John Seddon on lean

John Seddon writes about lean in his two books Freedom from Command & Control and The Whitehall Effect. He writes that the term lean was coined by Womack, Roos and Jones¹ when they wrote The Machine That Changed the World. The term thus came to represent the Toyota Production System as a whole.

What’s interesting is that Taiichi Ohno, the man behind the Toyta Production System, unequivocally warned against using any kind of label on grounds that people then would view it as a ready-made package.² Ohno counselled, never codify method, because it is the thinking that is the key.³ Ohno’s favorite word was understanding. He never explained.⁴ To Ohno, the approach was a way of behaving when faced with problems that needed solving.⁵ The point is that you can only absorb counterintuitive truths by studying and seeing them yourself.⁶

To sum up, the reason lean has become so popular is that it reduced the Toyota Production System to a set of tools.⁷ Tools can be taught and reporting can be institutionalized.⁸ Learning, on the other hand, requires active involvement.⁹

Updates 2016-06-19:
References added to Freedom from Command & Control and The Machine That Change the World.

Notes:
¹ John Seddon, Freedom from Command & Control, (2nd ed., 2005), p. 182.
² John Seddon, The Whitehall Effect, (1st ed., 2014), p. 149.
³ Ibid..
⁴ Ibid..
⁵ John Seddon, Freedom from Command & Control, (2nd ed., 2005), p. 182.
⁶ John Seddon, The Whitehall Effect, (1st ed., 2014), p. 150.
⁷ Ibid..
⁸ John Seddon, Freedom from Command & Control, (2nd ed., 2005), p. 182.
⁹ Ibid..