A lean look at racism

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Roberto Priolo: I believe lean thinking can truly help us make the world a better place, and this lofty goal involves eradicating discrimination. Although the connection between lean thinking and the Black Lives Matter movement is not immediately obvious, how do you think lean can contribute to the discussion on racism, inclusion and discrimination?

Michael Ballé: This is clearly not an easy topic — it is very emotional, and everyone has a different experience. My initial answer would be that, if you are not Black, this is the time to listen, not to talk. On the other hand, if we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem, so you are asking the right question: what can we do? 

Racism is rarely within the scope of the topics we discuss in lean, so it is hard to see where we can start, but I think we can start with hope. Lean itself was born from a meeting of Western and Eastern minds, which also had its tribal or racial politics. So, if we managed to overcome our differences to create a global movement, we can hope there is a deliberate element of inclusion in lean thinking that can help. 

Lean thinking is a discipline of asking questions instead of jumping to solutions; the more uncomfortable the problem, the more one person's solution will be another's discrimination. If we look at the core values of lean, what questions can we ask ourselves? 

1. Respect — How much effort are we really making to listen? To understand? To accept the weight and responsibility of history? It is easy to run away from questions to which we have no answers or which make us share a guilt of our own and a burden that we do not feel is directly ours. So the first lean questions to ask ourselves are: what does it mean to listen? Does the way we choose to listen go beyond our prejudices? And, if so, are we listening enough? The Black Lives Matter movement made me realize that I was not listening enough. I knew there was a problem, but I did not hear the size of the problem. Listening is not just about agreeing or disagreeing, but about questioning your own orientation — and your prejudices — regarding the problem. 
2. Teamwork — What are the joint problems we need to solve? This is a tricky question because, in many cases, not doing something can be seen as tolerance of what has been happening, and getting involved can be seen as condescension. The fact is that it is impossible to put yourself in someone else's skin, but we can make a greater effort to face this issue and help solve problems. For example, in any situation with two opposing extremes, do we deliberately switch places with the other and ask ourselves how we would react then? We need to be more than colleagues — we need to be allies and support one another. Concretely, this means we need to fight injustice more than we do, day after day.  
3. Go and see — Beyond what we see in the news, do we really look at the people of other ethnicities around us? Do we really look and listen to what they say and how they experience things? When people tell us “you can't understand,” it is easy to let it go and think “true, I can't; let's move on.” Instead, we can look at the situation rather than look away. After all, no problem can be solved without first understanding it intimately. 
4. Challenge — With such a difficult issue, the real challenge is to ask ourselves what our concrete goal is regarding racism and discrimination. I believe we all agree that all people have the same worth — and the same rights —, but it is easy to feel that concrete action is above us and that, as people who do not belong to the community, our involvement would not be welcome. The real question is: what goal do we set ourselves on this problem? In other words, what is our responsibility in this? With whom do we discuss it to see whether it makes sense? And how would our involvement be welcome? 
5. Kaizen — Where to start? What is the small action we can take today, concretely, to make the world more inclusive, less racist and free of discrimination? Big problems are solved by a continuous flow of small steps, so where is the first step? And the second? 

The challenge with racism is that, whatever we do, it is already too late. We cannot turn back time. We cannot adequately make up for the horrors committed by our ancestors. But what we can do is acknowledge them, take responsibility and, in the spirit of kaizen, seize every opportunity to make amends in practical ways. 

RP: Do you think lean can help, if only through its power to make uncomfortable conversations easier? 

MB: Yes. Respectful conversations are not necessarily the calmest and most peaceful ones. When people engage with a topic, they tend to become emotional about it, and that is a good thing (even if it is not always easy to deal with). The lean practice of having difficult conversations while building mutual trust and creating safe spaces for people to say things that go beyond what they really meant in the heat of the moment is definitely valuable when we are dealing with emotional and complex problems. 

The lean practice of having uncomfortable conversations can definitely help. I can better see the difficulty in bringing up the topic. Business people tend to think that social problems are beyond their competence and knowledge — clearly, they are not. We are humans first, and suits second. The question here is how we bring our skills to conversations that are hard to bear. First, we need to face the topic and start having the conversation — which is what you are doing. 

RP: How can our movement contribute to shaping a future for business that is more inclusive and tolerant? 

