Why bother with lean if we are all doomed?

What is the point of lean if everything is going to hell anyway? In fact, this is exactly the point of lean thinking! The world is not going to hell, it's just that no one is at their best in this moment of global panic.  

A fairly robust theory over the last twenty years has been that, in a challenging situation, you can adopt one of two attitudes:

• A growth mindset — learning is useful — what we learn will make things better; learning is possible; we can learn what we don't currently know; setbacks are learning experiences, and obstacles will be overcome. 
• A fixed mindset — learning is a waste of effort — even if it were useful, there is no time or nothing to learn that would help us now; learning is impossible — even if it were possible, learning is too hard and demands too much; the only way to succeed is to play it right, always looking smart and never dumb. 

A growth mindset leads to consistently better results. The basic premise of lean is that, if you surround yourself with growth-mindset people — think of Samuel Smiles's book “Self-Help”, which was so important to Sakichi Toyoda in the 1880s —, then you will create a culture of continuous improvement with the right visual tools to foster and support independent thinking. 

That is, of course, assuming self-improvement is worthwhile. In any crisis, our brains fill up with very strong emotions, such as fear, conviction, conformity and despondency. These emotions feel — and are — real. 

• Fear makes you want to act now, either ignoring the problem or lashing out with full force. Fear makes you feel you need to do something:  run and hide, or fight back and try to scare it off by doing something so outrageous that it will make the whole situation go away. 
• Conviction, the strength of your belief in something, is also a powerful emotion. Reason is about considering options and weighing their pros and cons. When only one path seems possible, and there is no doubt that it is the right path, reason ceases to exist. The feeling that there is only one way to see things is an emotion in itself. It leads to anger and frustration that other people can't see that this is the only way. 
• Conformity is another powerful driver. Going against the group around you and risking having it turn against you causes pain in our brains similar to physical pain. Like sheep that jump in front of a car to join their companions on the other side of the road, we have a strong need to prove that we belong to our group, which expresses itself as escalation — we feel the need to show that we are doing more, not less. Much of the banality of evil comes from our innate need to prove to authority figures or groups we belong to that we demonstrate it concretely. 
• Despondency also hits hard when we lose our will after losing hope or courage, and we feel there is nothing to do but let events unfold and take us wherever they will. We have all experienced moments of dismay when we despair about the possible outcomes and feel deeply discouraged, helpless, and lose all self-confidence. 

Having said that, even in a crisis, emotions must be counterbalanced, such as empathy, a sense of fairness and curiosity. The smart part of our brain keeps working even when it is full of fight-or-flight reactions. 

• Empathy means feeling for — and with — someone close to you. We can agree with the need to quarantine to reduce COVID-19 contamination, but feel very angry about unnecessary and unfair restrictions when a close friend is stuck far from home with no way to get back. 
• A sense of fairness is the best expression I have found for the need to do the right thing and in the right way, rather than self-righteousness. We usually have a good hunch when we are acting stupidly or like jerks and, when we calm down a little, we have a great need to set things right and find the right solution to an irritating problem. 
• Curiosity is always there when something new or unexpected catches our attention, no matter  what else is going on. Anything unexpected that interrupts our thought process (which is often overloaded with our panicked emotions and beliefs in a crisis) will shift attention to this new fact. We can then choose to pursue it or dismiss it as irrelevant. Confusion rarely does us good, but it is a premise for exploration — getting used to feeling confused is, in fact, a good thinking practice. 

This means that, in any moment of panic, we are tossed back and forth by a bunch of confused and conflicting emotions and never know exactly how we will react. This is where lean thinking helps: think of it as a brain-rebooting machine. 

Lean thinking offers a deliberate framework for thinking things through properly: who are the customers? How does our customer base feel? How will the logistics flow be disrupted? With what concrete situations will people need help? What team activities can we sponsor? 

Who are the customers? In a confusing panic situation, who are the people we should be most concerned about? How do we keep them safe and continue to deliver quality and care? Simply asking these questions tends to take our eyes off protecting the status quo at all costs (if there is a crisis, the status quo is already gone) and to think about who we need to help first. Certainly, with the COVID-19 epidemic, we should be most concerned about the people who have fallen ill, who are probably terrified and feeling guilty for having become involuntary vectors. If we don't do this, we risk seeing them ostracized, which is not an outcome we will be proud of later. 

