Lean philosophy can also change Brazilian education; companies and society as a whole would gain greatly

Developing the ability to solve problems is one of the pillars of the lean philosophy. Ensuring that everyone knows how to identify, define and resolve failures and errors in companies through the scientific method is more important than simply copying the tools, which were created for specific situations.

We frequently receive requests from companies to help them develop this skill at various levels: leadership, middle management and operators.

We see that the gap is enormous. Almost everyone has a huge tendency, when faced with a difficulty, to try to jump to the solution without understanding what problem they want to solve. Without a minimum understanding of the current situation, because they do not collect facts and data. This generates great waste, with actions that are usually costly, that do not solve the problems and that repeat themselves indefinitely.

Why does this happen?

First and foremost, because of how people are educated.

Let us look, for example, at professionals with a college degree. Companies receive people who come from a university teaching model whose foundations were laid more than a century ago and reflect the practices of Taylor's scientific management.

This outdated model uses standardized content, delivered in batches, in which the areas of knowledge are treated the same way as organizational silos, with practically no interaction between disciplines. The focus is the teacher, who transmits information in a one-way fashion, based on knowledge that was often generated decades ago.

This is what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, one of the most respected in the world, called “banking education” in the book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. It is the kind in which the teacher places himself on a higher level and “pours” content into the student, who is seen as a sort of “repository” that must absorb everything, without critical thinking.

This worked reasonably well a century ago, when knowledge evolved much more slowly than it does today. Professionals learned to reproduce a technique, and it would be used in that way, possibly throughout their entire professional lives, with little evolution.

But this picture changed long ago - and it keeps changing ever more rapidly. The knowledge students will need and the problems they will be exposed to throughout their professional lives are constantly evolving and increasingly require a multidisciplinary approach.

Well, professionals arrive at companies with this old education. And what happens? Companies try to make up for this deficiency and invest in development programs, but most of them reproduce the same specialized, siloed model.

When companies begin their lean transformation, it becomes evident how much they need to change in this game, developing true problem solvers. And they realize how much time and investment this will demand. Companies will always need to invest in continuing education, but what they have been doing looks more like a huge amount of rework.

Academic and educational circles have long been discussing models that seek an education better suited to the new times. These are ideas such as focusing on the student's learning process, flexibility for diverse situations and needs, developing the skills to seek out and generate new knowledge, far more than repeating old ideas, breaking down disciplinary silos, using horizontal projects to solve concrete problems, etc. Interesting experiences exist, but unfortunately they are still exceptions. The bulk of education continues to follow the traditional model.

Changing this situation depends on the combination of many forces in society. It demands from educational institutions a deep reflection on the form and content of what is taught to students and greater integration with the society in which they will work. Which, incidentally, would bring greater employability as a consequence. From employers, whether companies, government organizations or NGOs, it requires getting closer to educational institutions so that, lean-style, they start to “pull” real demands for what they need in their professionals.

We in the lean community need to take a more active part in this debate, contributing concrete actions. We can help with several lean concepts which, discussed in a more intense interaction between companies and academia, could bring good ideas.

For example, imagine if the concept of value stream were systematically applied to planning each student's specific education, with his or her effective participation. Jeffrey Liker and Michael Hoseus, in the book Toyota Culture, apply this concept to people development. The analysis would seek to identify and eliminate everything that did not add value toward this goal, that is, waste. This analysis would certainly show that many activities in a student's life during their course need to be changed or eliminated.

In companies, we know the revolution that takes place when we apply the concept of hoshin kanri to strategic planning: it breaks down organizational silos and generates an intense process of horizontal and vertical alignment. Current curricula clearly show that they were designed vertically, within watertight areas of knowledge. The planning of flexible curricula, with strong horizontal integration, could draw inspiration from hoshin methodologies.

What would really make a difference would be a complete change of method. Instead of repeating knowledge in a one-way fashion, it would be better to propose real needs for students to solve, developing true problem solvers with a structured scientific method, using PDCA and A3 thinking, and creating a pull system in which they, the students, would seek out the knowledge they need. They would do this by going directly to the gemba (where things happen) in companies, NGOs, etc. This would be the engine to boost productive capacity and accelerate technological innovation in our country.

This concept is not new in education. It is present, for example, in the theories of so-called “active pedagogy” or “active learning”, which see the student no longer as a mere “receiver” of knowledge but, instead, as a “seeker” who must go, on his or her own and in a highly engaged way, in search of the knowledge he or she needs. But this approach meets all kinds of difficulties in being used extensively.

One of the biggest difficulties lies in the way academic structures and incentives work, reinforcing the individualism of teachers, who aim to advance in a career along a specialized track. Devoting time to rethinking teaching and intensifying horizontal actions are not valued in current evaluation mechanisms. Work processes would have to change; for example, with practices such as multidisciplinary teaching-learning cells and perhaps with evaluations of teachers and students in shorter cycles, in the style of the agile methodologies applied in the digital world.

All of this would certainly require a new definition of the role of teachers, who would have to be trained for a new style of work. They would need to act much more as coaches, guiding students' education, proposing problems and acting in the same way lean leaders need to act: knowing how to ask the right questions, which will help the mentee reason and look for his or her own answers.

We have given these examples with reference to higher education. But if we think about basic education, a revolution would be needed. A variety of data show that the quality of education has been falling more and more in our country, and certainly several of the aspects discussed above would also apply to elementary education.

These are just reflections that we hope will serve as an invitation for everyone to think and act more on the subject. Many other similar ideas could be brought to light. For example, how can lean thinking contribute to the transformation of education? How can the lean community interact more with academia in the search for models that develop professionals for the future, emphasizing the ability to solve increasingly complex problems? How can your company develop programs in partnership with universities that would allow real problem-solving projects to be included in education and bring innovation?

If the lean community does not devote more attention to questions like these, we will go on complaining forever about the education of the professionals we receive. And we will also have to keep trying to rework the education of professionals through an enormous effort within each company, with great waste for society as a whole.

Abundant evidence has already shown that there is no developed nation with social well-being without quality education for its entire population. Brazil, unfortunately, has long been stagnant on this issue, and has even regressed in some respects. Lean concepts and practices can certainly bring elements that contribute to the debate and to existing initiatives aimed at improving this situation.