u/Informal-Tutor-8153

Something I see a lot with people (usually newer plant managers or founders) who are excited about lean and want to do it "right" ... they try to build the master plan first. Full current-state map, future-state map, multi-year roadmap, phase gates.... the works. Then six weeks later nothing has actually changed on the floor because they are still planning!

I made this mistake myself early on. Thought I needed a complete, defensible plan before I could touch anything. Turns out that's backwards, at least for how you start.

Here's the thing about problems on your floor (or in your process, if you're not literally manufacturing something): they are not evenly distributed. Picture a pyramid. Big wide base of simple, obvious problems: a tool that's never in the same place twice, a form that gets filled out three different ways, a handoff nobody owns. Small tip of genuinely hard, cross-functional, needs-real-analysis problems.

Most people start planning for the tip of the pyramid. You should start by clearing the base. It's not glamorous. It won't get you a case study. But it does two things a fancy roadmap doesn't: it gets you a fast, visible win, and it gets your people used to the idea that they're allowed to change how things work. That second part matters more than people think: a workforce that's never been asked to fix anything doesn't magically start solving problems just because you handed them a roadmap. They start because you let them fix something small and it stuck.

You don't need experts to start this way either. Lean, at the start, is closer to systematic common sense applied consistently than it is to a body of certified knowledge. Certifications and designations rarely matter... the deep tools matter later. At the start, they are often just an excuse to delay.

One caveat that I think matters and doesn't get said enough: this "start small, don't overplan" advice is for getting moving. It is not permission to stay tactical forever. At some point you do need the bigger picture. Otherwise you get a pile of disconnected local improvements that don't add up to anything at the system level. But that's a problem for month six, not week one.

For anyone who tried to build the full roadmap before doing anything, how'd that go? Did it ever actually launch, or did it die in the planning phase?

Something I see a lot with people (usually newer plant managers or founders) who are excited about lean and want to do it "right" ... they try to build the master plan first. Full current-state map, future-state map, multi-year roadmap, phase gates.... the works. Then six weeks later nothing has actually changed on the floor because they are still planning!

I made this mistake myself early on. Thought I needed a complete, defensible plan before I could touch anything. Turns out that's backwards, at least for how you start.

Here's the thing about problems on your floor (or in your process, if you're not literally manufacturing something): they are not evenly distributed. Picture a pyramid. Big wide base of simple, obvious problems: a tool that's never in the same place twice, a form that gets filled out three different ways, a handoff nobody owns. Small tip of genuinely hard, cross-functional, needs-real-analysis problems.

Most people start planning for the tip of the pyramid. You should start by clearing the base. It's not glamorous. It won't get you a case study. But it does two things a fancy roadmap doesn't: it gets you a fast, visible win, and it gets your people used to the idea that they're allowed to change how things work. That second part matters more than people think: a workforce that's never been asked to fix anything doesn't magically start solving problems just because you handed them a roadmap. They start because you let them fix something small and it stuck.

You don't need experts to start this way either. Lean, at the start, is closer to systematic common sense applied consistently than it is to a body of certified knowledge. Certifications and designations rarely matter... the deep tools matter later. At the start, they are often just an excuse to delay.

One caveat that I think matters and doesn't get said enough: this "start small, don't overplan" advice is for getting moving. It is not permission to stay tactical forever. At some point you do need the bigger picture. Otherwise you get a pile of disconnected local improvements that don't add up to anything at the system level. But that's a problem for month six, not week one.

For anyone who tried to build the full roadmap before doing anything, how'd that go? Did it ever actually launch, or did it die in the planning phase?

Long time lurker, first time actually writing one of these out instead of just reading answering to other people's war stories.

About twenty years ago I was running ops for a small manufacturer... a family business, second-generation owner, the kind of place where growth happened by throwing bodies at problems until it stopped working. One day the owner comes to me and says a major customer is going to walk if we don't get their orders out in three days. We had over 90 orders overdue, some by 20+ days. Average lead time from order to ship was 24 days! adding people had gotten us this far and it wasn't getting us any further.

That's when it actually hit me. we weren't too busy to fix the process. We were too busy because we'd never fixed the process. Two different things and I'd been treating them as the same thing for years.

Walked the floor properly for probably the first time with fresh eyes. One line was semi-organized. Everything else was chaos. No standard way to do anything. Nobody could tell you on any given day how many units we'd made, what got scrapped, what was actually open and due. We were going by whoever yelled loudest on the phone that week.

Here's the part that surprised me: we didn't need a black belt or a consultant to start. We started 5S in the one area that was already down for a broken machine, because we didn't have the luxury of stopping a healthy line to go "do lean" at it. Just cleaned it, organized it, gave everything a place. It looked almost embarrassingly simple compared to what I thought "lean transformation" was supposed to look like.

That embarrassingly simple thing is what got us moving. Within about aprox. 7 months we went from 24-day lead times to 97%+ on-time in 3 days or less... because a clean, standardized starting point is the only thing that makes the next problem visible. You can't see a deviation from a standard that doesn't exist yet.

The thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: you don't need the whole transformation mapped before you touch anything. You need one honest look at the floor and the willingness to start where you are, not where the textbook says you should be.

Curious what actually got other people's transformations moving

was it a crisis like mine, or did someone deliberately choose to start before things got that bad? And if it was a crisis, what was the first thing you touched?

Long time lurker, first time actually writing one of these out instead of just reading answering to other people's war stories.

About twenty years ago I was running ops for a small manufacturer... a family business, second-generation owner, the kind of place where growth happened by throwing bodies at problems until it stopped working. One day the owner comes to me and says a major customer is going to walk if we don't get their orders out in three days. We had over 90 orders overdue, some by 20+ days. Average lead time from order to ship was 24 days! adding people had gotten us this far and it wasn't getting us any further.

That's when it actually hit me. we weren't too busy to fix the process. We were too busy because we'd never fixed the process. Two different things and I'd been treating them as the same thing for years.

Walked the floor properly for probably the first time with fresh eyes. One line was semi-organized. Everything else was chaos. No standard way to do anything. Nobody could tell you on any given day how many units we'd made, what got scrapped, what was actually open and due. We were going by whoever yelled loudest on the phone that week.

Here's the part that surprised me: we didn't need a black belt or a consultant to start. We started 5S in the one area that was already down for a broken machine, because we didn't have the luxury of stopping a healthy line to go "do lean" at it. Just cleaned it, organized it, gave everything a place. It looked almost embarrassingly simple compared to what I thought "lean transformation" was supposed to look like.

That embarrassingly simple thing is what got us moving. Within about aprox. 7 months we went from 24-day lead times to 97%+ on-time in 3 days or less... because a clean, standardized starting point is the only thing that makes the next problem visible. You can't see a deviation from a standard that doesn't exist yet.

The thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: you don't need the whole transformation mapped before you touch anything. You need one honest look at the floor and the willingness to start where you are, not where the textbook says you should be.

Curious what actually got other people's transformations moving

was it a crisis like mine, or did someone deliberately choose to start before things got that bad? And if it was a crisis, what was the first thing you touched?