‘Battleship Lean’ sets sail: an allegory tale

“Battleship Lean” is fully loaded with every initiative, terminology and genealogy ever associated with “lean” or any of its sister or in-law or neighbor entities in the business process improvement realm, including TQM, TPS, TPM, TWI, TOC, JIT, VSM, VOC, WCM, OEE, QRM, KPI, DFMA, DOE, 3P, takt, kaizen, kanban and Six Sigma to name a few.

USS or HMS or non-designated Battleship Lean sails out armed with a full complement of heavy artillery, with no enemy (now or later) in sight, to escort convoys of swift, lean-reliable boats across placid seas (lean under little risk or danger). Battleship Lean’s officers and crew are external and internal consultants and facilitators wise in one or many or all of the aforementioned armaments.

While steaming across the waters, with careful and meticulous charting of those waters en voyage, Battleship Lean’s trumpeters frequently blow TAPS (Think Analyze Plan Study).

The crews of Battleship Lean’s entourage of fleet boats sometimes hear “Taps” played, but have universally adopted and painted on their hulls the words, “Just Do It.” And each also flies pennants proclaiming slogans such as “We Do Quick Setup!” or “Cells R Us” or “Queues Are Bad News!”

Between voyages, officers of Battleship Lean meet in conference halls with various members of convoy boats, as well as vessels hung up in drydock. The conferences revolve around PowerPoint battles, leading to medal-awarding ceremonies to honor themselves and convoy and drydock vessels and crews for battle readiness.

The sorting out of best candidates for medals actually begins earlier, with Battleship Lean’s officer and crew members amassing evidences of lean readiness. That effort features keyword searches in scholarly, branded and pedantic media. When favored keywords – including kaizen, mapping, belts and any of the lean-famous Japanese words – are found, Battleship Lean’s awards committee drills down to unearth context. They are especially interested in keywords linked to results, such as number of kaizens or value-stream maps completed; how many green belts and black belts have been certified; and frequency of “going to the gemba.”

But many fleet boats are not so strong in those indicators, their crews preferring to highlight instead such results as reductions in customer lead times, nonconformities, changeover times and the like. The awards committees do express their admiration for such improvements, but tend to withhold medals because “they aren’t doing it right” and “they’re just using lean tools.”

The moral of this short scenario is that effective lean does not require battleship-magnitude guidance, intervention or handholding. To go lean is to simplify through removal of excesses. Lean relies on deproliferation, downsizing, shortening the flow paths in both time and distance – and doing it oneself. Its single essential, off-line activity is training – but not in lean-isms whose primary purpose is to think, analyze, plan and study, or to foster “lean literacy.”

Rather, first and foremost, the training must be in the methodologies of lean that act directly to simplify the processes: cells, quick setup, queue limitation, quality at the source, associates keeping their own space and equipment glitch-free, multi-skilling with frequent job rotation, and so on. Training, often best in short bursts, may be in a classroom, outside visits somewhere to see simplification firsthand, watching it on video, studying it through electronic media or on-the-job through trial and error, including setting up a pilot-test to serve as a convincing example.

In the end, the moral boils down to the name adopted by the convoy of fleet boats: Just do it.