‘You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1891) A Scandal in Bohemia. Taiichi Ohno, who developed Henry Ford’s lean production system into the Toyota Production System, told managers to stand in a circle on the shop floor and observe everything that happened there. If people who try this exercise see but do not observe, neither they nor their organizations will gain from it. History shows that countless people, possibly tens of millions, have overlooked breakthrough improvement opportunities that are obvious to anybody who knows what to look for.

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