The difference between lean and systems thinking from the Vanguard Newsletter by John Seddon

I was asked by someone from a local authority: what is the difference between ‘lean’ and ‘systems thinking?  Having been on about it for years I was a bit surprised, but then I thought why should I be? Why should everyone know? So here, for others who have not read all the stuff on lean versus systems thinking, is what I wrote, maybe the simplest explanation:

“‘Lean’ was the word coined by Womack, Roos and Jones (in The Machine that Changed the World, 1990) to describe the Toyota Production System (TPS). The book brought the extraordinary achievements of the TPS to prominence. This led to the general assumption that if we apply the tools created in the TPS we will improve as it did. So the market for ‘lean’ grew.

But are you in the business of making cars at the rate of customer demand? Why should these tools be universal?

The TPS tools were developed to solve the problems they faced in developing a system to produce cars at the rate of demand. Do you have the same problems?

How did Taiichi Ohno (the man who created the TPS) teach people? Did he give them tools to solve problems they thought they had (as the lean tool-heads do?). No, he taught managers to study their work as a system, his favourite work was ‘understanding’. That’s what Systems Thinking does, it starts with studying. It leads to astonishing improvement. My current favourite: Portsmouth and their suppliers deliver repairs on the day and the time tenants want them, and they do so at half the repair cost. Just like the TPS, an economic benchmark.

Now for the tricky bit. ‘Lean as tools and projects’ appeals to managers. Managers think they know what their problems are and they think tools training and projects will be useful. Managers like the idea (promoted by the lean tool-heads) that services should be standardised (big mistake). If they do get improvement it is marginal, often they end up worse but they don’t know because they are still measuring the wrong things (lean tool-heads don’t question targets or activity measures for example, indeed they don’t question management philosophy).

My work has been the development of the Vanguard Method. It is a method that helps managers study service organisations as systems. On the basis of the knowledge gained, the system is re-designed; changing everything, roles, measures, procedures etc. The first step is leaders becoming curious about changing the way they think about the design and management of their services, for applying the method will change their thinking and hence the way everything is done.”