How do we maintain mutual trust with our base? Our team, our company's employees and the people we work with will probably be as affected as we are. What do we need to do to reassure them that our reactions will be competent and inclusive? What are the critical systems we need to keep running so that they can do their part? What sensible activities do we want to engage in to minimize panic? 

With the current horrible pandemic, Adam Kurchaski's rules of contagion¹ are duration (how long does the carrier remain contagious?), opportunities (how many people do they meet in their social circle?), transmission probability (how easy is it to catch the disease?), susceptibility (how many people are left to infect) — which means that spread can be drastically reduced by 1) staying home in case of fever, 2) avoiding crowds. 3) coughing into your elbow and 4) sanitizing and washing your hands after touching surfaces in public areas. Obviously, forcing people to stay home all the time will result in this containment — but at what cost? 

Where will logistics fail? Lean thinking then leads us to consider its two pillars. First, what are the risks of disrupting supply chains and how will we manage that? What are the critical components that failed first? How do we secure sources? What emergency stocks do we need to build up without drowning in unnecessary inventory? What alternative supply routes can we imagine? 

How do we set up the help chain? What kinds of concrete problems are people likely to encounter, and how will we reinforce jidoka? What specific help chain can we think of so that no one faces a problem alone? Is it a help chain? Or a hotline? Information on social behaviors? How do we communicate intelligently and continuously? 

What team activities do we need to support? What kind of concrete activities should our teams focus on to channel their energies into positive next steps? We can organize support for affected team members, organize the supply of disinfectant material, set up online systems for working from home, run training on what is happening, and so on. A feeling of control and competence will certainly help people get out of their bubbles and gain autonomy — as well as genuinely help.

One thing I learned many years ago when I was a green skipper: in a crisis, first don't make things worse. Take a mental pause (yes, yes, it's a storm, and chaos is near), list the options, think about what your crew is like and what the logistics are like, develop a plan, explain it in simple steps, stay flexible when things don't go as you expected. Easy on paper, hard in real life. 

Practicing lean thinking every day means reinforcing our beliefs in better results on a daily basis too — as we achieve seemingly impossible things, we learn by doing so that: 1) we can make things better, for real, and 2) the solutions that solve the problem are never apparent at the start (although they seem obvious when we look back). It is precisely when things seem hopeless that warm hearts and cool heads make the difference — and lean thinking is most relevant. 

The only certainty we have when we read about previous epidemics, whether lethal viruses or viral financial crashes, is that the experts of the time were largely wrong (and the only guy who figured it out is ridiculed and shunned — even if he is exalted much later) and that collective reactions tend to be inefficient, destructive and completely baffling when you read about them after the events. Of course, this is not particularly helpful when you are deep in a crisis, but it is a good reminder that the feelings of “all is lost”, “nothing can save us now”, “the solutions are simple; why don't people apply them?” and “there is nothing I can do but wait” are just that… feelings, not thinking. 

Applying the lean thinking framework, especially when you don't feel the need or desire to do so, will not give you any answers, but it will reboot the frontal cortex and show that no defeat is final (just as no success is complete) and that the whole point of learning is the belief (yes, the rational belief) that we will discover new ways to solve problems and move forward. Lean thinking was not invented for when everything is working. It is most useful precisely when all seems lost. Once their brains recover from panic-driven emotions, people are smart and mean well, so they will soon find a way — particularly with a smart method for thinking things through. 

In a panic situation, the fixed mindset shows up because we feel there is nothing we can learn fast enough to save us. Leaders with fixed-mindset opinions come to the fore. And things go from bad to worse. 

When we look back, crises are, in fact, the time when smart people figure things out and when you can learn precisely because you are stimulated and focused — I haven't learned so much about epidemiology since my family was hit by H1N1 in 2009 and during the equally contagious Lehman Brothers banking collapse. In the end, a growth mindset is what keeps us moving forward, both in good times — with continuous improvement — and in bad ones, by not making things worse and figuring out a way forward. Lean thinking is the framework to support and underpin a growth-mindset attitude. We need it now. 

Footnote 1: Kucharski, Adam. The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread - and Why They Stop. Wellcome Collection, Main edition, February 2020.