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production [glossary_exclude]in the post-war period, and the concept is widely applied in industry, as alluded to in this booku2019s <a href="https://leanlogic.online/introduction/">Introduction</a>. <em>Lean Logic</em> applies this frame of reference to the shared aim of rebuilding a[/glossary_exclude] political economy [glossary_exclude]in place of the failing[/glossary_exclude] market.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l181/"><sup>L181</sup></a>rnrn[glossary_exclude]The essence is this. Two ways of making something happen can be compared. One of themu2014top-down managementu2014is to tell people what to do: issue instructions, regulations,[/glossary_exclude] incentives, [glossary_exclude]penalties, targets; exert managerial control; do the thinking for them; give orders, make sure they are carrying them out, check that they have done them right and, if they havenu2019t, tell them to do it again.rnrnThe other way is to set people up with the necessary resources, the[/glossary_exclude] skills [glossary_exclude]and equipment, a[/glossary_exclude] common purpose, and the freedom to apply their judgment. [glossary_exclude]This has advantages: it brings to life the[/glossary_exclude] imagination [glossary_exclude]and tenacity of the people; it transforms the quality of decisions; it is flexible; it sets up conditions for alert[/glossary_exclude] feedback: [glossary_exclude]it makes the needs of the[/glossary_exclude] system [glossary_exclude]quickly apparent, responding to the[/glossary_exclude] local [glossary_exclude]and real, rather than to a distant caricature.rnrnAn example of what we are looking at here is the difference between, on the one hand, policy in which the government tells us what to do and is then obeyed with[/glossary_exclude] sceptical [glossary_exclude]resignation; and, on the other hand, an agreed direction, enabled by a[/glossary_exclude] leadership [glossary_exclude]which knows the difference between management and inspiration, and which makes it clear what the aims are and why they matter, switching on minds, ingenuity and motivation. Those aims are generalu2014e.g., u201cto achieve this long-term reduction in collective energy use, as defined by the Energy Budget, in order to preserve a benign climate. And it is up to you how you do it, though you will get all the help you ask foru201du2014as distinct from detailed instructions backed by rewards and penalties.rnrnThis is regime changeu2014from disjointed regulation to freedom to think, from command-and-control to concentration on the matter in hand. And in lean thinking such a[/glossary_exclude] radical break [glossary_exclude]is called <em>kaikaku</em>; whereas[/glossary_exclude] incremental [glossary_exclude]improvement is <em>kaizen</em>. The switch into lean thinking itself is almost always a radical break, prompted by crisis and reluctantly done. Whether further radical breaks, or creative destruction, are needed after that switch has been made is a more complex matter[/glossary_exclude] (Paradigm, The Wheel of Life).rnrn[glossary_exclude]And yet, in a sense, there is nothing new about lean thinking. It is as old as[/glossary_exclude] politics and community, [glossary_exclude]but it was business that rediscovered it and made it explicit in our own time, so the business context of the principle is still present. This turns out to be quite helpful because business, especially lean productionu2019s home territory of vehicle manufacturingu2014though far removed from post-market communitiesu2014provides a real-life setting for the five rules of the[/glossary_exclude] grammar [glossary_exclude]of lean thinking. <em>Lean Logic</em> suggests its own labels for three of them; the original names are given in brackets:[/glossary_exclude]rnrn&nbsp;rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">1. <em>Intention</em> (Specify value)</p>rn[glossary_exclude]rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The Intention defines what you want to achieve; it is the core around which every activity is organised and given shape. In industrial lean production, the Intention is to achieve u201cvalueu201d, and value is .u00a0.u00a0.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 60px;">[a] capability provided to a customer at the right time at an appropriate price, as defined in each case by the customer.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l182/"><sup>L182</sup></a></p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">So, it works like this. We have a complex intention, and here again there are two ways of thinking about it. One way is to adopt a single task within that wider aim. It might be:</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 60px;">Require all workers to account for and record their time in full.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Now, why is that relevant to the Intention? What value does it bring? You might be able to think of ways in which customers get better value if all workers account for their time in full than if they donu2019t do so. But if, as we shall suppose for this example, it turns out that, after examination of the matter from all angles, it is just a case of bureaucratic form-filling, a tedious encumbrance which takes workersu2019 minds off their jobs, then it should not be there. Lean thinking[/glossary_exclude] travels light. [glossary_exclude]It concentrates on what contributes to valueu2014to the Intentionu2014and does without things that donu2019t.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">It sounds obvious; in action, it isnu2019t. Organisations sustain many practices that are irrelevant to what they are there to do. Sometimes they do so because <em>other</em> practices require it, such as a structure based on top-down command-and-control which requires exhaustive recordkeepingu2014if the recordkeeping were removed, the whole structure could collapse. That could be exactly the[/glossary_exclude] <em>kaikaku</em> [glossary_exclude]event that is needed, but to the people around at the time, it is anything but obvious.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Another possible subsidiary task:</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 60px;">Make sure the handbrakes work.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Here we have identified an aim which at least has some relevance to making cars, though given such prominence that other aims, which are also intrinsic to u201cvalueu201d, risk being forgotten-about: you could end up with cars in which nothing worked but the handbrake. That is a caricature, of course, but it is not a remote one in the context of schools with state-of-the-art security cameras and collapsing discipline, farms with awesome labour-saving equipment and a deteriorating soil structure, urban districts whose smoothly-functioning[/glossary_exclude] social security [glossary_exclude]system underwrites their crime and futility, factories whose milling machines work to a speed and accuracy far ahead of the rest of the systemu2019s ability to keep up, or societies paralysed under the weight of regulation and[/glossary_exclude] control.</p>rn[glossary_exclude]rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">It is, of course, the aim that is wrong. The aim (again, it sounds obvious but it often isnu2019t to the harassed people in nominal command-and-control) should not be simply to produce handbrakes that work, but to produce cars that the customers want. Here, then, is[/glossary_exclude] reductionism [glossary_exclude]in its most characteristic form, where it seems to let us off the need to think about working with the system as a whole, offering instead the satisfaction of concentrating on a simplified, one-item, to-do list. This will only destroy the shared focus on the overall aim and rule out the possibility of discovering a[/glossary_exclude] common purpose.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">[glossary_exclude]And that would in turn opens the way to Advanced Reductionism, where those[/glossary_exclude] iconic [glossary_exclude]single-focus aims multiply, infesting the system like an extended family of clothes-moths. The cost of administering that collection of reductionist targets is high; inconsistencies either paralyse the system or impose a culture of pretence;[/glossary_exclude] creative [glossary_exclude]invention is disallowed. The system becomes rigidly connected up; paralysed into incompetence. There is disempowermentu2014the task imposed on that busy ecology is to labour, but not to ask for any reward save the joy of catching each other out. The only participants who are happy with the situation are the managers, who think that more control is needed. Despite being rushed off their feet, they still canu2019t keep control, so it appears at first breathless glance that they have a point.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">In contrast with all this, the Intention identifies the systemu2019s deep, central, aims. That does not mean that the idea of u201cvalueu201d should be so focused that it itself becomes a reductionist aim, for the u201ccapability provided to a customeru201d may in fact be quite complex and require[/glossary_exclude] reflection. [glossary_exclude]The customer does not, for instance, want the company to go out of business, so she will expect it to make a profit; nor does she want to buy products from a company that pollutes the groundwater. So valueu2014the Intention of an industrial enterpriseu2014can be expressed in terms of responding to the claims of its numerous stakeholders, such as customers, shareholders, staff, the local community and the environment. The u201ctriple bottom lineu201d recognises companiesu2019 obligations in terms of quality and income, and of the environment and social justice too.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l183/"><sup>L183</sup></a></p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">What is non-negotiable is that the enterprise, having decided what it wants to do, must avoid being burdened either by a host of other kinds of urgent commitments which are nothing to do with that Intention, or by[/glossary_exclude] iconic [glossary_exclude]reductionist obsessions which crowd out[/glossary_exclude] encounter [glossary_exclude]with the system as a whole.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">So, value is defined in terms of what the enterprise is ultimately for, and leaves out all the other things it may want to do, unless they are also relevant to that defining purpose. Since an enterprise is a[/glossary_exclude] complex [glossary_exclude]system, many unexpected things may well <em>be</em>[/glossary_exclude] relevant, [glossary_exclude]such as blue skies research and a generous pension scheme, but the connection between them and the Intention needs to be explicit. There may be seductive reasons for being distracted from what you are trying to do, but unless there is a plain reason in support of something being part of the enterpriseu2019s Intention, it should be left out.</p>rn[/glossary_exclude]rnrn&nbsp;rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">2. <em>Lean Means</em> [glossary_exclude](Identify the value stream)</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The Intention is defined, so now is the moment to purge the irrelevantu2014the legacy of stuff that clogs up and weighs down the system. For instance, in the case of a manufacturing companyu2014the original setting for lean thinkingu2014you donu2019t have to maintain and pay for large numbers of supervisors to regulate the front-line workers on the assumption that no one can be trusted to think for themselves; you donu2019t need a large inspection and testing establishment if quality and[/glossary_exclude] judgment [glossary_exclude]are intrinsic to every stage in the process. You donu2019t need arbitrary targets if there is a structure of motivation and[/glossary_exclude] trust, [glossary_exclude]and a widely shared agreement on the Intention. Controls and written reports may in some circumstances be needed, but they do not in themselves add value, so they should be used only if they are essential to value being added. You donu2019t need centralisation if localisation will do as well or (more likely) better.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">So get rid of all the irrelevant activities, elaborations and hassle (collectively known as[/glossary_exclude] <em>muda</em>) [glossary_exclude]which tend to accumulate in organisationsu2014that is, everything that isnu2019t part of the u201cvalue streamu201d. With the shock of[/glossary_exclude] <em>kaikaku</em> [glossary_exclude]comes the sacrifice of much that may have been thought of as important or indispensable, and its replacement by lean-intelligent design, which is in turn followed by[/glossary_exclude] <em>kaizen</em>: [glossary_exclude]incremental improvement, working out how to do what is[/glossary_exclude] necessary, [glossary_exclude]and how to avoid what is not.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">But, at the same time as purging the irrelevant, it is necessary to recruit the[/glossary_exclude] relevantu2014[glossary_exclude]the set of means that <em>is</em> needed. There may be a lot of them, and not all of them will reveal themselves at first. For example, good ventilation is essential to good patient care, as Florence Nightingale discovered, too late for most of her patients at Scutari; soil structure depends on rotations and on the use of natural fertility and compost; a shared[/glossary_exclude] commons [glossary_exclude]requires well-established conditions to be met if its users are to sustain it with the necessary autonomy, understanding and competence. Sifting the lean means from the irrelevant and achieving the needed convergence of focus and[/glossary_exclude] complexity [glossary_exclude]may be difficult; it is an idea which, as is the way of[/glossary_exclude] systems, [glossary_exclude]resists summary. In the end, learning about it means living it: heartbeat and respiration respond faithfully tou2014are pulled along exactly and promptly byu2014what the body needs.</p>rn[/glossary_exclude]rnrn&nbsp;rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">3. <em>Flow</em></p>rn[glossary_exclude]rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Flow keeps the system moving at an even pace. The lean industrial system delivers parts and finished goods as they are needed; it avoids large batches, bottlenecks and storage. There is no waiting time between frantic bursts of work; the system is synchronised. It is also connected up, so that tasks are arranged close to each other and in sequence; the people who are doing them can sort out problems together; their conversation enables their cooperation. There is a convergence of the systemu2019s aptitudes, timings, circumstances and purpose (for wider meanings of flow, see the separate entry).</p>rn[/glossary_exclude]rnrn&nbsp;rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">4. <em>Pull</em></p>rn[glossary_exclude]rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Once the system is connected up, action in one part of it is the cue for fitting responses in adjacent parts. Action and information converge. Everyone involved can seeu2014or recognises that they must work out for themselvesu2014what needs to be done to achieve the Intention; actions are focused responses to the particular.</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This is how the two leading exponents of lean thinking explain it (u201cdownstreamu201d refers to activities nearer the completion of the process; u201cupstreamu201d refers to activities nearer the start of the process):</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 60px;">[Pull is] a system of cascading production and delivery instructions from downstream to upstream activities in which nothing is produced by the upstream supplier until the downstream customer signals a need.