You may recognize the following quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, or more recently from Kelly Clarkson: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I’ve thought about this often during the last 22 months in context of the horrible pandemic and, more parochially, in relation to the efforts of many client organizations to sustain continuous improvement in a period of great uncertainty. There are more than a few parallels.

Here are some that occur to me.

Burning platforms are finite

The 17th-century playwright Samuel Johnson said, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The sense of urgency generated by immediate threats, commonly referred to as burning platforms, has kick-started many a lean transformation, including at Toyota. There, as Taiichi Ohno noted, “The oil crisis opened our eyes,” and it was the event that kicked the Toyota Production System (TPS) into high gear during the 1970s.

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