Enchanted by a “greenfield”

Last spring, on a trip to Central America, I spotted that wonderful landscape for lovers of improvement processes, a greenfield ¹. And I mean literally a Green Field ². It was behind a hospital, run by a non-governmental organization (NGO), where I was volunteering my time. The task assigned to me was to dispose of 15 years of personal medical records, in a country where there was no recycling. The standard way of disposing of waste in that country was simply to dump it into a ravine to form an uncovered landfill. But this, fortunately, was not acceptable for the medical records, which contained personal information about the hospital's former patients.

So, what to do? The right thing, obviously, would have been to create a lean recycling program following the model of the recently established Lean Institute Brasil (www.lean.org.br). (It is in a poor neighborhood near São Paulo and provides jobs to residents who have difficulty accessing the formal job market, for example, after having paid their debt to justice.) But all I had was one week to wrap up many activities at this NGO, so there was no way this could be done.

After some reflection, the “least bad” thing that could be done was to burn the records. So I briefly sat down with the hospital's warehouse manager (who had kept these records in an overcrowded storeroom) and a small group to figure out how to do it. The manager suggested we use the open field of short grass behind the hospital, since there was no incinerator on the grounds.

In the spirit of “go and see” and “ask why,” we went to the field and I asked the small team what we should do. They answered that we should remove the records from the folders (which could be reused), spread them on the ground and burn them. Simple. But this soon proved to be completely inefficient, unless we were prepared to wait for the documents to burn page by page. Leaving several pages of documents burning on the ground produced a weak flame and the fire went out.

Fortunately, there was an oil drum in the trash pile in the corner of the field, along with some concrete blocks and a steel bar. Within a few minutes, we had created an incinerator and the team was very happy, dumping the records into the top of the drum. In fact, they were dumping piles of documents so energetically that the fire soon went out for lack of oxygen.

A second round of “go and see” and “ask why” led us to understand that the documents needed to be crumpled so that air could reach each page, not dumped in batches. And they needed to be fed into the drum steadily to exactly match the burn rate if we wanted to keep the fire going and minimize the time needed to complete the task. But how could this be done with the least effort? (It was a very hot day.)

The answer was to divide the work. One person removed the records from the folders, two others crumpled the papers and tossed them into the fire, and a fourth person stoked the fire with the steel bar to knock the ashes out of the record boxes. Meanwhile, if the barrel was out in the sun, located away from the nearest tree, but everyone stayed in the shade of the tree, we would most likely have a hot fire and a contented workforce. So, after a third round of experimentation to standardize and level the work, voila ³ ! We had created a lean destruction line and we all worked together at a steady pace, getting the job done in hours instead of days, as had been expected.

This was a small-scale but satisfying example of applying process thinking to work in the world. But what was really striking to me was how easy it was to create a relatively lean process almost instantly. The reason was that no inappropriate resources and no managers or teams who had carefully learned bad habits got in the way. (That situation, of course, is what most members of the Lean Community face every day.) Why couldn't it always be like this?

This summer, in Boston, I had a second experience that raised the same question on a much larger scale. Three young entrepreneurs called us to ask how a lean thinker would start a greenfield business. They invited me to a local test of the new restaurant chain for which they were raising funds, and we thought through the application of the lean mindset to the core processes of this business. These included employee selection and training, job design (including employees' daily work experience), logistics for receiving materials in stores and disposing of waste, creating new stores (because they want to grow fast, with a minimum of money invested in stores not yet open) and the customer's consumption process and experience (which interacts with the stores' production process and the employees' experience). In just a few hours, it was easy to think of ways to launch the business with robust lean processes that required fewer resources.

Why, I wondered, don't all new businesses start lean, instead of growing considerably before management realizes that key processes are broken or full of waste, interfering with continued growth and profitability? And in mature businesses, why don't all new products that require a new production and delivery process start lean right from the beginning?

The answer, I think, is that many of us in the Lean Community acquired our skills by reworking broken processes. And perhaps we don't even have the financial and psychological inclination: it takes us much less effort to do the work right from the start than to do kaizen as rework to make it right much later.

But, above all, I think we have never learned to get through to the start-up entrepreneur of a new business, or to the chief engineer leading a team launching a new product, along with its accompanying production process. These people usually have only a faint notion of the importance of rigorous process design and the power of a truly lean process right from the start. And most of the people I have talked to are convinced that creating a lean process from the start would cost more and take more time. I am sure these views are based on ignorance and lack of reflection, but until we start the conversations to explain why, a great opportunity for the Lean Community and for society will be wasted.

I am now engaged in several “system design” experiments to create new lean processes in order to address new or changing needs of consumers and society; and I hope to do my part in raising awareness by publishing these experiments. I hope, too, that you will reflect on this important question, so that we can all create more value, with fewer rework processes in brownfields ⁴, that should have started out and stayed a brilliant green.

P.S. By coincidence, this is my hundredth e-letter to the Lean Community since I began writing them in September 2001. And it is also the last. A press release went out as this e-letter was sent, announcing that I will retire as leader of the Lean Enterprise Institute on September 27 and will be succeeded by John Shook.
I will have a new role as Senior Advisor ⁵ to LEI, and my involvement with the Lean Community will be as intense as ever. But the time has come for John to take on the leadership role, including the monthly
e-letters. To mark the transition, John and I will co-author the next e-letter at the end of September as John moves from Senior Advisor at LEI to Chairman ⁶ and CEO ⁷ and I do the reverse. He will then be in touch every month with his observations and ideas for the future.

I have truly loved writing these e-letters and loved even more taking the gemba walks on which my letters were based. As long as I am involved with the Lean Community (which I believe I will be for years), I will always be taking gemba walks. I hope our paths continue to cross along the way.

Notes from the Portuguese translator:
1 – Greenfield is a new production plant, providing the opportunity to introduce lean working methods into a new work culture in which the inertia of the past is not a barrier.
2 – When the author says Green Field (literally, a green field) he is making a pun on the word Greenfield, giving us the connotation that a Green Field is an excellent work environment, where there are lean methods.
3 – Voila is a French expression meaning “here it is” or “there you go”. See more at: michaelis.uol.com.br .
4 – Brownfield is a production facility usually managed according to the philosophy of mass production.
5 – Senior Advisor is a synonym for Senior Counselor.
6 – Chairman is a word also used in Brazil, synonymous with president.
7 – CEO (Chief Executive Office) is an English-language term that means the highest position in a company. In Portuguese, it is equivalent to executive director, general director or president.