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l184/"><sup>L184</sup></a></p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Each activity responds to the needs of the next one along: it is <em>pulled along</em> in sequence. No one has to stand there giving instructions about what to do; participants respond to the demands of the processes downstream from them, whose needs they have to supply. The people involved see what is needed, and engage their brains.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l185/"><sup>L185</sup></a></p>rn[/glossary_exclude]rnrn&nbsp;rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a id="feedback"></a>5. <em>Feedback</em> [glossary_exclude](Perfection)</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Reflect on results; improve the system[/glossary_exclude] incrementally. [glossary_exclude]Check outcomes against Intention. Decide in the light of all this: is what you are trying to do realistic? Where are the gaps? Where is the room for improvement?</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">This is another of the features of lean thinking which seems obvious but which, on close inspection, turns out not to be. You can look at a system from the outsideu2014and perhaps from a little bit aboveu2014and come to the conclusion that it is all working just fine, just as scale models of horrendous proposed city developments, with their tiny figures and tree-lined walkways, tend to look nice litter-free places to live. So, how is this error of misty-eyed complacency to be avoided?</p>rn<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Well, the first rule is: donu2019t look down at it from the sky. It is the people who are inside it who know it, and it is usually the dissidents, complainers and troublemakers who are most perceptive about it. What they are quite likely to see is the ways in which the bits do not join up: they will see the trade-offs: <em>this</em> can only work properly at the cost of <em>this</em>. But complex systems, given[/glossary_exclude] time [glossary_exclude]and feedback, can usually do better than that: instead of trade-offs, with one part having to bear the cost of another, they develop u2018trade-onsu2019, where the service being provided by one part of the system for another is felt as a benefit by both the recipient and by the supplier. In contrast with the exchange relationships of[/glossary_exclude] economics, [glossary_exclude]participants in such complementary relationships benefit <em>directly</em> from the very act of providing the goods and services to other parts of the system. Intrinsic advantage rolls through the system.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l186/"><sup>L186</sup></a></p>rn<p style="text-align: center;">u2014</p>rn&nbsp;rnrnLean thinking is a radical approach. It begins with the break of <em>kaikaku</em>, which may be hard to bear, as it is a profound change from previous assumptions and methods and so is usually resisted until a shock intervenes. The changed thinking that follows, approaching the system in a profoundly new way, moves ahead with incremental improvement and evolution, guided by experience and local detail.rnrnIt is a philosophy with wide application, shaped by the context. But there are significant differences between lean thinking as it is now widely applied in industry and the use that <em>Lean Logic</em> makes of itu2014apart from the obvious one that the industrial case is about extending the flying-time of the[/glossary_exclude] market [glossary_exclude]state and <em>Lean Logic</em> is about bringing it in to land.rnrnOne of the differencesu2014in fact it is more apparent than real, as we shall seeu2014lies in the attitude to standard practice. Industrial[/glossary_exclude] lean production [glossary_exclude]requires its procedures to be carried out to a standard, and in a standard way. Individuals are encouraged to invent and develop new ways, but they are not adopted without testing and widely shared agreement that this is to be the new way of doing it. The reason for this becomes obvious when you think about what it means to introduce, say, a new procedure in an aircraft cockpit. Each cockpit is used by many different pilots and co-pilots, who must be confident that all the cockpits they enter are virtually identical; they need to be able to use the equipment with[/glossary_exclude] certainty, [glossary_exclude]not only as a routine, but in the dark, in an emergency and when tired. Innovations in equipment and practice are constantly introduced in response to pilotsu2019 suggestionsu2014this is key to the debugging process which is needed for every new modelu2014but only after an established routine of evaluation, followed by briefings to everyone involved, and then the change is made to all aircraft of that type at the same time. A similar case for standard practice can be made for any system in which a number of people use the same equipment, where customers want to know in advance what service they can expect, and where u201ctrial and erroru201d has to be strictly contained, and cannot be allowed to escape into actual practice.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l188/"><sup>L188</sup></a>rnrn&nbsp;rnrnFor a[/glossary_exclude] panarchy, or ecology, [glossary_exclude]of communities, matters are more relaxed. The people who work in them and who depend on them tend to stay in the same[/glossary_exclude] place; [glossary_exclude]it does not matter that they donu2019t know much about how things are done elsewhere; trial and error is not only acceptable, it is at the heart of their working practice. Their u201cerrorsu201d rarely have fatal consequences, and experiments can be extended and refined over many years; surviving mistakes; allowing successes to be gradually copied and locally adapted. At the same time, there is a presumption in favour of local practice, allowing a <em>lack</em> of standardisation that would be impractical in an industrial organisation.rnrnAnd yet, a group of independent[/glossary_exclude] communities [glossary_exclude]will still not be without its standard practice. For instance, the <em>principles</em> of[/glossary_exclude] organic [glossary_exclude]food production and[/glossary_exclude] permaculture [glossary_exclude]are widely agreed. It helps, of course, that those principles advocate a high degree of diversity in application, depending on soil,[/glossary_exclude] climate [glossary_exclude]and the needs and numbers of the people involved in it, but the insights of teachers like Eve Balfour, David Holmgren and Patrick Whitefield have universal application, once the local[/glossary_exclude] intention [glossary_exclude]has been settled. These enabling principles are, in a sense, a standard practice; they can be learned.rnrnAnd the same applies to the whole cluster of[/glossary_exclude] practical and cultural [glossary_exclude]skills discussed in <em>Lean Logic</em> and beyondu2014in surgery and computer programming, for instance. This is not a case, then, of inventing everything from scratch, but of having a foundation of skills and relevant[/glossary_exclude] expertise [glossary_exclude]opening up possibilities and degrees of[/glossary_exclude] freedom [glossary_exclude]which, without that foundation, would not be available. As any musician will tell you, you must know the rules before you can invent interesting ways to break them.rnrnThe key to the freedom and flexibility of the Lean Economy, then, consists of a range of[/glossary_exclude] skills, [glossary_exclude]needing hands, mind, memory,[/glossary_exclude] judgment, emotion [glossary_exclude]and cooperation. It will be a case of lifetime learning, starting not long after the first breath, and continuing with experience and[/glossary_exclude] conversation [glossary_exclude]for as long as a person is able to take part in making community work.rnrnWith that platform of competence, it is possible to sustain flexibility and pragmatism in the bloodstream of the Lean Economy, and this affects such fundamentals as the u201cThe Planu201du2014the[/glossary_exclude] Energy Descent Action Plan, [glossary_exclude]for instance. There is nothing wrong with long-term plans: to learn from them is instructive, and to deliberate about them engages the wits, but to believe them is a betrayal of the creative[/glossary_exclude] imagination [glossary_exclude]which is the heart of the matter (see u201cFlexibility and Inventionu201d sidebar).rn<table border="1" cellpadding="40">rn<tbody>rn<tr>rn<td>rn<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 24px;">FLEXIBILITY AND INVENTION</span>rnReflection and Learning</p>rnI once did a course with Australian permaculture teacher Dave Clark, who talked about his experiences implementing permaculture in refugee camps in Macedonia. He was dealing with large numbers of people moving to places with no infrastructure, all of which had to be created. He did amazing work, erecting straw-bale buildings, food gardens, putting in miles of swales and hundreds of thousands of trees.rnrnHe spoke of having to work with professional engineers who would design something such as a drainage system, which Dave could see wouldnu2019t work, but which, because the person was a u2018professionalu2019, could not be questioned. He saw much money wasted through this unchallengeable u2018ruleu2019 that the professional is always right.rnrnHe talked about how in his work he always worked from the premise that he was wrong. This designed into the process the openness to reassessment at any stage. An Energy Descent Action Plan should be like this. It is a collection of ideas that should be reworked and revised regularly.rnrnSome u2018Plansu2019 become carved in stone, immutable and fixed: u201cWe are working our way through the planu201d, even though that Plan may be long since irrelevant. By designing flexibility into the process, we can make it infinitely more powerful, and give the community a far stronger sense of ownership and involvement.rn<p style="text-align: right;">~ Rob Hopkins, <em>The Transition Handbook</em>, 2008.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l187/"><sup>L187</sup></a></p>rn</td>rn</tr>rn</tbody>rn</table>rn&nbsp;rnrnAnd a more profound difference between mainstream lean thinking and its application in <em>Lean Logic</em> lies in the idea of a[/glossary_exclude] slack economy. [glossary_exclude]The lean enterprise is designed to be so[/glossary_exclude] taut [glossary_exclude]that problems immediately show up, with dire consequences, and everyone involved has the maximum[/glossary_exclude] incentive [glossary_exclude]to make sure they donu2019t happen. This is the u201cJust-In-Timeu201d (<em>kanban</em>) principle which does not allow backup stocks, so that supplies are delivered at the last minute. It certainly concentrates the mind but, even in industry itself, it has its risks, leading to stock outages if, for instance, there is a problem in supply which the company can do nothing about. And yet, there is slack even in the industrial version of lean thinking, in the sense of its responses to such challenges: it is unencumbered; it can respond quickly and effectively; it[/glossary_exclude] travels light. [glossary_exclude]There is extended freedom for the people involved in itu2014not just a remote well-intentioned managementu2014to engage their minds.rnrnThe lean approach is not about apple-pie-sensible practices. It is about listening acutely to what a[/glossary_exclude] system [glossary_exclude]needs and responding accurately. It is not an ecology in which the waste of materials, money, labour, health, or environmental quality is <em>cut</em>: some[/glossary_exclude] waste [glossary_exclude]may indeed still be present, but here it is not inadvertently designed into the system.rnrnLean thinking switches on the information technology that we keep in the space between the bridge of the nose and the top of the head. Regulatory management has not been made aware of its existence.[/glossary_exclude]rnrn&nbsp;rnrn<strong>Related entries</strong>:rnrnLean Food, Incentives Fallacy, Paradigm, Metamorphosis, Lean Education, Harmonic Order, Relevance Fallacy.","accessMode":"textual, visual","url":"https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/"}</script> <style type="text/css"> .feedzy-rss-link-icon:after { content: url("https://leanlogic.online/wp-content/plugins/feedzy-rss-feeds/img/external-link.png"); margin-left: 3px; } </style> <link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="76x76" href="/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/apple-touch-icon.png"> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="32x32" href="/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/favicon-32x32.png"> <link rel="icon" type="image/png" sizes="16x16" href="/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/favicon-16x16.png"> <link rel="manifest" href="/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/site.webmanifest"> <link rel="mask-icon" href="/wp-content/uploads/fbrfg/safari-pinned-tab.svg" color="#5bbad5"> <link 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class="post-1081 glossary type-glossary status-publish hentry" id="post-1081">    <div class="single_post_content has_share_pos_after">    <h1 class="postitle entry-title" >Lean Thinking</h1>   <div class="single_metainfo ">  <i class="fa-user"></i> <a class="vcard author post-author" href="https://leanlogic.online/author/matthew/" ><span class='fn author' >David Fleming</span></a>  <i class="fa-comments-o"></i><div class="meta_comm"><a href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/#respond">0 Comment</a></div>  <i class="fa-th-list"></i><div class="catag_list" ></div> </div>   <div class="share_foot share_pos_after "> <div class="share_this social_square"> <div class="social_buttons"> <span class="share_label">Share This</span> <div class="lgn_fb"> <a target="_blank" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/&amp;t=Lean+Thinking" title="Share this on Facebook"><i class="fa-facebook"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_twt"> <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/&text=Lean%20Thinking" title="Tweet This"><i class="fa-twitter"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_pin"> <a target="_blank" title="Pin This" href='https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/&media='><i class="fa-pinterest"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_linkedin"> <a target="_blank" title="Share this on Linkedin" href="https://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/&title=Lean+Thinking"><i class="fa-linkedin"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_stmbl"> <a target="_blank" title="Stumble This" href="https://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/&title=Lean+Thinking"><i class="fa fa-stumbleupon"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_digg"> <a target="_blank" href="https://www.digg.com/submit?url=https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-thinking/&amp;title=Lean+Thinking" title="Digg This"><i class="fa fa-digg"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_email"> <a target="_blank" onclick="window.location.href='mailto:?subject='+document.title+'&body='+escape(window.location.href);" title="Email This"><i class="fa fa-envelope-o"></i></a> </div> <div class="lgn_print"> <a target="_blank" onclick="window.print();" title="Print This Page"><i class="fa fa-print"></i></a> </div> </div> </div> </div>   <div class="thn_post_wrap" > <div class="glossary-item-audio"></div><p>A frame of reference for enabling people to join together in a shared aim.</p> <p>“Lean” in this sense was originally derived from industrial <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Lean Production</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The original form of the lean revolution in production systems, developed in the 1940s at Toyota’s factory in Japan, under the direction of Taiichi Ohno. It maintained low backup stocks of parts and finished goods, and that forced the whole productive process to develop rapid reactions and to achieve very low rates of error. This in turn meant that workers had responsibility for taking timely decisions in response to local circumstances, forestalling errors rather than waiting for them to happen.