The lean response to uncertainty
For a few of us, uncertainty is a blessing. The co-authors of “Raise the Bar”, Nicolas Chartier and Guillaume Paoli, saw the opportunity of the Internet and, in 20 years, built a € 1.4 billion business from scratch. They pioneered the industrial-scale refurbishment of used cars and the shift to a more sustainable circular economy. I have seen them go into frightening crises (they created the company right after the tragedy of September 11 and, since then, have gone through industry crises, from “diesel gate” to the Covid-19 pandemic), but somehow they saw the opportunities, pulled their teams along and emerged stronger.
In the last six months, the car market has changed drastically, with far fewer vehicles being produced as a result of disruptions in the supply chain and in semiconductors. It is fascinating to watch Nicolas and Guillaume take the blows, look for a way out and keep their teams focused: customers and employees first and, only afterwards, worry about everything else.
Unfortunately, most of us are not like that. Uncertainty hits us in many ways. It paralyzes us. It makes us doubt ourselves and our choices. When we can no longer see where things are going or whether we will come out on top, it is easy to give up and just react to day-to-day events. Uncertainty erodes our resilience, makes us prone to mood swings and feelings of sadness, and feeds our anxieties. Our brains need to know an outcome – even if it is a bad one –, or our stress responses go wrong. Researchers, for example, have found that the fear of losing one's job affects a person's health more than actually losing it.
We are goal-oriented creatures. Uncertainty obscures the future, and suddenly we can see nothing positive in current trends. When every trend you look at shows some terrible development, it is natural to feel that all possible outcomes are bad and that there is no way out. How do you plan, set goals and chart a path if there is no visible hope?
Should we focus on one isolated outcome or another and ignore the rest? Easy to say, but hard to do for open-minded, socially aware people.
The point is to create a sense of purpose without a clear vision of where to go because, well, there is no way of knowing where things are heading in general. The lean answer is to cultivate the spirit of challenge in directions, not in the destination. We usually define the word “better” as a “better place”: we are here, but we would like to be there. Athletes visualize themselves winning. Entrepreneurs visualize themselves successful. Employees visualize their careers, and so on. Uncertainty takes this away, because it is hard to visualize everything working out. However, lean teaches us to define the word “better” as “better at some things”.
For example, we know from history that productivity is always a good thing. Seventy years of lean experience show that productivity is built layer by layer, first by improving safety (for customers and employees), then quality, and then by reducing lead times and eliminating all the other unnecessary costs that are revealed by the efforts on the first three.
The thing is, we don't know what a safer workplace should look like (if we knew, we would already have implemented it immediately). We need to find out. Along the way, we can measure, question, analyze and improve, until safety is better and we see a safer workplace gradually appearing before our eyes. Likewise, we don't know what “better quality” means. First, because it is hard to find out whether we are doing the “right thing” – what customers really value, what they want most –, and it is equally hard to know whether we are doing it right and to identify what we are doing wrong. But asking ourselves these questions every day allows us to see what better-quality products and processes look like.
The same goes for lead time – or sustainability. In the current tsunami of bad news about climate change, it is hard to imagine any kind of positive future, but we can certainly think of ways to make things better now and see where that takes us: we can avoid the excessive use of machines that consume non-renewable energy; we can find ways to reduce consumables, such as water and rare materials; we can design products to last longer and consume less. We don't need to know what “better” will look like in order to strive to be better every day.
A decade ago, my father Freddy and I discussed in the book “The Lean Manager” how to draw a “North Star”, a list of dimensions of “what cannot be missing” in order to improve, whatever the circumstances.
If I could change something in that picture, I would add environmental sustainability (we clearly did not have that in view at the time), but the logic remains the same. Regardless of whether you can draw a vision of what “better” looks like, you can better define how to improve on key dimensions. The trick is to make sure that each dimension corresponds to a “typical problem”, as my father would say, a problem that is built into your activity, a feature, and not a bug in your business model. Safety will always need to be improved, as will quality, and so on.
Even when we are not born entrepreneurs with a talent for spotting opportunities in chaos, we do not need to be paralyzed by uncertainty, nor procrastinate endlessly in the name of not knowing. Some things we do know, no matter how murky and changeable the environment. There are some key dimensions of what we do that we need to improve – typical problems that will always be present in our chosen profession. By committing to improving them, step by step, in the spirit of kaizen, we resolve to build a better future, even if we feel blind. Being lucid about where the current trend is taking us and accepting that it doesn't look good need not forbid us the optimism of thinking that the Gods help those who help themselves. By improving the key dimensions, we change the state of play, and new and unexpected good things can happen. And hopefully, they will happen. This is the point of hope – you don't need to know in order to hope, as long as you see a path, and you don't need a clear destination to have a direction.
The lean spirit of challenge is to recognize concrete challenges to respond to and to move forward in a spirit of hansei, of acknowledging our own mistakes and correcting what we can, step by step. Uncertainty is a burden. It makes plans seem silly and achievements seem pointless, and it undermines our will to act. Only if we let it. The beauty of lean thinking is that, as we used to say, the room for improvement is the biggest room. We don't need a roadmap or a brilliant vision. We need to face our problems of today, try countermeasures and make things better – and watch how new creative solutions emerge from the darkness. Kaizen first, and vision later.
