we see software all the time where there's like 40 licenses they're still paying for that no one is using. Well, that's just silly.

I know, it's just silly. And it's super easy to get that money. We see people that have people working overtime, and it's significant overtime, because the process that they're working on doesn't really allow them to get it done within eight hours and they're doing all this rework. Well, you fix that process and the need for overtime goes away. There are ways that you can get quick hits.

But when we work with organizations that have significant financial pressure, it's a longer-term fix that they need and it needs to be permanent. It can't be… That's the other thing why it takes longer is it takes longer to put a band-aid on properly than it is to slap one on. And the band-aid should never come off again until conditions change.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. Well, I think there's this… you know, I think this interesting change process, and this is something I've been exploring and kind of my own continuous learning kind of ideas that come from more of the clinical counseling realm, not engineering. You know, engineering–and I said this, you know, a recovering engineer or a recovering MBA–there's so much emphasis placed on logic, rational facts, argument. And people are far more complex than that. Emotion obviously enters into it. That's not a bad thing. That's just a reality. And I could see executives or leaders saying, “I know we need better results.” But I mean, this is cutting to the chase or it's harsh… “Yeah, but I don't want to change.”

Karen Martin:

Right.

Mark Graban:

So like, “Well, I want better results, but I don't want to do anything differently.”

Karen Martin:

Well, good luck with that.

Mark Graban:

Good luck with that. And you're in trouble that way. Or there's maybe the… I think the different layer where somebody says, “I know I need to think more in the long term. I want to engage all of my employees as the experts in their work to improve.”

Karen Martin:

But…

Mark Graban:

Right. And so then here's the other side of it: “I don't have time. That's too slow, blah, blah, blah. I don't think I can really change.” There's what gets referred to as “change talk”–“you know, I, we need to do better. I want to engage employees”–and then there's the “status quo talk” or the “sustain talk.” And I mean, I think a lot of leaders seem to be like really individually, very, very conflicted. It's not an easy thing to work through. So I'm curious, what are some of your thoughts of… forget organizational change for a minute, but thinking about a single executive, what are some of your thoughts on that level of change?

Karen Martin:

Well, first of all, I have a tremendous affection for and empathy for leaders. I think it is very… I don't think, I know it is very difficult to be a leader in today's environment. There are so many things coming at you and there are so many pressures in business today that it's wickedly difficult to be a leader, period. So I definitely come from a place of empathy and understanding.

And so there's a lot of leader-dissing that goes on out there, especially by junior internal improvement people like, “Ah, you know, this is a CEO, you know…” Yeah. There are people that are in leadership roles that really shouldn't be, for sure. Met a lot of them. But by and large, leaders are very well-intentioned. By and large, they are capable and competent, and by and large have the well-being of the organization at heart and its people. You have to start with that as a place to start. Then you go into a little more about why do they respond the way they do, why do they behave the way they do, what's going on with that. The time one. I get that a lot.

We get that a ton. Like, “We don't have time.” And I basically just kind of look at them and say, “You don't have time not to.” Look at all the amount of time you're wasting solving the same problem over and over and over and over. Who said that?

Mark Graban:

Or Ford. There are lots of similar thoughts about, you know, “If you don't have time to do it right the first time, why do you have time to do it over?”

Karen Martin:

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, so I start from that position. And then this is where… I'm not a big fan, even though I wrote a book on Kaizen events, I'm not a big fan of “Kaizen Event Frenzy” where you use them over and over and over. And I think that's just silly. It's ridiculous. But there is a place for using Kaizen events to help an organization get focus on something that matters a lot and start teaching them how to work cross-functionally and break down silos. And that from a cultural shift perspective, that kind of learning that happens in a Kaizen event–and it's the only environment I have found to get quick learning on the cultural piece–that's when you throw people in a room for two to five days with a very clear target and you help them do it because they're not having to think about their day-to-day work. Sometimes that's the only way to get improvement made and made well. So anyway, so we could talk about each one of those where leaders say “yes, but…” The thing is that I've recently kind of changed my whole approach on the way we work with clients, and I won't work with clients anymore unless the senior-most or someone at least very high up is really excited and has a huge appetite for this, because it just doesn't work well otherwise.

Mark Graban:

So, yeah. Well, and so as we wrap up here–and I think there are maybe other topics we could do a part two of this before doing a podcast on Clarity First–but you know, to wrap up, I think there was that core question at the beginning of the podcast that you raised is, “Is Lean dead?” Before you give your thoughts to wrap up, one thing I looked at today–and today being July 24th when we're recording this–I wrote a blog post looking back, being five years yesterday since my book that I wrote with Joe Swartz, Healthcare Kaizen, was released.