&lt;br /&gt;Since then, lean production has evolved into the more broadly-based system of management(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-production/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">lean production</a> in the post-war period, and the concept is widely applied in industry, as alluded to in this book’s <a href="https://leanlogic.online/introduction/">Introduction</a>. <em>Lean Logic</em> applies this frame of reference to the shared aim of rebuilding a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Political Economy</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Society in the broad sense. Despite many differences of emphasis, economics was once understood in this way, as including the whole range of society, politics and economy.&lt;br /&gt;That understanding held in the period roughly between the publication of a coherent theory of value (based on labour) by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, and the launch in 1891 of the narrower interpretation of &quot;positive economics” by John Neville Keynes (1852–1949). Before that period, economics had been discussed as a question of moral philosophy; after it, economics became(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/political-economy/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">political economy</a> in place of the failing <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Market Economy</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The economic order on which modern society depends.&lt;br /&gt;The &quot;Great Transformation” in politics, economics and society came when the market economy hit its stride in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Before it, cohesion was sustained to a large extent through the social capital of reciprocal obligation, loyalties, authority structures, culture and traditions. &lt;br /&gt;The Great Transformation consisted of their replacement by market exchange, income and price, and by the impersonal principles of economics. Around these, cooperative arrangements can be sustained with little need for a common(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/market-economy/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">market</a>.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l181/"><sup>L181</sup></a></p> <p>The essence is this. Two ways of making something happen can be compared. One of them—top-down management—is to tell people what to do: issue instructions, regulations, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Incentives, The Fallacy of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The presumption that a person will not carry out a substantial task unless given an incentive over and above—separate from—the benefits derived from the task itself.&lt;br /&gt;It is taken as a self-evident truth that the way to persuade people to make the effort to achieve a significant aim is to give them an incentive—a reward if they do, or a penalty if they don’t. The possibility that people may want to achieve an aim for its own sake is not taken to be a sufficient motivation. This carrot-and-stick theory is at the heart of the system of rewards and grades in education and public policy, and it(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/incentives-the-fallacy-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">incentives</a>, penalties, targets; exert managerial control; do the thinking for them; give orders, make sure they are carrying them out, check that they have done them right and, if they haven’t, tell them to do it again.</p> <p>The other way is to set people up with the necessary resources, the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Skills</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Manual Skills.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/skills/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">skills</a> and equipment, a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Common Purpose</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Common purpose is a shared intention to achieve a shared goal, where collective aims are advanced by the individual purpose, and individual aims are advanced by the collective purpose.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Common Capability, Emergence, Presence, TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas).</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/common-purpose/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">common purpose</a>, and the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Freedom</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Is lean thinking consistent with freedom? There are clearly some senses in which it is not. The five rules of the grammar of lean thinking—intention, lean means, flow, pull and feedback—are designed to focus minds on a purpose, so there is a commitment there which may narrow individual options. The purpose may be the business of making cars or the Lean Economy’s aim of building and sustaining a community, but it cannot be achieved in a culture where—as Aristotle put it, warning us of the fallacy—&quot;freedom means doing what you like”.&lt;sup&gt;F39&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Nor can we expect useful results from a collective(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/freedom/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">freedom</a> to apply their <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Judgment</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Reflection, Encounter, Flow, Presence, Casuistry, Intelligence, Practice, Spirit.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/judgment/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">judgment</a>. This has advantages: it brings to life the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Imagination</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Creative intelligence in action; the ability to learn and understand something without having experience of it.&lt;sup&gt;I17&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If the mature market economy is to have a sequel on the Wheel of Life, it will be the work, substantially, of imagination. But imagination will not have an easy time of it, for it is widely seen as a dissident to be suppressed, removed or re-educated. &quot;Higher level learning”, the ability to understand and analyse a subject, was achieved by one in five teenagers in 1976; as the psychologist Michael Shayer has shown, this is now down to one in twenty. The target-led routines of(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/imagination/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">imagination</a> and tenacity of the people; it transforms the quality of decisions; it is flexible; it sets up conditions for alert <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Feedback</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Systems Thinking &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Feedback, Resilience &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Feedback, Lean Thinking &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Feedback.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/feedback/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">feedback</a>: it makes the needs of the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Systems Thinking</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Guidelines for thinking about networks of interaction.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lean Logic&lt;/em&gt; makes a distinction between two kinds of system: the complex system and the modular system.&lt;br /&gt;It also recognises two more kinds of system which are special applications of these: the complicated system and the ecological system. &lt;br /&gt;The four are summarised in the table below.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/systems-thinking/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">system</a> quickly apparent, responding to the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Local</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Localisation, Local Wisdom.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/local/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">local</a> and real, rather than to a distant caricature.</p> <p>An example of what we are looking at here is the difference between, on the one hand, policy in which the government tells us what to do and is then obeyed with <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Scepticism</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(1) Precautionary defence against the untrue. Reasonable doubt.&lt;br /&gt;(2) Unreasonable defence against the true. William Fleming’s &lt;em&gt;Vocabulary of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt; summarises, &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;Scepticism distrusts the very instruments of knowing, and discredits the claims of evidence to warrant certainty.&lt;sup&gt;S7&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Certainty.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/scepticism/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">sceptical</a> resignation; and, on the other hand, an agreed direction, enabled by a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Leadership</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Character.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/leadership/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">leadership</a> which knows the difference between management and inspiration, and which makes it clear what the aims are and why they matter, switching on minds, ingenuity and motivation. Those aims are general—e.g., “to achieve this long-term reduction in collective energy use, as defined by the Energy Budget, in order to preserve a benign climate. And it is up to you how you do it, though you will get all the help you ask for”—as distinct from detailed instructions backed by rewards and penalties.</p> <p>This is regime change—from disjointed regulation to freedom to think, from command-and-control to concentration on the matter in hand. And in lean thinking such a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Radical Break</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>This is a central idea in lean thinking—known there as &lt;em&gt;kaikaku&lt;/em&gt;. It means the shock—the large, and usually strongly-resisted break—that opens the way to an elaborate and dysfunctional complex system being transformed into the flexible elegance of lean thinking. This principle is the enabling condition for &lt;em&gt;Lean Logic&lt;/em&gt;, but we should remember that it has its dangers: the radical break’s value lies in its rarity: the serial reforms of our time are, on the contrary, a pathology—the troubled responses of a culture that has lost its identity and wits, and is struggling with vicious(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/radical-break/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">radical break</a> is called <em>kaikaku</em>; whereas <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Incrementalism</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Progress consisting of small steps: little-by-little (Latin: &lt;em&gt;paulatim&lt;/em&gt;). It is generally—but not always—based on a clear intention as to where these steps will eventually lead. It corrects for errors, being guided by slight feedbacks, or algorithms; like the steersman of a yacht. It &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; in due course be so prolific and elaborate that it becomes unsupportable and breaks in a shock of &lt;em&gt;kaikaku&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, that may not happen. For one thing, feedbacks and corrections do not necessarily have to deliver incremental advance (&lt;em&gt;kaizen&lt;/em&gt;); they may deliver stability, as in the case of species that had(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/incrementalism/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">incremental</a> improvement is <em>kaizen</em>. The switch into lean thinking itself is almost always a radical break, prompted by crisis and reluctantly done. Whether further radical breaks, or creative destruction, are needed after that switch has been made is a more complex matter (<a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Paradigm</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A frame of reference which makes reasonably good sense of a complex subject, and enables us to think about it, to work with it and to get results which we can at least in part predict, and which we may be able to apply in useful ways. The word &quot;paradigm” has been around some six centuries, in the sense of a story—an exemplar—retold many times to illustrate an argument or a group of ideas with something in common. It became a crucial idea in modern thought when, in 1962, the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, published his book &lt;em&gt;The Structure of Scientific Revolutions&lt;/em&gt;. in the context of(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/paradigm/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Paradigm</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Wheel of Life, The</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A way of thinking about the life-cycle of complex systems (woodlands, companies, civilisations, Gaia . . .).&lt;br /&gt;These can be understood as inhabiting the space defined by two variables or dimensions: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Potential&lt;/em&gt;: a measure of the richness of the system, in the sense of being able to make interesting things happen—the quantity and diversity of plant and animal life in an ecosystem; the friendships, trust and social capital sustained in a society; the skills and accomplishments of a political economy . . .&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Connectedness&lt;/em&gt;: the extent and strength of the linkages between different parts of the(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/wheel-of-life-the/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">The Wheel of Life</a>).</p> <p>And yet, in a sense, there is nothing new about lean thinking. It is as old as <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Politics</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(1) Deliberation about collective decisions by those affected by them.&lt;br /&gt;(2) The grief that follows when (1) breaks down.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Nation &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Politics, Abstraction, Anarchism, Blame, Conversation, Democracy, Devil&#039;s Tunes, Green Authoritarianism, Multiculturalism, Unlean.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/politics/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">politics</a> and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Community</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Community can mean many things. One of them refers to common interests—the Morris dancing community, the gay community, the Facebook community. These are reasonable understandings of community, but they fall outside the bounds of this entry, which explores community in the sense of living in the same place.