We had a management meeting yesterday and we were discussing the word Lean and how, in some areas, it has lost its value because people associate it with 'a bit of process mapping' and when this fails to deliver results, they want to move onto 'Agile' or 'Leagile' or 'Lean Sigma' etc.
We had a long discussion around whether we should look to change the message we put out to Manufacturing businesses and the NHS, partly because most good Lean people use a 'hybrid approach' which will draw appropriate tools from Lean, Six Sigma, Agile etc as required by the situation.
After a circular discussion we reached an interesting conclusion which was that we needed to maintain the word 'Lean' in all our work, but start stressing that it is a hybrid approach, as without the Lean word people would struggle to 'pin down' what you are doing.
However, it never fails to amaze me that people are so quick to write off improvement approaches so quickly, just because they have had problems with it themselves - and how quickly even the approaches with the highest impact (such as Lean) can quickly lose their cachet with some people.
What do you think?
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