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For over 30 years companies have been relying on Lean thinking principles for driving successful business models to allow them to become more competitive in leading and winning the global economic and environmental marathon. Lean Thinking is a business methodology based on the history of Japanese manufacturing techniques which have been applied worldwide within many types of industries. It is a mindset – a way of viewing the world – that aims to handle work in a Lean manner.

Lean is a way of thinking about creating needed value with fewer resources and less waste. Lean practices begin with the work — the actions that directly and indirectly create value for the customer — and the people doing that work. Through ongoing experimentation, workers and managers learn by innovating in their work — be it physical or knowledge work — for increasingly better quality and flow, less time and effort, and lower cost using a systematic and continuous learning approach.

Beyond Lean Thinking (BLT) is learning how individuals, organizations, and the communities they live in and serve seek to live in balance with nature, in all ways great and small — by learning how to do better with less of everything.

Disruptive Innovation

Now, the time has come to take a “disruptive innovation” approach to addressing opportunities and challenges needed in business and the academic community to adapt business models for a post-pandemic era. The term “disruptive innovation” was popularized by the American academic Clayton Christensen, it has been called the most influential business idea of the 21st century.

A disruptive innovation process can take longer to develop than by the conventional approach and the risk associated with it is higher than the other more incremental, architectural, or evolutionary forms of innovations. Beyond business and economics disruptive innovations can also be considered to disrupt complex systems, including and business-related aspects. These dramatic changes will need to be led by a “disruptive instigator” (a person who brings about or initiates change) who can lead a team or organization over an extended period to create dramatic changes in accepted norms.

One such disruptive instigator was a founding member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence(AME), Robert “Doc” Hall, who dedicated much of his career to redefining business practices in ways that are feasible and transferable. For lasting change to occur, a new generation of vigorous learning leaders and thinkers must have the leading learning organizations providing them access to new best practice tools/processes and new paradigms that eschew outdated learning methods.

Beyond Lean Thinking

In 1992, Doc Hall wrote “The Soul of the Enterprise,” a critique of the system that led to an “unending book,” “Compression.” He contends that we need a major shift in business and economic practices to meet our challenges of the 21st century and proposes a general pathway – compression thinking. Compression thinking builds on, and integrates powerful models such as Lean, organizational learning, and sustainability.

The idea of Compression is much different than present economic concepts about how the world is evolving, and works to address global challenges, from population growth and limited resources to work processes and human footprints. Compression provides a working solution to begin converting organizations into vigorous learning enterprises, transforming individual and collective behaviors.

While the book does elucidate the problem, the main emphasis is on what leaders can do to change the mindset of stakeholders at all levels. Specifically, Hall shares how the Toyota model, the most successful and enduring manufacturing system ever implemented, can be applied, and adapted to help identify roots of problems, eliminate waste, and create a new vision along with the path to realizing that vision:

• We must rethink our perpetual devotion to old ideals such as continual growth and more are always better
• We need to recognize that we are quickly reaching the point of critical mass where the inequities of society will force the have-nots to take matters into their own hands
• We need to learn to learn more effectively, in terms of individuals, organizations, and processes
• We must embrace the paradigm culture shift required to implement lasting constructive change that we can live by

To implement the sort of changes that allow civilization to prevail rather than merely endure requires a resourcefulness and ingenuity beyond any the world has ever employed. Doc Hall shows us how to learn more effectively both as individuals and organizations, and in terms of processes. He invites us to rethink our perpetual devotion to old ideals and welcome the shift in thinking that must be our first and immediate step.

Doing Better with Less

We all know how integral lean has been in many organizations’ successes. In the future, economic survivability will require enterprises to combine both lean and green principles. These actions will require businesses to retool their thinking about how they become more sustainable.

Sustainability is a term that describes how to make human economic systems last longer and have less impact on ecological systems, and it particularly relates to the concern over major global problems relating to the depletion of natural resources and increased carbon emissions. More important are ways to make some unit of economic production for an entity – a business firm, a family household, a farm – more sustainable.

A sustainable enterprise is an integrated entity that focuses on not creating waste for starters versus just the elimination of waste while producing products and services. By minimizing the consumption of resources (human and natural capital) to effectively maximize the creation of value for its customers, stakeholders, natural order as much as possible or at the least do no harm and curtail the environmental impact to the communities. Human capital pertains to business practices relating to labor and the community and region in which a corporation conducts its business. Natural capital refers to sustainable environmental practices. Compression is all about “doing better with a lot less of everything” as reflected in these four guidelines.

Finite Earth: Seen from its surface, earth may seem infinite, but it isn’t. For practical purposes, our small dot in the universe is fixed in size. Therefore, its capacity to yield material to us is limited. Its capacity to absorb waste dumped into it is limited. If the earth is to take care of us, we must take care of it. This attitude is very different from regarding nature as a storehouse of resources to exploit, a dump for our garbage, and as an enemy to be conquered.

Symbiotic Thinking: Systems thinking is far from new. Systemic thinkers are always nosing into how things interrelate. Symbiotic thinking extends systems thinking to always include natural processes. For example, think far afield from any everyday experience, like examining your shoes. Where did they come from? What were they made from? Who made them? And how might nature have been affected, even on the other side of the earth? We can never know this in detail, but curiosity makes a huge difference in your thinking.

Organize for Learning (to be more effective): If we must live in balance with nature, learning to effectively do this is more important than being efficient, although incredible efficiency is sometimes necessary. Most work organizations promote continuous improvement and R&D, innovating to compete in a market. However, learning for effectiveness constantly questions the effects of our actions on nature and on all human stakeholders. Learning is emotional, not just intellectual.

Quality Over Quantity, always: Commercial quality is the composite of various attributes of a product or service: features, ease-of use, reliability, durability, and ease of disposition at the end of useful life — convenience, includes the quality of all life. We can have more convenience than the earth can stand. How can we re-use, re-purpose, restore, regenerate, recycle, and have a better balance with nature?

Moving Forward

Beyond Lean Thinking values processes over results. It opens minds to overcoming challenges, including unanticipated ones. This transformation will require becoming a “Vigorous Learning Organization.” (Implied here is that much of the learning is by people who are do-ers, not specialized staff).

Beyond Lean Thinking, an organization seeks to live in balance with nature, in all ways great and small. By contrast, current financial reasoning, from simple to convoluted, assumes that human systems can grow without limit. We cannot go back to a lost past. We can learn from it, but we must invent a new low-consumption future. The intent of BLT is to accelerate pragmatic learning about serious issues and topics to respond to the core challenges for sustainable global economic growth as we learn from the past as shown below:

The goal of Beyond Lean Thinking is to learn how to continuously improve human quality of life while reducing the consumption of energy and virgin raw material, while releasing no toxic chemicals into either air or water. Neither the economic nor ecological systems can be sustained without a new emphasis on thinking of “doing better with less” of everything.