&lt;br /&gt;The character of such communities is varied, and many attempts have been made to devise a frame of reference for making sense of their differences. The best-known way of distinguishing between them was provided by Ferdinand Tönnies, who (in 1887) pointed to the difference between the(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/community/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">community</a>, but it was business that rediscovered it and made it explicit in our own time, so the business context of the principle is still present. This turns out to be quite helpful because business, especially lean production’s home territory of vehicle manufacturing—though far removed from post-market communities—provides a real-life setting for the five rules of the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Grammar</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The way a language works: the received principles which enable it to communicate meaning, colour and joy.&lt;br /&gt;That, at least, is the meaning of grammar as applied to language. But &lt;em&gt;Lean Logic&lt;/em&gt; uses it in an extended sense as one of the key implications and elements of lean thinking. Lean thinking affirms that it is those who are actually engaged in a task who are better placed to decide on responses to events and shocks, and to invent local solutions, than is a centralised authority remote from the detail; there is local freedom to think. But this requires that there should be consensus on what(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/grammar/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">grammar</a> of lean thinking. <em>Lean Logic</em> suggests its own labels for three of them; the original names are given in brackets:</p> <p> </p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">1. <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Intention</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>One of the properties (Rule 1) of a system designed on the principles of lean thinking. This first, critical, stage defines what you want to achieve: resist the temptation to add numerous other objectives, since this will only destroy the focus and rule out the possibility of discovering a common purpose. But you don’t need to resist the temptation to adopt an aim which is beyond what you think you can achieve—for among the resources available to you is pull, and its speciality is discovering solutions.&lt;br /&gt;But of course it isn’t as simple as that, for two reasons. First, overall aims consist(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/intention/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Intention</a></em> (Specify <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Value</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The word is used in two senses in lean thinking: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 40px;&quot;&gt;(1) In the context of industrial lean production, &lt;em&gt;value&lt;/em&gt; consists of the potential benefits the customer gets when she buys from a company (they are only &quot;potential” because what she actually does with what she has bought is another matter). So value is . . .&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 70px;&quot;&gt;A capability provided to a customer at the right time at an appropriate price, as defined in each case by the customer.&lt;sup&gt;V1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 40px;&quot;&gt;In the application of lean thinking to the local Lean Economy, value is what makes most sense for the people who live there; what they have decided, for now, to(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/value/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">value</a>)</p> <p></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The Intention defines what you want to achieve; it is the core around which every activity is organised and given shape. In industrial lean production, the Intention is to achieve “value”, and value is . . .</p> <p style="padding-left: 60px;">[a] capability provided to a customer at the right time at an appropriate price, as defined in each case by the customer.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l182/"><sup>L182</sup></a></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">So, it works like this. We have a complex intention, and here again there are two ways of thinking about it. One way is to adopt a single task within that wider aim. It might be:</p> <p style="padding-left: 60px;">Require all workers to account for and record their time in full.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Now, why is that relevant to the Intention? What value does it bring? You might be able to think of ways in which customers get better value if all workers account for their time in full than if they don’t do so. But if, as we shall suppose for this example, it turns out that, after examination of the matter from all angles, it is just a case of bureaucratic form-filling, a tedious encumbrance which takes workers’ minds off their jobs, then it should not be there. Lean thinking <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Travelling Light</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Adaptation to the failure of the intermediate economy of big infrastructures and services which will follow the breakdown of the market. The scale and consequences of the loss of these essentials will be shocking. The long-term task will be to build lean, small-scale, elegant, sustainable-resilient replacements. The Lean Economy will travel light. And there will be a major gain, since local enterprise such as hospitals and farms, can—relative to their giant equivalents—afford a greater flexibility and attention to detail; they can expect better morale, closed-loop waste management, a(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/travelling-light/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">travels light</a>. It concentrates on what contributes to value—to the Intention—and does without things that don’t.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">It sounds obvious; in action, it isn’t. Organisations sustain many practices that are irrelevant to what they are there to do. Sometimes they do so because <em>other</em> practices require it, such as a structure based on top-down command-and-control which requires exhaustive recordkeeping—if the recordkeeping were removed, the whole structure could collapse. That could be exactly the <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Kaikaku</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A radical break.&lt;br /&gt;For more, see Lean Thinking, Paradigm.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/kaikaku/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">kaikaku</a></em> event that is needed, but to the people around at the time, it is anything but obvious.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Another possible subsidiary task:</p> <p style="padding-left: 60px;">Make sure the handbrakes work.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Here we have identified an aim which at least has some relevance to making cars, though given such prominence that other aims, which are also intrinsic to “value”, risk being forgotten-about: you could end up with cars in which nothing worked but the handbrake. That is a caricature, of course, but it is not a remote one in the context of schools with state-of-the-art security cameras and collapsing discipline, farms with awesome labour-saving equipment and a deteriorating soil structure, urban districts whose smoothly-functioning <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Social Security</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Lean Social Security.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/social-security/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">social security</a> system underwrites their crime and futility, factories whose milling machines work to a speed and accuracy far ahead of the rest of the system’s ability to keep up, or societies paralysed under the weight of regulation and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Control Overload</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The final breakdown that occurs when an attempt is made to control a system comprehensively. Every control usurps local decision-making, and needs to be controlled itself, so that, with each added control, there is more to be controlled, until the system is crushed by the weight of it all.&lt;br /&gt;It is hard to stop because in the latter stages, failures keep occurring, which prompt the installation of more controls.&lt;br /&gt;Examples: financial regulation; anti-terror/enemy-of-the-state regimes; state-controlled health services; law and order when rivalries develop; fast-breeder nuclear reactors (see &quot;The(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/control-overload/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">control</a>.</p> <p></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">It is, of course, the aim that is wrong. The aim (again, it sounds obvious but it often isn’t to the harassed people in nominal command-and-control) should not be simply to produce handbrakes that work, but to produce cars that the customers want. Here, then, is <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Reductionism</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The practice of considering a problem in isolation, as if it had no implications for the wider system to which it belongs, and as if interventions could be designed without taking account either of their wider consequences or of their effects over the longer term.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Serial&lt;/em&gt; reductionism can be understood as the idea that a complex system can be understood by focusing acutely on parts of it, and then adding them together.&lt;sup&gt;R19&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Reductionism in its characteristic and familiar form consists of obvious and easy solutions, whatever the problem. Here are some examples: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 40px;&quot;&gt;Too many weeds? → more(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/reductionism/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">reductionism</a> in its most characteristic form, where it seems to let us off the need to think about working with the system as a whole, offering instead the satisfaction of concentrating on a simplified, one-item, to-do list. This will only destroy the shared focus on the overall aim and rule out the possibility of discovering a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Common Purpose</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Common purpose is a shared intention to achieve a shared goal, where collective aims are advanced by the individual purpose, and individual aims are advanced by the collective purpose.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Common Capability, Emergence, Presence, TEQs (Tradable Energy Quotas).</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/common-purpose/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">common purpose</a>.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">And that would in turn opens the way to Advanced Reductionism, where those <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Icon, The</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>An argument summarised in one ready-made idea: a silver bullet, often of the kind which thinks the job is done when it has found someone to blame. Icons are words or phrases which act as a substitute for—or which distract attention from—the argument, crowding out reflection.&lt;br /&gt;Once fixed on the iconic word, the argument is over: &quot;reform”, &quot;diversity”, &quot;competition”, &quot;qualifications”, &quot;level playing field”, &quot;equality”, &quot;transparent”, &quot;fair”, &quot;democratic”, &quot;accessible”, &quot;vibrant”, &quot;modernising”; &lt;em&gt;or &lt;/em&gt;&quot;selfishness”, &quot;greed”, &quot;violence”, &quot;privilege”, &quot;elitist”, &quot;exclusive”, &quot;discriminatory”,(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/icon-the/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">iconic</a> single-focus aims multiply, infesting the system like an extended family of clothes-moths. The cost of administering that collection of reductionist targets is high; inconsistencies either paralyse the system or impose a culture of pretence; <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Creative Block</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(1) The stage of uncertainty, pessimism and loss of confidence through which a person must pass in order to achieve a creative and rooted insight.&lt;sup&gt;C268&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;(2) Failure which prevents a person, community or culture from carrying out a bad idea, and thereby forces development of a better one.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Boredom, Wishful Thinking, Fortitude, Casuistry, Ingenuity Gap, Interest, Paradigm, Success, Hippopotamus.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/creative-block/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">creative</a> invention is disallowed. The system becomes rigidly connected up; paralysed into incompetence. There is disempowerment—the task imposed on that busy ecology is to labour, but not to ask for any reward save the joy of catching each other out. The only participants who are happy with the situation are the managers, who think that more control is needed. Despite being rushed off their feet, they still can’t keep control, so it appears at first breathless glance that they have a point.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">In contrast with all this, the Intention identifies the system’s deep, central, aims. That does not mean that the idea of “value” should be so focused that it itself becomes a reductionist aim, for the “capability provided to a customer” may in fact be quite complex and require <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Reflection</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Disengagement, in order to think. It may be brief and urgent: a matter of ducking out of sight for a moment, if there is no other way.&lt;br /&gt;As Richard Chartres reminds us in his reflection on Ash Wednesday, that is what Jesus did, when pressed by an angry crowd—doodling reflectively in the dust before giving us the clincher argument against the witch-hunt and its variants: &quot;He who is without sin: let him cast the first stone.” Chartres summarises: stoop, clarify, connect.&lt;sup&gt;R26&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;In less crowded circumstances, reflection is thinking time; there is local self-reliance; a flow of concentration. It is(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/reflection/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">reflection</a>. The customer does not, for instance, want the company to go out of business, so she will expect it to make a profit; nor does she want to buy products from a company that pollutes the groundwater. So value—the Intention of an industrial enterprise—can be expressed in terms of responding to the claims of its numerous stakeholders, such as customers, shareholders, staff, the local community and the environment. The “triple bottom line” recognises companies’ obligations in terms of quality and income, and of the environment and social justice too.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l183/"><sup>L183</sup></a></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">What is non-negotiable is that the enterprise, having decided what it wants to do, must avoid being burdened either by a host of other kinds of urgent commitments which are nothing to do with that Intention, or by <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Icon, The</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>An argument summarised in one ready-made idea: a silver bullet, often of the kind which thinks the job is done when it has found someone to blame. Icons are words or phrases which act as a substitute for—or which distract attention from—the argument, crowding out reflection.