Study your organisation as a system

Thanks to Mark for encouraging me to listen to this great podcast of John Seddon rethinking “Lean” and going back to its roots in the Toyota / Japanese miracle

Some notes:

• Customer pull, worker pull. Let workers improve (and own!) the processes.
• Let the problems you encounter determine the processes you set up.
• The measures in use must relate to the customer (“For any flow, we measure the end to end timing as it is experienced by the customer”).
• Let demand drive the system. Which kinds of demand represent value, which waste (that determines your response).
• Study your organization as a system

Really fantastic and very valuable for working out what I have been learning over the last two or three years.

I remember trying this out before though. “Study your organization as a system.” But what if you discover a system that is not consonent with how the organization represents itself to its customers, or worse (and more likely) to itself.