Lean says: Manage flow. Your brain says: My work isn’t linear. My day is filled with interruptions, and so I don’t have the “luxury” of flow. What’s at play here: functional fixedness.

If there is one area where there’s not an obvious transfer of lean principles from manufacturing to knowledge work, it’s understanding how flow can in fact be achieved when work is creative and contextual rather than isolated and prefigured.

On the factory floor, workers create a fairly static set of tangible products in a predictable way, while constantly aiming to reduce variation to produce uniform output.

In the office, whether their work products are largely inventive (e.g., software development) or relatively standardized (responding to a customer service call), knowledge work is fraught with variation.

Myriad people, products, projects, processes, experience levels, and information sources (both tacit and explicit), coupled with the requests for clarity or adjustment that these constituencies make, can combine and compete to create a sometimes bewildering if not cacophonous work environment.

Confusing and noisy—yes. Wasteful? Probably not. Quite the contrary, in fact.

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