&lt;br /&gt;Once fixed on the iconic word, the argument is over: &quot;reform”, &quot;diversity”, &quot;competition”, &quot;qualifications”, &quot;level playing field”, &quot;equality”, &quot;transparent”, &quot;fair”, &quot;democratic”, &quot;accessible”, &quot;vibrant”, &quot;modernising”; &lt;em&gt;or &lt;/em&gt;&quot;selfishness”, &quot;greed”, &quot;violence”, &quot;privilege”, &quot;elitist”, &quot;exclusive”, &quot;discriminatory”,(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/icon-the/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">iconic</a> reductionist obsessions which crowd out <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Encounter</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The act of recognising something—a person, a practice, a system—on its own terms; the particular character and wholeness of the other is acknowledged; judgment and opinion about him/her/it are set in a relevant context, rather than in the context of universal general principle or immoveable mindset.&lt;br /&gt;To acknowledge the wholeness of a system—a woodland, a person, a planet, nature—means being aware that you are in the presence of something which has business and an agenda of its own, and which cannot be tamed by your understanding. To see nature as a whole, as its own self, you need to(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/encounter/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">encounter</a> with the system as a whole.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">So, value is defined in terms of what the enterprise is ultimately for, and leaves out all the other things it may want to do, unless they are also relevant to that defining purpose. Since an enterprise is a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Complexity</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The property of a system consisting of many complementary tasks carried out by highly specialised parts, which are joined up in networks of information, control and distribution.&lt;sup&gt;C238&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Each part of a complex system depends on most, or all, of the other parts being in good working order at all times and providing them with the reciprocal services they need. This means that a complex system is vulnerable to shock. If something goes wrong, it is in trouble. It has poor recovery-elastic resilience, but it compensates for this by having well-developed preventive resilience: it is good at keeping(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/complexity/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">complex</a> system, many unexpected things may well <em>be</em> <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Relevance, The Fallacy of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The fallacy that the efficiency of a complex system can be sustained by purging the irrelevant.&lt;br /&gt;Living systems, given a chance, are exuberant. The &lt;em&gt;excess&lt;/em&gt; produced by a natural system—the supply of seed and larvae, the material abundance—would threaten to choke it if it were not for the predators which prune it and control the surplus, stimulating an even greater variety. There is a wildness here, a sense of inexhaustible invention, of not knowing when to stop.&lt;br /&gt;As the naturalist Gilbert White wrote to his friend Thomas Pennant in 1768, &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;All nature is so full that that district has the(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/relevance-the-fallacy-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">relevant</a>, such as blue skies research and a generous pension scheme, but the connection between them and the Intention needs to be explicit. There may be seductive reasons for being distracted from what you are trying to do, but unless there is a plain reason in support of something being part of the enterprise’s Intention, it should be left out.</p> <p></p> <p> </p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">2. <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Lean Means</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>One of the properties of a system designed according to the principles of lean thinking (Rule 2). It carries out the intention, and that may involve the shock of bringing to an end a lot of activities which, up to now, had seemed to be important. From now on, the enterprise is travelling light.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Value, &lt;em&gt;Muda&lt;/em&gt;.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-means/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Lean Means</a></em> (Identify the value stream)</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">The Intention is defined, so now is the moment to purge the irrelevant—the legacy of stuff that clogs up and weighs down the system. For instance, in the case of a manufacturing company—the original setting for lean thinking—you don’t have to maintain and pay for large numbers of supervisors to regulate the front-line workers on the assumption that no one can be trusted to think for themselves; you don’t need a large inspection and testing establishment if quality and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Judgment</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Reflection, Encounter, Flow, Presence, Casuistry, Intelligence, Practice, Spirit.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/judgment/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">judgment</a> are intrinsic to every stage in the process. You don’t need arbitrary targets if there is a structure of motivation and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Trust</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Trust is confidence that an obligation, explicit or implied, will be honoured. The motivation for keeping faith in this way is varied. It may be love, or a promise, or commitment to a professional standard, or a matter of going along with the purpose of the institution to which you belong. In &lt;em&gt;Lean Logic&lt;/em&gt;, trust is a condition for the web of reciprocal obligation which builds community, and for the relationship between a nation and its people.&lt;br /&gt;And it is a critical capital asset, distinct from the other forms of capital; it is both producer and product of social capital. It is a necessary(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/trust/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">trust</a>, and a widely shared agreement on the Intention. Controls and written reports may in some circumstances be needed, but they do not in themselves add value, so they should be used only if they are essential to value being added. You don’t need centralisation if localisation will do as well or (more likely) better.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">So get rid of all the irrelevant activities, elaborations and hassle (collectively known as <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Muda</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A Japanese term used in the context of lean production and lean thinking, meaning any activity that consumes resources but creates no value. Type 1 &lt;em&gt;muda&lt;/em&gt; consists of activities which create no value but which are, at present and for practical purposes, unavoidable, such as issuing invoices. Type 2 consists of activities which do not have a useful function: they just happen, and things would go better without them. It is on this kind of &lt;em&gt;muda&lt;/em&gt; that the attention of lean thinking is focused, and it comes in many forms:&lt;sup&gt;M38&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;1. Mistakes and defects in products: the time and cost of making them(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/muda/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex='0' role='link'>muda</a></em>) which tend to accumulate in organisations—that is, everything that isn’t part of the “value stream”. With the shock of <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Kaikaku</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A radical break.&lt;br /&gt;For more, see Lean Thinking, Paradigm.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/kaikaku/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">kaikaku</a></em> comes the sacrifice of much that may have been thought of as important or indispensable, and its replacement by lean-intelligent design, which is in turn followed by <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Kaizen</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Incremental advance.&lt;br /&gt;For more, see Lean Thinking, Paradigm.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/kaizen/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">kaizen</a></em>: incremental improvement, working out how to do what is <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Necessary and Sufficient</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A crucial distinction between two kinds of condition required for your argument to hold true, or for an outcome or event to take place.&lt;br /&gt;As the words make plain, a condition is &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; if the event could not have happened without it; it is &lt;em&gt;sufficient&lt;/em&gt; if it is enough on its own to cause or trigger the event (although, in some cases, something else could just as well have caused it). Example: Before having the energy to play in tonight’s concert I need . . . &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;a. some bangers and mash [a sufficient condition, but steak and kidney pie would do just as well];&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;b. some supper [a necessary and(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/necessary-and-sufficient/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">necessary</a>, and how to avoid what is not.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">But, at the same time as purging the irrelevant, it is necessary to recruit the relevant—the set of means that <em>is</em> needed. There may be a lot of them, and not all of them will reveal themselves at first. For example, good ventilation is essential to good patient care, as Florence Nightingale discovered, too late for most of her patients at Scutari; soil structure depends on rotations and on the use of natural fertility and compost; a shared <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Commons, The</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A common-pool resource, such as land, or a marine fishery, or a community, whose benefits are shared amongst the people who use it or live in it.&lt;br /&gt;Private property rights are, by comparison, straightforward: the owner has (or can reasonably be presumed to have) a sense of responsibility towards the property he or she owns, and a desire for its continuity. He or she will stand to gain from its improvement over the long term, or lose if it deteriorates. There are many exceptions to this, but the record of care for land where an individual has autonomy—as in the case of a family farm—is good.(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/commons/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">commons</a> requires well-established conditions to be met if its users are to sustain it with the necessary autonomy, understanding and competence. Sifting the lean means from the irrelevant and achieving the needed convergence of focus and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Complexity</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The property of a system consisting of many complementary tasks carried out by highly specialised parts, which are joined up in networks of information, control and distribution.&lt;sup&gt;C238&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Each part of a complex system depends on most, or all, of the other parts being in good working order at all times and providing them with the reciprocal services they need. This means that a complex system is vulnerable to shock. If something goes wrong, it is in trouble. It has poor recovery-elastic resilience, but it compensates for this by having well-developed preventive resilience: it is good at keeping(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/complexity/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">complexity</a> may be difficult; it is an idea which, as is the way of <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Systems Thinking</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Guidelines for thinking about networks of interaction.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lean Logic&lt;/em&gt; makes a distinction between two kinds of system: the complex system and the modular system.&lt;br /&gt;It also recognises two more kinds of system which are special applications of these: the complicated system and the ecological system. &lt;br /&gt;The four are summarised in the table below.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/systems-thinking/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">systems</a>, resists summary. In the end, learning about it means living it: heartbeat and respiration respond faithfully to—are pulled along exactly and promptly by—what the body needs.</p> <p></p> <p> </p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">3. <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Flow</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>One of the properties of a system designed according to the principles of lean thinking (Rule 3). The aim is to achieve a regular flow of work on a scale small enough for participants to be aware of—and to respond to—local diversity and detail. It avoids batches and blockbusting projects full of unexamined error. It enables incremental learning and improvement, and it invites participation from the people involved. When flow is in place, the conditions are right for pull.&lt;sup&gt;F16&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;But there is more to it than that. Flow is a key—perhaps &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; key—principle of a life that makes sense to the person(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/flow/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex='0' role='link'>Flow</a></em></p> <p></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Flow keeps the system moving at an even pace. The lean industrial system delivers parts and finished goods as they are needed; it avoids large batches, bottlenecks and storage. There is no waiting time between frantic bursts of work; the system is synchronised. It is also connected up, so that tasks are arranged close to each other and in sequence; the people who are doing them can sort out problems together; their conversation enables their cooperation. There is a convergence of the system’s aptitudes, timings, circumstances and purpose (for wider meanings of flow, see the separate entry).</p> <p></p> <p> </p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">4. <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Pull</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>One of the properties of a system designed according to the principles of lean thinking (Rule 4). Pull recognises that the people best placed to deal with a complex task are those who are doing it—who are engaged with the practical detail. Once the intention (or common purpose) is defined, participants do not need forever to rely on instructions; they can respond to actual local circumstance, guided and pulled along by observation, rather than pushed through in response to rules or general principles, or a regulatory agency that claims a monopoly on decision-making.