December was a busy month for everyone at GBMP. In addition to all of the usual activities to close out the year, we were packing to relocate from Newton, Massachusetts, to our new office in Boston. We were also tossing a whole lot of stuff, something we’d previously neglected to do.

As promoters of lean, it seems we were a bit remiss ourselves in practicing what we preached. Shigeo Shingo famously noted that “the worst waste is the waste we cannot see.” Fact is, if you have enough space and your piles are neat, it looks like you’re organized. While we were extolling the virtues of 5S to our clients, we were also getting our Ph.D. (pile it higher and deeper) in neatly arranging stagnant files, videos, fliers, posters, banners, displays, and unusable electronics. It’s amazing how much stuff can hide in plain sight under a cloak of invisibility. We were tidy, but not organized. Better that we’d have been sloppy about it because then we might have seen it.

 …