And there's one thing you can do looking at Google Trends where they make data available in terms of search traffic. And so there's a chart in the blog post that has the search term “Lean healthcare.” Now, this could be people looking for other than TPS Lean. This could involve searches for weight loss or something. But right there's kind of a steady increase from 2004 to 2010, and there's a peak in the chart where then it starts declining and kind of levels out. So the question is, was there a point of “peak Lean?”

You know, this could be imperfect data. Like I feel like there are two things happening. There's, well, three things. There are organizations that are still getting started, there are organizations that are still working at it and hopefully they're improving their practice of Lean. And then there are organizations who are giving up on Lean. So is Lean dead? It's hard to generalize, but how would you answer that to wrap up here?

Karen Martin:

Well, and I'd put one more category. There are people… I call it the “camel effect,” where there are humps. Like there's a lot of organizations out there that have great success and then a leader… there's leadership turnover and then Lean kind of dies. And then someone comes back in and they bring it back in, and then it dies. And that kind of… that's both good and bad because the bad is that it gives people that “flavor of the month” feeling. But the good is that they're able to get some more traction whenever a new leader that understands Lean's power comes in and kind of puts new life into it.

So Lean is definitely not dead from my perspective at all. I think that the interest that we see in non-manufacturing clients–and it's every sector… government is just starting to really come to the table and ask for help. Education, financial services has been out for a while, but there's more of that. There's a lot of professional services, legal, accounting, all those types of organizations. Not-for-profits. Energy, the whole energy sector, oil and gas, has been at it for a while, but now wind and all kinds of energy firms are getting into it. Just the sheer ask, the volume of the ask and inquiries is indicating to me that it's not dead. Also in manufacturing, we're getting a fair number of requests from manufacturers that have been at it for a while and they just aren't making continued progre¹ss. And in some cases, we went in and, for example, they still have a very push operation. They haven't even started to use pull production scheduling and pull work through, which is very effective from a waste reduction perspective.

So there are all kinds of things–I mean, assuming that that's the proper solution for the particular problem at hand–but there are all kinds of things that we see happening. So there's nothing that I have seen that doesn't work about Lean that just is like… “what? that doesn't… that's silly.” You know, there's nothing about it that doesn't work. And most of Lean works everywhere. It's a very, very universal management flow. And so I just think that the people that are saying things about Lean being dead and everything are just operating from a place of misunderstanding and lack of… a lack of good experience.

Mark Graban:

And like you said earlier, maybe a lack of patience. And I would say I think it's proven that Lean can be effective in many different settings. That doesn't mean it automatically will be or that it's easy to do. So I think that's the challenge. So I get frustrated when I see a doctor have what might have been a bad experience in one organization, and then they extrapolate wildly and write a journal article saying, “See, Lean doesn't work in healthcare.” That's no more true than looking at a success story and say, “Well, see, everybody will be able to do this.”

Karen Martin:

Well, you know, and that's really risky thinking for a doctor because that's the same doctor that could look at a diagnosis of one patient, see a similar symptom in another one, and go, “Therefore they must have this,” you know? And that's pretty…

Mark Graban:

That's pretty faulty. Or looking, you know, medication was ineffective for one patient. That doesn't mean it doesn't work for anybody.

Karen Martin:

Right, right.

Mark Graban:

So it goes.

Karen Martin:

Yes, so it goes.

Mark Graban:

And I believe this… this is actually sort of a misquote, but as Mark Twain says, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” I think maybe the same is true with Lean.

Karen Martin:

Yeah. I mean, when you look at the people that have beefs with Lean, it's like, well, what could possibly come along? I mean, there are going to be different ways of operating as a business that are going to be improvements, for sure. I mean, we're an innovative world and society, so that's going to keep happening. But what is it that's going to come and replace Lean in terms of there being a wildly different way of approaching… like, when will push ever work? You know what I mean? It's not… pushing work through a system just never works. And so there's just so much fundamental to Lean that there'll be tweaks and little adjustments to it, rightfully so. But the core methodology is very Deming-like, it's very Drucker-like, it's very Tom Peters-like, it's… you know, it's fundamental stuff that's not as commonly practiced.

Mark Graban:

Yeah. Well, so we'll keep at it. I encourage people, listeners, to go check out Karen's website, ksmartin.com. Check out the past webinars. You're doing webinars, you're starting up some new ones, is that right?

Karen Martin:

Yep, I am. August 22nd is our next one on daily management systems.

Mark Graban:

Well, great. So thank you for doing those. Those are free. I encourage people to check those out and to check out Karen's books. You can learn more on her website again, ksmartin.com. You can find her on Amazon, Twitter, LinkedIn, all the usual places. So Karen, great talking to you as always. And thanks again for being on the podcast.

Karen Martin:

Thank you so much, Mark. It was really fun talking with you again. Thank you. Have a great day.

Mark Graban:

You too.

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Let’s build a culture of continuous improvement and psychological safety—together. If you're a leader aiming for lasting change (not just more projects), I help organizations:

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• Apply Lean thinking in practical, people-centered ways

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