In 1988, John Krafcik wrote an article in the Sloan Management Review. In his article he introduced two new terms: lean and buffered production systems.* Since then, Lean has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of people, including me. Rather than focus on being lean, however, my intent is to help people reduce the buffer. So what is the buffer?
Any situation that involves two or more people interacting with each other will have buffers; they're inevitable. The thoughts and ideas we have in our head simply cannot be fully communicated (fully!) to someone else.
But while buffers can never be eliminated, they can always be reduced, and that's where the work comes in. One must be able to see a buffer before attempting to reduce a buffer and there will always be more than one way to see a buffer.
There is no right answer, there is only right effort.
My hope is that by experiencing different frameworks and perspectives in a given situation, we can all pick up different ways to see the buffers around us. If we can see them, we can try to reduce them. And in doing so, we can see the world around us a little bit more clearly.
Wherever possible I will try to include source material. I welcome comments and questions.
*Krafcik observes in a footnote that this typology builds on previous work done by other researchers who used fragile and robust. It's little wonder that lean caught on better than fragile in English.
Any situation that involves two or more people interacting with each other will have buffers; they're inevitable. The thoughts and ideas we have in our head simply cannot be fully communicated (fully!) to someone else.
But while buffers can never be eliminated, they can always be reduced, and that's where the work comes in. One must be able to see a buffer before attempting to reduce a buffer and there will always be more than one way to see a buffer.
There is no right answer, there is only right effort.
My hope is that by experiencing different frameworks and perspectives in a given situation, we can all pick up different ways to see the buffers around us. If we can see them, we can try to reduce them. And in doing so, we can see the world around us a little bit more clearly.
Wherever possible I will try to include source material. I welcome comments and questions.
*Krafcik observes in a footnote that this typology builds on previous work done by other researchers who used fragile and robust. It's little wonder that lean caught on better than fragile in English.
No comments:
Post a Comment