Abnormality at a Glance: Mastering Lean Thinking

In the pursuit of excellence, organisations have turned to Lean principles to streamline processes, reduce waste, and increase efficiency. While Lean tools and methodologies are well-known for their ability to drive continuous improvement, true mastery of Lean goes beyond superficial implementation. It lies in understanding and embedding abnormality at a glance into workplaces, enabling quick problem identification and resolution.

What is abnormality at a glance?

John Shook, former Toyota executive and author of “Managing to Learn” emphasises the value of abnormality at a glance as a fundamental lean concept. He argues that true mastery of Lean involves training oneself to effortlessly recognise abnormalities in a workplace. In other words, I should be able to stand in one place and immediately see or hear where the next abnormality is. By abnormalities, we mean anything that prevents someone from successfully completing their standard work or required operation. These could be mura, muri, muda, or any other inefficiencies that hinder optimal performance.

In this cycle, lean thinking hinges itself on being able to create clear standardised work connected to your purpose. Understand what each person does to add value to the customer, understand the difference between normal and abnormal, and build skills and habits in your people to be able to logically see and act upon the abnormalities.

Build your systems and processes to allow you to see abnormalities quickly, and most importantly, be able to follow a repeatable and logical behavioural pattern to understand the problem and its causes in detail, and therefore understand better how to solve it.

All in all, it perpetually comes back to the point I always try to drive home with my clients, lean is not fundamentally about improvement, it’s about learning. You can only solve a problem when you recognise that you have one, and then have the right skills to be able to tackle that problem logically.

How do we create abnormality at a glance?

Lean tools and visual management techniques play a crucial role in creating abnormality at a glance and facilitating deeper learning into your organisation. Let’s delve into some brief examples:

• Andon: An Andon system incorporates visual and audible alerts to draw immediate attention to abnormalities. It acts as a visual signal, indicating that a problem has occurred and requires a response. Andon is an obvious and physical demonstration of abnormality at a glance by handing the responsibility of identifying problems straight to the team members and enabling them to become problem solvers in their own right.
• Kanban: Kanban is – in short – a ‘signal’ to indicate when more production or the next process can start or should stop based on customer demand. “Kanban might stop the process!” is something that often comes up in a debate or on the list of disadvantages in the CI textbook, when instead I’d argue that this is an advantage in many ways. Kanban puts the responsibility and visualisation of value into the front line’s hands. Line stoppages or issues with Kanban are often just trying to show you where the next abnormality in your system is. You can choose to ignore it, continue to produce defects, overproduce, or work overtime to fulfil customer demand… or we can stop to see the problem first-hand at the gemba and go on a journey and learn how the system got there in the first place (and hence understand how to solve it). This goes back it I4Excellence’s ‘invest to improve’ concept linked at the bottom of this page.
• 5S: All about workplace organisation and tidy stations so that everything is easy to access, correct? Well, in part, but once again let’s think about it from a learning perspective. 5S is equivalent to ‘generate clear standard’ in Fig 1, by making it clean and giving everything a clear place, it allows me to better understand when an abnormality occurs. 5S effectively slaps me in the face when I see missing 5S items, and the response being either to “simply replace it” or just “go and find it then put it back”. In one single quick action we have circumvented what 5S was trying to tell us in the first place… why is the item missing in the first place?

Each tool does in its own right help improve efficiency and reduce waste, but I want you to begin to explore beyond the superficial benefits of the textbook and look deeper into how it is forcing all of your people to learn more about the system you are in and how it helps your customer.

The tools themselves don’t fix anything, only you can do the fixing. Show respect for people and enable them to become engaged in understanding your processes and how they help the customer.

Think of lean sometimes as the mirror being held up to your organisation and you need to provide team members with the ability to act on the problems it reflects.

The list of lean concepts could go on. For those who are more aware of the myriad of Lean ‘tools’, think about Heijunka, Jidoka, Just-in-time etc. and begin to look at why these concepts really exist beyond the surface waste elimination.

Two halves of the battle

The ability to perceive abnormalities at a glance is instrumental in identifying problems early on. When abnormalities are readily apparent, team members can quickly respond and address them before they escalate into larger issues. Allow team members to become proactive problem-solvers and contribute to a culture of continuous improvement. By fostering a heightened sense of awareness, abnormality at a glance ensures that potential problems are spotted in their infancy, leading to more efficient and effective problem-solving.

Remember however that recognising a problem however is only half the battle; the other value lies in the ability to respond and solve it effectively to achieve this, organisations must provide a structured problem-solving methodology to build habits with the right sensei’s (coaches) and training to make people better problem solvers. If you want to see how easily our brains trick us into fast responses, you need only look at Daniel Kahneman’s systems 1 vs systems 2 thinking, something I reference in most of my work.

The practice of abnormality at a glance encourages individuals to challenge the status quo and think differently. As human beings, our brains possess remarkable neuroplasticity—the ability to rewire and form new neural connections. By consistently exposing ourselves to abnormal situations and training ourselves to spot deviations, we expand our cognitive capacity and foster new ways of thinking. This can lead to innovative solutions, creative problem-solving, and an overall culture of continuous improvement within an organisation. You can describe this process as ‘acting your way to a new way of thinking’.

In Summary

Organisations can create environments where abnormalities are instantly seen, leading to proactive problem identification and resolution. However, being able to see a problem is only valuable if employees possess the skills and knowledge to respond and solve it effectively. By combining abnormality at a glance with effective problem solving, organisations can drive continuous improvement campaigns further.

• Every problem is an opportunity, and you are surrounded by problems, I am certain.
• Don’t see problems so much as a negative, but as a door to go and understand more about how your processes work synonymously.
• Embrace the abnormal and embark on a journey that transforms how we think about improvement and think about how we need to learn before we act.
• Train your systems 2 thinking. Allow abnormality at a glance to help you know where to look.