&lt;br /&gt;In the context of the(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/pull/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex='0' role='link'>Pull</a></em></p> <p></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Once the system is connected up, action in one part of it is the cue for fitting responses in adjacent parts. Action and information converge. Everyone involved can see—or recognises that they must work out for themselves—what needs to be done to achieve the Intention; actions are focused responses to the particular.</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">This is how the two leading exponents of lean thinking explain it (“downstream” refers to activities nearer the completion of the process; “upstream” refers to activities nearer the start of the process):</p> <p style="padding-left: 60px;">[Pull is] a system of cascading production and delivery instructions from downstream to upstream activities in which nothing is produced by the upstream supplier until the downstream customer signals a need.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l184/"><sup>L184</sup></a></p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Each activity responds to the needs of the next one along: it is <em>pulled along</em> in sequence. No one has to stand there giving instructions about what to do; participants respond to the demands of the processes downstream from them, whose needs they have to supply. The people involved see what is needed, and engage their brains.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l185/"><sup>L185</sup></a></p> <p></p> <p> </p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;"><a id="feedback"></a>5. <em><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Feedback</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Systems Thinking &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Feedback, Resilience &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Feedback, Lean Thinking &lt;strong&gt;&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Feedback.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/feedback/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Feedback</a></em> (Perfection)</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Reflect on results; improve the system <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Incrementalism</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Progress consisting of small steps: little-by-little (Latin: &lt;em&gt;paulatim&lt;/em&gt;). It is generally—but not always—based on a clear intention as to where these steps will eventually lead. It corrects for errors, being guided by slight feedbacks, or algorithms; like the steersman of a yacht. It &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; in due course be so prolific and elaborate that it becomes unsupportable and breaks in a shock of &lt;em&gt;kaikaku&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, that may not happen. For one thing, feedbacks and corrections do not necessarily have to deliver incremental advance (&lt;em&gt;kaizen&lt;/em&gt;); they may deliver stability, as in the case of species that had(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/incrementalism/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">incrementally</a>. Check outcomes against Intention. Decide in the light of all this: is what you are trying to do realistic? Where are the gaps? Where is the room for improvement?</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">This is another of the features of lean thinking which seems obvious but which, on close inspection, turns out not to be. You can look at a system from the outside—and perhaps from a little bit above—and come to the conclusion that it is all working just fine, just as scale models of horrendous proposed city developments, with their tiny figures and tree-lined walkways, tend to look nice litter-free places to live. So, how is this error of misty-eyed complacency to be avoided?</p> <p style="padding-left: 30px;">Well, the first rule is: don’t look down at it from the sky. It is the people who are inside it who know it, and it is usually the dissidents, complainers and troublemakers who are most perceptive about it. What they are quite likely to see is the ways in which the bits do not join up: they will see the trade-offs: <em>this</em> can only work properly at the cost of <em>this</em>. But complex systems, given <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Time Fallacies</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Examples include:&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Permanent Present&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The fallacy which gives undue emphasis to the present when considering an option with long-term consequences. Examples include arguments that our present ability to import food justifies permanent burial of agricultural land under new housing; that joining the Eurozone is justified by today’s low interest rates there; that the state of the jobs market at the moment calls for migrant labour; that the current price of oil opens the way to a long-term expansion of air travel. This presumption of a constant present is a leading symptom of the dementia(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/time-fallacies/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex='0' role='link'>time</a> and feedback, can usually do better than that: instead of trade-offs, with one part having to bear the cost of another, they develop ‘trade-ons’, where the service being provided by one part of the system for another is felt as a benefit by both the recipient and by the supplier. In contrast with the exchange relationships of <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Economics</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(see also Green Economics, Lean Economics)&lt;br /&gt;To the question, &quot;What is economics?”, there are two answers. Economics in one sense is about policy. It is interested in the way that goods and services are produced and distributed, in markets and the conditions that help or hinder them, and in the complex system of the national economy, its cycles of crisis and recovery, and its interactions with other national economies.&lt;br /&gt;Economics in another sense, less widely recognised, is that which brings to problems an understanding of choices and consequences. The starting point for this is the principle(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/economics/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">economics</a>, participants in such complementary relationships benefit <em>directly</em> from the very act of providing the goods and services to other parts of the system. Intrinsic advantage rolls through the system.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l186/"><sup>L186</sup></a></p> <p style="text-align: center;">—</p> <p> </p> <p>Lean thinking is a radical approach. It begins with the break of <em>kaikaku</em>, which may be hard to bear, as it is a profound change from previous assumptions and methods and so is usually resisted until a shock intervenes. The changed thinking that follows, approaching the system in a profoundly new way, moves ahead with incremental improvement and evolution, guided by experience and local detail.</p> <p>It is a philosophy with wide application, shaped by the context. But there are significant differences between lean thinking as it is now widely applied in industry and the use that <em>Lean Logic</em> makes of it—apart from the obvious one that the industrial case is about extending the flying-time of the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Market Economy</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The economic order on which modern society depends.&lt;br /&gt;The &quot;Great Transformation” in politics, economics and society came when the market economy hit its stride in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Before it, cohesion was sustained to a large extent through the social capital of reciprocal obligation, loyalties, authority structures, culture and traditions. &lt;br /&gt;The Great Transformation consisted of their replacement by market exchange, income and price, and by the impersonal principles of economics. Around these, cooperative arrangements can be sustained with little need for a common(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/market-economy/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">market</a> state and <em>Lean Logic</em> is about bringing it in to land.</p> <p>One of the differences—in fact it is more apparent than real, as we shall see—lies in the attitude to standard practice. Industrial <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Lean Production</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The original form of the lean revolution in production systems, developed in the 1940s at Toyota’s factory in Japan, under the direction of Taiichi Ohno. It maintained low backup stocks of parts and finished goods, and that forced the whole productive process to develop rapid reactions and to achieve very low rates of error. This in turn meant that workers had responsibility for taking timely decisions in response to local circumstances, forestalling errors rather than waiting for them to happen.&lt;br /&gt;Since then, lean production has evolved into the more broadly-based system of management(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-production/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">lean production</a> requires its procedures to be carried out to a standard, and in a standard way. Individuals are encouraged to invent and develop new ways, but they are not adopted without testing and widely shared agreement that this is to be the new way of doing it. The reason for this becomes obvious when you think about what it means to introduce, say, a new procedure in an aircraft cockpit. Each cockpit is used by many different pilots and co-pilots, who must be confident that all the cockpits they enter are virtually identical; they need to be able to use the equipment with <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Certainty, Fallacies of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Certainty—confidence in a material truth beyond reasonable doubt—is not itself a fallacy. A fallacy does occur, however, when certainty takes the form of: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;1. defence of a position, by all means, logical and otherwise; or&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;2. insistence that the other person’s proposition has to be certain and proven beyond any conceivable challenge, before it can be accepted as relevant. Example: &quot;It was the excellent music teaching she had at home and at school that made it possible for her to become a professional pianist.” &quot;You see, you simply don’t know that: she might have taught herself on the(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/certainty-fallacies-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">certainty</a>, not only as a routine, but in the dark, in an emergency and when tired. Innovations in equipment and practice are constantly introduced in response to pilots’ suggestions—this is key to the debugging process which is needed for every new model—but only after an established routine of evaluation, followed by briefings to everyone involved, and then the change is made to all aircraft of that type at the same time. A similar case for standard practice can be made for any system in which a number of people use the same equipment, where customers want to know in advance what service they can expect, and where “trial and error” has to be strictly contained, and cannot be allowed to escape into actual practice.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l188/"><sup>L188</sup></a></p> <p> </p> <p>For a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Panarchy</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Hierarchy.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/panarchy/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">panarchy</a>, or <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Ecology: The Scholars</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>&lt;em&gt;(see also Ecology: Farmers and Hunters)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;Ecology is the study of the interactions between living organisms and their environments, and the word refers equally to these natural systems themselves (a woodland, a pond). The closely-related subject of ecological, or environmental, ethics extends moral judgment beyond human affairs to the ways humans interact with nature. The two aspects of ecology combined—the science and the ethics—is a field as large as the planet’s history. Here is a shortened version:&lt;sup&gt;E22&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The science of ecology&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;E23&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;1. &lt;em&gt;Evolution and adaptation&lt;/em&gt; (or &quot;autoecology”) studies the(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/ecology-the-scholars/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">ecology</a>, of communities, matters are more relaxed. The people who work in them and who depend on them tend to stay in the same <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Place</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Space whose local narrative can still be heard, and could be heard again, given the chance.&lt;br /&gt;Place is the practical, located, tangible, bounded setting which protects us from abstractions, generalities and ideologies and opens the way to thinking as discovery. On this scale, there is elegance, and some relief from the need to be right, for if you are wrong, the small scale of place allows for revision and repair, supported by conversation.&lt;br /&gt;The philosopher David Hume considers the matter: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;There are in &lt;em&gt;England&lt;/em&gt;, in particular, many honest gentlemen, who being always employ’d in their domestic(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/place/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">place</a>; it does not matter that they don’t know much about how things are done elsewhere; trial and error is not only acceptable, it is at the heart of their working practice. Their “errors” rarely have fatal consequences, and experiments can be extended and refined over many years; surviving mistakes; allowing successes to be gradually copied and locally adapted. At the same time, there is a presumption in favour of local practice, allowing a <em>lack</em> of standardisation that would be impractical in an industrial organisation.</p> <p>And yet, a group of independent <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Community</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Community can mean many things. One of them refers to common interests—the Morris dancing community, the gay community, the Facebook community. These are reasonable understandings of community, but they fall outside the bounds of this entry, which explores community in the sense of living in the same place.&lt;br /&gt;The character of such communities is varied, and many attempts have been made to devise a frame of reference for making sense of their differences. The best-known way of distinguishing between them was provided by Ferdinand Tönnies, who (in 1887) pointed to the difference between the(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/community/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">communities</a> will still not be without its standard practice. For instance, the <em>principles</em> of <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Organic</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(1) A model of cultivation which focuses on maintaining a fertile soil as the enabling condition for producing food and raising animals with resistance to pests and disease, making it unnecessary to turn to industrial pesticides and fertilisers. See Lean Food.