A friend and colleague remarked to me that “the lean market has become mature,” implying a depth and breadth of lean understanding in industry that I have rarely seen myself.

Standardized work, for example, almost always looks like time setting to me, an occasional and cursory exercise by industrial engineers to shave seconds from a static work sequence to reduce apparent labor costs. Workers are not even asked to participate. In those instances where a standard work chart is actually posted, it’s rarely up to date; usually it’s from a one-time effort of a long-past kaizen event.

One manager challenged me recently. “Our workers don’t need that; they know their jobs very well,” he claimed—a comment that exposed his misunderstanding of standardized work on several levels. When we then watched the work and compared it to the standardized work chart posted next to the worker, it became apparent pretty quickly that there was an extra person in process, that standard work in process was ignored, and that takt time represented a minimum value.

“The chart is really not for the workers; it’s for you,” I replied. “Do you see why? Can you see what’s happening?”

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