MB: Lean leadership is leading by example. It is a simple framework: every time we listen to a different or uncomfortable point of view and really support it, making the person feel included, we take a step in the right direction. Every time we close our ears and our minds to what does not make sense to us and simply move on, we take a step in the wrong direction. 

We can show respect. We can show that we listen to and support people when they need it. But we also need to create the circumstances in which people will feel comfortable speaking up, without which there will be no problem for us to listen to. The basic principle of lean is to show up every time the andon cord is pulled. When it comes to racism, we need to create that andon cord, to learn to recognize the problem and show up. 

Tribalism is a feature of our minds, not a bug. It will always be there — we, all of us, will unconsciously always favor people who look like us and talk like us. Consequently, cultures diverge not because people dislike being with different people, but because we hate being surrounded by difference. That is why signs of difference become visual cues, and that is why people who talk give more credit to people similar to them, and so on — something we know in lean as the West/East divide. 

Because lean thinking is so focused on joint problem solving across functional barriers, we can recognize the various groups we deal with and make a deliberate effort to reframe, clarify the common problem and the desired outcomes, and work on it together. That is what we are trained for. 

RP: Black people still have very limited access to leadership positions (as do women and members of other minorities). Have we done enough as a movement to change things? 

MB: No, certainly not. And I believe it is a matter of accepting the challenge. For example, I am very proud to say that Institut Lean France now has gender parity, and we have women as President, Director and Executive Director. However, as for the ethnic issue, I have to confess that we simply never asked that question — and we seriously need to. 

Promotion is essentially co-optation, so, unsurprisingly, the effect of “only talking to similar people” and “preferring similar people” operates at full force. The bias of choosing people with the same background is ubiquitous, a known fact in recruitment interviews under the mantra “will fit well in our culture.” The root cause is understanding groupthink — the tendency groups have to focus on cultural responses instead of focusing on solving the real problem. We need to understand the fundamental fact that, beyond the moral element, a plurality of backgrounds and thinking is simply essential for creative problem solving. 

In recruitment, I see no other way than to make a deliberate effort to counter it by actively seeking more diverse candidates — which is when we come to the chicken-and-egg problem of fewer minority candidates precisely because they are minorities. As a movement, I believe we really need to accept this challenge as a first step: not so much why there are few people belonging to minorities in our group, but where we can find more of them and invite them. 

RP: Just as in a lean transformation, bringing about change in the world will require leaders to change their mindset. What can we learn from lean thinking in this regard? How can we contribute to changing hearts and minds? 

MB: We can learn four things from lean thinking. First, direction management: setting ourselves the right challenge. When Toyota set itself the environmental challenge, it ended up developing the Prius, perfecting hybrid technology and then progressively equipping all its cars with hybrid engines. What is the challenge we want to set ourselves to recognize this present and very clear social challenge? 

Second, weak-point management: we can learn to recognize every time we fail to reach the ideal and are part of the problem, not the solution. For example, when it comes to hiring, I am not suggesting reverse discrimination and hiring someone because of their skin color. What I am suggesting is spending much more time considering candidates from diverse backgrounds than we usually do and asking ourselves how much effort we are making to counter the unconscious bias of talking to similar people. 

Third, change-point management: as you rightly said, mindsets need to change. In absolute terms, this is almost impossible. What is not impossible, however, is to look at concrete change points and progress from one to the next. Having recognized our weak points of inclusion or discriminatory reflexes, we can work to change things concretely. One difficulty with issues such as respect is that, even if you try, you will always be exposed to people's criticism for not doing enough. We need to accept this, face it and start with one change, deal with all the issues that change will bring to the surface and move on to the next one. 

Fourth, people development management: education through experience remains the path to change. I remember meeting a sociologist in South Africa who was responsible for a program  to train white South African police officers to stop brutalizing Black people. I was surprised to hear him say that where they succeeded in partnering Black and white officers, the situation quickly improved, but where they kept all-white units, nothing changed. The question for us is to create a flow of experiences so that people work together, solve problems together, support one another, learn to trust one another and forget their tribal fears of difference (a fear that is clearly acquired, since children do not have it). People learn and develop through repeated experiences, so are we doing enough to create this path of repeated experiences? 

These are extremely difficult and painful topics. We have all been to strange places where we look different, where everyone looks at us out of the corner of their eye, and no one speaks to us directly — can you imagine what it is like to live like that all the time? I don't know whether there are global solutions to these problems, but what I do know is that we can join the fight and reach out — at every opportunity. That we can do.