&lt;br /&gt;(2) A model for building a project, notably a community, which is based on a network of relationships built one step at a time: a form of emergence, in which outcomes grow out of the project in ways which no individual, including the leader or social entrepreneur, could have planned. This meaning of &quot;organic” is in a sense the same(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/organic/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">organic</a> food production and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Permaculture</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Lean Food.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/permaculture/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">permaculture</a> are widely agreed. It helps, of course, that those principles advocate a high degree of diversity in application, depending on soil, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Climate Change</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The Earth’s climate is part of an ecological system which, despite spinning in cold space, manages to regulate its temperature and support life. Its ability to do so is shaped by three things: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;1. Endowment: the physical properties of the Earth—its size and distance from the sun and moon; its continents and oceans; its life; the composition of gases; the laws of physics; the whole of its inheritance; the story so far.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;2. Internal dynamics: the way in which the many parts of the system interact, with diversity and ingenuity.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;3. Forcings: changes which are imposed from &quot;outside”. But(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/climate-change/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">climate</a> and the needs and numbers of the people involved in it, but the insights of teachers like Eve Balfour, David Holmgren and Patrick Whitefield have universal application, once the local <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Intention</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>One of the properties (Rule 1) of a system designed on the principles of lean thinking. This first, critical, stage defines what you want to achieve: resist the temptation to add numerous other objectives, since this will only destroy the focus and rule out the possibility of discovering a common purpose. But you don’t need to resist the temptation to adopt an aim which is beyond what you think you can achieve—for among the resources available to you is pull, and its speciality is discovering solutions.&lt;br /&gt;But of course it isn’t as simple as that, for two reasons. First, overall aims consist(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/intention/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">intention</a> has been settled. These enabling principles are, in a sense, a standard practice; they can be learned.</p> <p>And the same applies to the whole cluster of <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Practice</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A skill or craft, requiring a lifetime’s learning, and whose tight feedback loops reveal errors quickly.&lt;br /&gt;This is in sharp contrast to activities which are in various ways protected against feedback (e.g., politics, economics). Without quick feedback, actions which will in due course lead to disaster can be assumed (on the ignorance-is-bliss principle) to be successful, and firmly embedded and reinforced in irrational assumptions, appetites, reflexes and emotions which the person assumes to be right.&lt;sup&gt;P76&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The built-in feedback of practice does things. First, it nudges in the direction of the(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/practice/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">practical</a> and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Culture</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The culture of a community is its art, music, dance, skills, traditions, virtues, humour, carnival, conventions and conversation. These give structure and shape to community—like the foundational vertical strands used in basket-making, round which you wind the texture of the basket itself. Culture keeps social capital alive and upright. It is . . . &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;. . . all those habits and customs whereby we identify ourselves as a community instead of as a collection of atomic individuals. And what makes that possible is a sense of shared destiny, shared history, shared home, being together in one(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/culture/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">cultural</a> skills discussed in <em>Lean Logic</em> and beyond—in surgery and computer programming, for instance. This is not a case, then, of inventing everything from scratch, but of having a foundation of skills and relevant <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Expertise, The Fallacy of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(&lt;em&gt;Argumentum ad verecundiam&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;Argument based on an uncritical appeal to expert opinion, pointing to the shame that (in the expert’s opinion) the other person ought to feel at challenging their expertise.&lt;sup&gt;E215&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Those who consider themselves experts defend their status in many ways, and here are six: &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;1. The &lt;em&gt;Train Crash Fallacy&lt;/em&gt;: a claim to instant expertise derived from a single personal experience.&lt;sup&gt;E216&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;2. The &lt;em&gt;Genetic Fallacy&lt;/em&gt;: judging an argument by its source rather than by its content.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;3. The &lt;em&gt;Spillover Fallacy&lt;/em&gt;: belief that expertise in one field of science confers the right to pronounce on(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/expertise-the-fallacy-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">expertise</a> opening up possibilities and degrees of <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Freedom</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Is lean thinking consistent with freedom? There are clearly some senses in which it is not. The five rules of the grammar of lean thinking—intention, lean means, flow, pull and feedback—are designed to focus minds on a purpose, so there is a commitment there which may narrow individual options. The purpose may be the business of making cars or the Lean Economy’s aim of building and sustaining a community, but it cannot be achieved in a culture where—as Aristotle put it, warning us of the fallacy—&quot;freedom means doing what you like”.&lt;sup&gt;F39&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Nor can we expect useful results from a collective(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/freedom/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">freedom</a> which, without that foundation, would not be available. As any musician will tell you, you must know the rules before you can invent interesting ways to break them.</p> <p>The key to the freedom and flexibility of the Lean Economy, then, consists of a range of <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Skills</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Manual Skills.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/skills/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">skills</a>, needing hands, mind, memory, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Judgment</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Reflection, Encounter, Flow, Presence, Casuistry, Intelligence, Practice, Spirit.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/judgment/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">judgment</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Emotional Argument, Fallacies of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(1) The fallacy that the strong presence of emotion in an argument validates it: the expression of real feeling is taken to show that the person is sincere, so she has to be right.&lt;br /&gt;(2) The fallacy that the strong presence of emotion in an argument invalidates it: the expression of real feeling is taken to show that the person is not being rigorous, so she has to be wrong.&lt;br /&gt;But neither of these are necessarily fallacies. The logician’s view of this is generally austere. Madsen Pirie writes, &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;Emotion . . . motivates us to do things, but reason enables us to calculate what to do.&lt;sup&gt;E94&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; Not in(...)&lt;/em&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/emotional-argument-fallacies-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">emotion</a> and cooperation. It will be a case of lifetime learning, starting not long after the first breath, and continuing with experience and <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Conversation</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>&lt;strong&gt;(1)&lt;/strong&gt; Cooperative problem-solving and deliberation (Latin: &lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt; thoroughly + &lt;em&gt;librare&lt;/em&gt; weigh), including deliberation with oneself. A moment of deference is due to the power of conversation: often it comes empty-handed but sometimes, crucially, it is the bearer of good judgment, raising the collective IQ by—who knows?—20 points? Do nothing that matters without consulting a conversation.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(2)&lt;/strong&gt; The &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; of encounter.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(3)&lt;/strong&gt; The interaction that builds a community; the process of emergence. As the artist Santiago Bell demonstrated at the Bromley by Bow community where he was resident, craftsmanship and(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/conversation/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">conversation</a> for as long as a person is able to take part in making community work.</p> <p>With that platform of competence, it is possible to sustain flexibility and pragmatism in the bloodstream of the Lean Economy, and this affects such fundamentals as the “The Plan”—the <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Energy Descent Action Plan</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The &quot;energy descent” is the phased decline in energy dependence needed in response both to climate change and to the depletion of fuels (Energy Prospects).&lt;sup&gt;E103&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The idea of descent in this context was suggested by Howard and Elisabeth Odum in &lt;em&gt;A Prosperous Way Down&lt;/em&gt; (2001). Ted Trainer, in his &lt;em&gt;Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society&lt;/em&gt; (2007), pointed out that the decline in fossil fuel supply will leave a gap which cannot be filled in the foreseeable future, leaving no alternative to a steep reduction in our dependence on energy. And the permaculturist David Holmgren’s work over(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/energy-descent-action-plan/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Energy Descent Action Plan</a>, for instance. There is nothing wrong with long-term plans: to learn from them is instructive, and to deliberate about them engages the wits, but to believe them is a betrayal of the creative <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Imagination</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Creative intelligence in action; the ability to learn and understand something without having experience of it.&lt;sup&gt;I17&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;If the mature market economy is to have a sequel on the Wheel of Life, it will be the work, substantially, of imagination. But imagination will not have an easy time of it, for it is widely seen as a dissident to be suppressed, removed or re-educated. &quot;Higher level learning”, the ability to understand and analyse a subject, was achieved by one in five teenagers in 1976; as the psychologist Michael Shayer has shown, this is now down to one in twenty. The target-led routines of(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/imagination/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">imagination</a> which is the heart of the matter (see “Flexibility and Invention” sidebar).</p> <table border="1" cellpadding="40"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: 24px;">FLEXIBILITY AND INVENTION</span><br /> Reflection and Learning</p> <p>I once did a course with Australian permaculture teacher Dave Clark, who talked about his experiences implementing permaculture in refugee camps in Macedonia. He was dealing with large numbers of people moving to places with no infrastructure, all of which had to be created. He did amazing work, erecting straw-bale buildings, food gardens, putting in miles of swales and hundreds of thousands of trees.</p> <p>He spoke of having to work with professional engineers who would design something such as a drainage system, which Dave could see wouldn’t work, but which, because the person was a ‘professional’, could not be questioned. He saw much money wasted through this unchallengeable ‘rule’ that the professional is always right.</p> <p>He talked about how in his work he always worked from the premise that he was wrong. This designed into the process the openness to reassessment at any stage. An Energy Descent Action Plan should be like this. It is a collection of ideas that should be reworked and revised regularly.</p> <p>Some ‘Plans’ become carved in stone, immutable and fixed: “We are working our way through the plan”, even though that Plan may be long since irrelevant. By designing flexibility into the process, we can make it infinitely more powerful, and give the community a far stronger sense of ownership and involvement.</p> <p style="text-align: right;">~ Rob Hopkins, <em>The Transition Handbook</em>, 2008.<a href="https://leanlogic.online/footnote/l187/"><sup>L187</sup></a></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p> </p> <p>And a more profound difference between mainstream lean thinking and its application in <em>Lean Logic</em> lies in the idea of a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Slack and Taut</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The two ends of the spectrum of connectedness, and one of the three pairings of properties which define the extent of a system’s resilience.&lt;br /&gt;Slack is central to the ability of a system to recover from shock. It enables it to cope with losses, and it makes space for choice. It is also needed in well-defined ways for that special case of resilience—a post-industrial Lean Economy.&lt;br /&gt;By contrast, a price-based economy is taut. For goods to command a price they must be scarce, and a taut market is one in which this scarcity is present. As summarised in one of the defining phrases of economics,(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/slack-and-taut/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">slack</a> <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Economics</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(see also Green Economics, Lean Economics)&lt;br /&gt;To the question, &quot;What is economics?”, there are two answers. Economics in one sense is about policy. It is interested in the way that goods and services are produced and distributed, in markets and the conditions that help or hinder them, and in the complex system of the national economy, its cycles of crisis and recovery, and its interactions with other national economies.