LEAN AND INTELLIGENT

Just as no living organisms spontaneously generate, nor do manufacturing operations just pop up out of nowhere or magically appear from an electrified bog of primordial corporate goo. All companies are the product of intelligent design, not evolution. Evolution is an accidental, unguided process that has no intended goal. Although the performance of some companies may appear as though they operate in this manner, the actual process of improvement includes the manager (intelligence) critically assessing the problem areas of his organization (intelligence applied to his company), processing his data, and designing a specific solution to achieve a specific improvement (goal-directed design). This is anti-evolution.

“When managers [intelligence] understand what the customer wants [intelligent interaction with the target environment], they are empowered and able to construct processes [design] that produce outputs with positive outcomes [specific plans for a specific, predetermined goal. This is classic intelligent design].

“By focusing on what the customer wants, processes evolve [contradiction – rather: the manager, the one focusing on customer wants, intentionally manipulates the processes…] to meet customer needs, while tasks that are unnecessary or that don’t add value to the customer can be removed [How? By lack of use as evolution suggests? No, unless the manager of the system intentionally seeks out and removes unnecessary tasks and useless bureaucracy, they will remain in place and continue to hinder and rob the company of efficiency and profitability. Just like the actions of a master gardener seeking to maximize the fruitfulness of his orchard, an intelligent manager will carefully select and prune away the deadwood, suckers and superfluous growth that robs energy, nutrients and ultimately fruitfulness from his company].

“Tools such as 5S and other lean principles [all of which are products of intelligence] can now be deployed intelligently as a means of achieving this end [contradiction - evolution has no ultimate, predetermined purpose in mind]. The focus is now on streamlining processes [on their own? or by the pruning and fine-tuning of the manager?] to achieve their ultimate purpose of satisfying customers. Waste is removed as part of the natural evolution of the process [contradiction – rather: waste removal is built into the system, and is removed as a logical result of the intelligently designed and implemented process], and improvement is made for the proper reasons.”

A common error of the evolution position is to describe the rational, cause and effect process of intelligent design but then call it evolution. This is the only way evolution can gain the legitimacy and connection to reality it lacks – it steals the characteristics of I.D. and claims them for itself. I’ve seen similar articles in which the authors described the “evolution of the Corvette” and the “evolution of computer viruses” – which completely ignored the automotive and computer engineers responsible for the creation of these objects. In the evolution model, it’s like the main causal agent disappears from the equation just because it isn’t seen - that’s not reality.

What this article is promoting is the idea that a good manager should survey, examine and gain as much understanding as possible of the survival environment (public marketplace) in which his product will be introduce so that he can custom design his product to the particular demands of that environment so that his product will thrive [and ideally to do so in as little time as necessary thereby maximizing rewards, i.e. rapid prototyping]. Any company relying on the millions of years of gradually accumulated, unguided, random yet “beneficial accidents” of the evolutionary process would be extinct before it could take its first breath.

What this process does mirror, however, is the creative process the God of Israel employed in designing and manufacturing the world in which we live. God, the unseen Intelligent Designer, first spoke into being the various “survival environments” – the land, the seas, the sky – during the first four days of creation. The next two days would be filled with the God of Israel considering the survival environments and custom designing each and every kind of creature so that it could thrive in the environment in which it was introduced, hence, the “Cambrian Explosion” of fully formed, irreducibly complex life forms with no transitional links. Now that’s rapid prototyping!

Even as intelligent men have conceived of, designed and built all manner of specialized vehicles to transport us over or through the land, seas or sky, the process of contemplation, design plan, and execution of the design plan that brings the mental information into 3D reality, is merely a small scale manifestation of the same, original process the God of Israel used on a galactic scale, and evidence that we are, in fact, fearfully and wonderfully made in His image.