What does lean look like in everyday life? We launched a simple tweet contest in class to make the students reflect on the course material outside the lecture hall. The response and results were terrific.
Launching the everyday lean tweet contest
What we learned
I thought lean was easy to spot in everyday life. Launching this contest made me realize that it is much easier to spot when something is not lean than when it is lean. It was also clear that it is hard to spot a truly lean process because it requires taking a system perspective and observing value creation over the time dimension. What we can see are individual practices of a lean system. The following lean practices are among the most apparent:
- Safety measures: Personal safety equipment, danger signs, fencing
- Visual management: Labeling, signs, marking, lights, etc.
- Standard operating procedures: One-point lessons, simple work routines
- Poka-yoke: Error-proofing solutions
- 3S (Sort, Set-in-order, and Shine): Labeling, shadow boards, sorted items, general orderliness and cleanliness, etc.
- Quick changeover (e.g., SMED): Quick and seemingly optimized processes
Other lean practices are much harder to spot. Generally, the behavioral aspects of lean can be harder to identify. Take for example “kaizen” or continuous improvement, how do you know if a process is improving? You must observe the process repeatedly over several days, maybe weeks or months. This is well illustrated by the story of the Japanese sensei who was invited to a factory for a shop floor tour. After the visit, the management team eagerly asked, “So, how lean do you think we are?” The sensei responded, “I have no idea; I wasn’t here yesterday…”
Some everyday lean examples
Students who did not have a Twitter account could send a photo and text to the teaching team, and we would post it as @pom_ethz. Below are a few of the excellent contributions we got. While the accuracy of some of them can be discussed, they all show how our passionate students were reflecting on lean content outside of class hours.
A cool thing about Twitter is that it reaches people everywhere. The contest we launched in a classroom in Zurich, received responses from almost all continents. Below are a few of the brilliant entries we received.
The everyday lean winners
The winners? The #everydaylean Student Award went to Julia Burri for her timely contribution to using lean thinking while baking Christmas cookies—an excellent illustration of Muri, Mura, and Muda. While the number of likes was not a criterion for winning, this tweet won that competition, too.
The #everydaylean International Award went to the Twitter-savvy Information, Operations, and Decisions (IDO) Division at Bath University, UK, for a simple tweet about a staircase next to an elevator. What a great way to illustrate issues related to flow versus batch production.
Thanks to all who contributed tweets and ideas! You are challenged; find an example of lean in your everyday life and tweet it with #everydaylean.
More everyday lean
Want more? See all contributions at @pom_ethz, or check out the Twitter profiles of Russel Watkins, Daryl Powell, and Mark Graban.