&lt;br /&gt;Economics in another sense, less widely recognised, is that which brings to problems an understanding of choices and consequences. The starting point for this is the principle(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/economics/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">economy</a>. The lean enterprise is designed to be so <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Taut</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>See Slack and Taut.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/taut/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex='0' role='link'>taut</a> that problems immediately show up, with dire consequences, and everyone involved has the maximum <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Incentives, The Fallacy of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The presumption that a person will not carry out a substantial task unless given an incentive over and above—separate from—the benefits derived from the task itself.&lt;br /&gt;It is taken as a self-evident truth that the way to persuade people to make the effort to achieve a significant aim is to give them an incentive—a reward if they do, or a penalty if they don’t. The possibility that people may want to achieve an aim for its own sake is not taken to be a sufficient motivation. This carrot-and-stick theory is at the heart of the system of rewards and grades in education and public policy, and it(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/incentives-the-fallacy-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">incentive</a> to make sure they don’t happen. This is the “Just-In-Time” (<em>kanban</em>) principle which does not allow backup stocks, so that supplies are delivered at the last minute. It certainly concentrates the mind but, even in industry itself, it has its risks, leading to stock outages if, for instance, there is a problem in supply which the company can do nothing about. And yet, there is slack even in the industrial version of lean thinking, in the sense of its responses to such challenges: it is unencumbered; it can respond quickly and effectively; it <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Travelling Light</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Adaptation to the failure of the intermediate economy of big infrastructures and services which will follow the breakdown of the market. The scale and consequences of the loss of these essentials will be shocking. The long-term task will be to build lean, small-scale, elegant, sustainable-resilient replacements. The Lean Economy will travel light. And there will be a major gain, since local enterprise such as hospitals and farms, can—relative to their giant equivalents—afford a greater flexibility and attention to detail; they can expect better morale, closed-loop waste management, a(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/travelling-light/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">travels light</a>. There is extended freedom for the people involved in it—not just a remote well-intentioned management—to engage their minds.</p> <p>The lean approach is not about apple-pie-sensible practices. It is about listening acutely to what a <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Systems Thinking</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Guidelines for thinking about networks of interaction.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lean Logic&lt;/em&gt; makes a distinction between two kinds of system: the complex system and the modular system.&lt;br /&gt;It also recognises two more kinds of system which are special applications of these: the complicated system and the ecological system. &lt;br /&gt;The four are summarised in the table below.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/systems-thinking/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">system</a> needs and responding accurately. It is not an ecology in which the waste of materials, money, labour, health, or environmental quality is <em>cut</em>: some <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Waste</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>(1) Material available for use by another part of the system, or by a different system in a closed-loop arrangement.&lt;br /&gt;(2) Material discarded by a system as a means of preventing surplus which could produce unwanted growth (Intentional Waste).&lt;br /&gt;(3) Material abandoned and made unavailable to the system (and to its neighbours and wider ecological setting), which will in due course destroy it. The product of an open-loop arrangement formed by excessive scale.&lt;br /&gt;&nbsp;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related entries&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;Needs and Wants, Lean Materials, Pollution, Sorting Problem.</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/waste/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">waste</a> may indeed still be present, but here it is not inadvertently designed into the system.</p> <p>Lean thinking switches on the information technology that we keep in the space between the bridge of the nose and the top of the head. Regulatory management has not been made aware of its existence.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Related entries</strong>:</p> <p><a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Lean Food</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Local self-reliance in food, where the community can buy in little or nothing of what it eats. We will consider this by walking through the sequence of lean thinking: intention, lean means, flow, pull and feedback.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Intention: The Proximity Principle Applied to Food&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;As with all the other &quot;lean” entries, the intention is to provide a starting point for thinking about how local lean economies might provide for themselves from their own resources. The degree of their local self-reliance will vary with time and place. It could lie anywhere between &lt;em&gt;local lite&lt;/em&gt;—where communities have access to(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-food/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Lean Food</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Incentives, The Fallacy of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The presumption that a person will not carry out a substantial task unless given an incentive over and above—separate from—the benefits derived from the task itself.&lt;br /&gt;It is taken as a self-evident truth that the way to persuade people to make the effort to achieve a significant aim is to give them an incentive—a reward if they do, or a penalty if they don’t. The possibility that people may want to achieve an aim for its own sake is not taken to be a sufficient motivation. This carrot-and-stick theory is at the heart of the system of rewards and grades in education and public policy, and it(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/incentives-the-fallacy-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Incentives Fallacy</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Paradigm</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A frame of reference which makes reasonably good sense of a complex subject, and enables us to think about it, to work with it and to get results which we can at least in part predict, and which we may be able to apply in useful ways. The word &quot;paradigm” has been around some six centuries, in the sense of a story—an exemplar—retold many times to illustrate an argument or a group of ideas with something in common. It became a crucial idea in modern thought when, in 1962, the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, published his book &lt;em&gt;The Structure of Scientific Revolutions&lt;/em&gt;. in the context of(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/paradigm/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Paradigm</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Metamorphosis</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>A metaphor for the transformation that overcomes people when they surrender their judgment to a group, to a managerial institution, to a complex bureaucracy, or to a government, as the price of belonging to it. For example, the ten-year-plus period of intense learning required in order to be able to cope with the detail, diplomacy and boredom of negotiating trade agreements with the World Trade Organisation and the European Union makes it unlikely that anyone who has achieved expertise in it will question the aims of the organisations involved, or the essential assumptions of sustained(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/metamorphosis/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Metamorphosis</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Lean Education</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Culture, science, crafts, play, friendship and the ecology provide the medium in terms of which an individual fulfils his or her potential as a person, and a group fulfils its potential as a community.&lt;br /&gt;Education is that part of the life of a community that contributes to those ends.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Community practice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;The starting point is early education in the fundamental skill of belonging to a community, and here is a teacher with something to say about this. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre makes a connection (introduced in Practice) between complementary forms of learning—between (a) acquiring a(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/lean-education/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Lean Education</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Harmonic Order</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The seeming untidiness of a resilient system which has been allowed to develop diverse and appropriate responses to local detail.&lt;br /&gt;Small groups do not need orderly structures of organisation with a manager at the top. Larger groups do—unless they are subdivided into small groups or holons working to a common purpose and building up their own competence.&lt;br /&gt;One of the reasons why managing a large organisation is difficult is that it is hard to see what is going on. Managements therefore turn to the next best thing, which is summary data. Statistics make work visible. The result is that(...)</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/harmonic-order/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Harmonic Order</a>, <a class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Relevance, The Fallacy of</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>The fallacy that the efficiency of a complex system can be sustained by purging the irrelevant.&lt;br /&gt;Living systems, given a chance, are exuberant. The &lt;em&gt;excess&lt;/em&gt; produced by a natural system—the supply of seed and larvae, the material abundance—would threaten to choke it if it were not for the predators which prune it and control the surplus, stimulating an even greater variety. There is a wildness here, a sense of inexhaustible invention, of not knowing when to stop.&lt;br /&gt;As the naturalist Gilbert White wrote to his friend Thomas Pennant in 1768, &lt;p style=&quot;padding-left: 30px;&quot;&gt;All nature is so full that that district has the(...)&lt;/p&gt;</div>" href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/relevance-the-fallacy-of/" data-mobile-support="0" data-gt-translate-attributes='[{"attribute":"data-cmtooltip", "format":"html"}]' tabindex="0" role="link">Relevance Fallacy</a>.</p> <a href="https://leanlogic.online/list-of-entries/">« Back to List of Entries</a> </div> <div style="clear:both"></div> <div class="thn_post_wrap wp_link_pages"> </div>   <div class="post_foot"> <div class="post_meta"> </div> </div>  </div>  </div>  <div class="author_box "> <div class="author_avatar"> <img width="100" height="100" src="https://leanlogic.online/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/david-fleming-100x100.png" class="avatar avatar-100 photo" alt="" decoding="async" loading="lazy" srcset="https://leanlogic.online/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/david-fleming-100x100.png 100w, https://leanlogic.online/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/david-fleming-150x150.png 150w, https://leanlogic.online/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/david-fleming.png 205w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 100px) 100vw, 100px" /> </div> <div class="author_inner"> <h5>David Fleming</h5> <div class="athor_desc"> Dr David Fleming (2 January 1940 – 29 November 2010) was a cultural historian and economist, based in London, England. He was among the first to reveal the possibility of peak oil's approach and invented the influential TEQs scheme, designed to address this and climate change. He was also a pioneer of post-growth economics, and a significant figure in the development of the UK Green Party, the Transition Towns movement and the New Economics Foundation, as well as a Chairman of the Soil Association. His wide-ranging independent analysis culminated in two critically acclaimed books, 'Lean Logic' and 'Surviving the Future', published posthumously in 2016. These in turn inspired the 2020 launches of both BAFTA-winning director Peter Armstrong's feature film about Fleming's perspective and legacy - 'The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation?' - and Sterling College's unique 'Surviving the Future: Conversations for Our Time' online courses. For more information on all of the above, including Lean Logic, click the little globe below! </div> <div class="athor_social"> <a class="auth_website" href="https://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/books/" target="_blank"><i class="fa-globe"></i></a> </div> </div> </div>     <div class="comments_template ">    <div id="respond" class="comment-respond"> <h3 id="reply-title" class="comment-reply-title">Comment on this entry: <small><a rel="nofollow" id="cancel-comment-reply-link" href="/glossary/lean-thinking/#respond" style="display:none;">Cancel reply</a></small></h3><p class="must-log-in">You must be <a href="https://leanlogic.online/wp-login.php?redirect_to=https%3A%2F%2Fleanlogic.online%2Fglossary%2Flean-thinking%2F">logged in</a> to post a comment.</p><p class='comment-form-subscriptions'><label for='subscribe-reloaded'><input style='width:30px' type='checkbox' name='subscribe-reloaded' id='subscribe-reloaded' value='yes' /> Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.</label></p> </div>  </div>  </div> </div>         </div> </div> </div> <a class="to_top "><i class="fa-angle-up fa-2x"></i></a>  <div class="footer_wrap layer_wrapper "> <div id="footer" > <div class="center"> </div>  <div id="copyright" class="soc_right"> <div class="center">  <div class="copytext"></div>  <div class="foot_right_wrap">  <div id="footer_menu" class=""><div class="menu-footer"><ul id="menu-footer" class="menu"><li id="menu-item-4420" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-4420"><a href="https://leanlogic.online/bibliography/">Bibliography</a></li> <li id="menu-item-4421" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page menu-item-4421"><a href="https://leanlogic.online/glossary/">Dictionary</a></li> </ul></div></div>   <div class="foot_soc"> <div class="social_bookmarks bookmark_simple bookmark_size_large"> <a target="_blank" class="ast_fb" href="https://twitter.com/leandictionary"><i class="fa-facebook"></i></a> </div></div>  </div> </div> </div>  </div> </div>  <script type="text/javascript"> jQuery('#ss360-layer').bind("DOMSubtreeModified",function(){ console.log('changed'); 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