Insights
A few things worth writing down properly.
Not a blog feed. A small set of durable articles that stay true, on transformation, learning organizations, and the foundations most of this field is standing on without knowing it.
This section is being built out. The articles below exist and are linked to where they were published. They are being rewritten as permanent pages here, so they stop depending on somebody else's platform staying up. Guest contributors are welcome; if you write rigorously about this work and want a home for a piece, get in touch.
Published case studies
From the field.
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It's the Productivity, Not the People
A Bering Sea fish processing vessel with five years of poor production. The supervisors said they were understaffed. The crew were migrating between stations four times an hour, losing about ninety minutes of production a day on a twenty-four hour operation, and nobody had calculated how many people each station actually needed. The whole transformation had to be done without using the words lean or Toyota, because the crew had worked on a badly run vessel before and the vocabulary was poison. After the numbers were worked out it was the first time in five years the vessel told head office it had enough people.
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Lean Transformation: Have You Hit the Lean Plateau?
Five years of improvement events and A3 projects at a health system, and a plateau. What broke it: a model line on one medical-surgical floor, a daily improvement routine folded into a huddle that already existed, and the discovery that changing daily behaviour requires daily follow up. The first attempt failed because the coaches never changed their own routines. Six months after the second attempt, accreditation surveyors were being sought out by managers wanting to show off their improvement boards.
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You Gotta Kata, Now What?
What happens after the training, when not a single department has changed its daily routine and the reason turns out to be obvious in hindsight. On organizational inertia, and on the commitment that broke it: you will be empowered to solve challenges daily, and we will be right there with you if you get stuck.
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Don't Start with Tools
A facilities supervisor whose team sometimes searched three separate locations to find a tool. Rather than directing a standard 5S implementation, he was given the challenge and the structure to work it out. His team ended up doing every stage of 5S without being told what it was called, and understood why each stage existed, which is the part that survives.
On the foundations
Being written for this site.
These exist as published essays and posts elsewhere. They are being rebuilt here as permanent articles, with the primary sources linked directly into the Learning Center.
Harmonic Leadership: the timeless wisdom of Karol Adamiecki
The anchor piece. The field is stuck in the tool age, and the reason is not that the theory is missing. The pioneers supplied it a century ago and we stopped reading them. Covers the harmonogram, the cycle of organization that predates PDCA, the origin of takt, and an idea of enterprise purpose that included employee wellbeing and affordable goods alongside profit, written decades before anyone called that a movement.
The 1926 value stream map
What is very likely the earliest known cost flow analysis, published in Polish, doing exactly what a value stream map does and predating the term by roughly seventy years.
Is management an art or a science?
The question that decides whether any of this is teachable. If management is an art, experience is all there is and every organization starts over. If it is a science, results transfer between people, which is the entire argument for the field existing.
The laws of harmony
Harmony of selection, harmony of operation, and harmony of spirit. The first two are widely practised under other names. The third is the one that gets dropped, and it is the one with the direct evidenced link to whether the other two hold.
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