# Is There Such a Thing as a Lean Philosophy?

Joop De Zwart

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Joop De Zwart. Is There Such a Thing as a Lean Philosophy?. 8th European Lean Educator Conference (ELEC), Nov 2022, Galway, Ireland. pp.3-13, 10.1007/978-3-031-25741-4_1. hal-04735686

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# Is there such a thing as a Lean philosophy?

Joop de Zwart

Avans University of Applied Sciences, Breda, The Netherlands

jg.dezwart@avans.nl

**Abstract.** The word ‘philosophy’ has been regularly used within the context of Lean thought. For example, Liker [1] insists that a long term *philosophy* is required in order to become a Lean organization, while Bicheno and Holweg [2] use the word as the title of a chapter to describe what they consider to be the essence of Lean thought.

However, what does this all have to do with philosophy? Philosophy – viewed as an academic discipline – is not the same as the philosophies used in the discussions about Lean. For Lean educators it could be interesting to reflect philosophically upon Lean thought. In this paper it shall be explored what happens if you approach Lean thought from a philosophical perspective. The use of the singular can be misleading: there are different ways to approach Lean thought, so in this paper is described how philosophy can be used to reflect upon Lean thought both from the *inside out* and from the *outside in* and demonstrated examples of the *inside out* approach. This study has implications for further research and is of relevance for Lean (education) practitioners. This paper is built upon the hypothesis that (philosophical) reflection upon Lean thought is relevant because it can improve both Lean practices and the in-depth knowledge of the methods applied in practice.

**Keywords:** Lean philosophy, Lean thought, Lean essence, Critical Lean thought

## 1 Introduction

If there is no chapter about Lean philosophy in books on philosophy, does that automatically mean that there is no such thing as Lean philosophy? Some authors do write about Lean philosophy [2] or production philosophy [3, 4], but then philosophy is used in a specific way, and that is not the way philosophers tend to use the word. It is more to indicate that Lean thought is a more or less consistent set of vocabulary and methods. This use of philosophy is an everyday use of the word, as one can also say that organizations or persons have a certain philosophy [5]. This everyday use of the word is just a small part of what philosophy is all about.

Philosophy, as a specific discipline, is most commonly defined as the art of asking questions, most introductions on philosophy agree about that [6, 7]. The philosopher ‘is putting into words an amazement or sense of wonder’ [8]. A currently popular Dutch book on philosophy [9] has as its subtitle ‘guide to asking good questions’. What’s different then to for example the 5W1H-approach, also known as the Kipling questions [10] or the ‘5 times why’ method, which are also about asking questions and deep learning [11]?

Philosophical questioning tends to focus upon fundamental issues in reality. For example, in Lean thought, the idea of ‘respect for people’ [12] can be philosophically addressed by asking what *respect* means and what its boundaries are. Or one could ask why respect for people should be limited to people? Asking questions philosophically – and in the case of *respect* ethically – means that one wonders about certain things in reality and that seeks to clarify the concepts (like respect) and critically examining the scope and limits of a concept (*why should respect be limited to people?*). Magee [7] emphasises that this attempt to clarify concepts is concerned with subjects that are of great practical importance, but at the same
time can be very problematic. The concepts of Lean thought are indeed of practical importance but can be ambiguous at the same time. Respect looks familiar at first sight, but when one looks a bit closer it can appear quite ambiguous. In the remainder of this paper other concepts will be addressed that also seem familiar, but, when investigated more thoroughly, reveal surprising insights.

*What's the use of a philosophical approach towards Lean thought?* Questioning Lean thought philosophically (or critically) may have several results. Firstly, the concepts used so often by Lean practitioners are questioned from time to time which deepens the understanding of them and prevents a sloppy use of them and provides newcomers in the field with an up-to-date vocabulary. Secondly, the critical questions about the concepts in use give even experienced professionals a possibility to update their conceptual library. In the example of 'respect for people', sustainability issues or societal dynamism like the changing attitude towards gender issues can give the concept 'respect for people' a new content or provide arguments to rename it to 'respect for life'.

Approaching Lean philosophically in general can be done in two ways: from the inside out and from the outside in. The approach is *inside out* if one takes Lean thought and digs into the Lean concepts philosophically, by asking questions. It is the approach also used by Griseri [5], when, in the first part of his book, he questions phenomena like 'organisations', 'work' and 'leadership'. One does not need a certain philosophical vocabulary, but rather certain methods of questioning. It is *outside in* when the starting point is taken in philosophy and from that point Lean thought is questioned. So, in this respect lean thought is the inside and philosophy the outside. Jones and Ten Bos [13] call this approach towards, in their case, organisation studies, 'injections of philosophy'. Authors try to take a certain philosophical concept to enrich Lean thought. This paper focuses on the inside out. This is primarily because of the lack of space to perform both exercises. The outside in approach requires elaborations of specific philosophic topics, while the inside out approach starts from concepts that are familiar to Lean practitioners.

## 2 Method: how to approach Lean philosophically

This paper searches to explore some Lean concepts from the inside out. The method is based upon what Griseri [5] did. In his *Introduction to the philosophy of management* he explains his project in the following manner: 'this book looks, not at the thinking that goes on in management (...) but rather at the thinking behind management. What is the basis of our understanding of what organisations are'. Most simply put, in this paper 'Lean thought' replaces 'management': What thinking lies behind Lean thought? What is the basis of our understanding about what Lean thought is? That means that Lean thought is examined in a way which seeks to further clarify it.

The other approach, outside-in, starts from philosophy and then questions Lean thought. Koskela and Kagioglou [14, 15] performed such an exercise twice, when they examined production and management through the lens of metaphysics. They did so in order to understand better how Lean thought differs from much of the managerial literature and practices traditionally used. Previously, the example of ethics was mentioned, which is also a branche of philosophy. In other words, the outside in approach starts from the questions that are traditionally asked by philosophers and then examines Lean thought through that lens. In this paper the inside out approach is elaborated on, and further research will explore the outside-in approach.

The inside out approach can be performed in roughly two ways. Firstly, Lean thought is questioned in order to find certain characteristics that can be considered to be *its essence*. Where the five times why method seeks to understand a certain problem thoroughly, philosophical investigation seeks to do that with Lean thought itself. If one studies the body of literature about Lean thought (e.g. meta analysis like Van Kollenburg and Kokkinou [16]), combined with practical application like the ones performed by students at the author's University of Applied Science, can one distinguish one or more essential features that help to understand Lean thought? And can one thus develop a better understanding why it is so notoriously difficult to really establish something like a Lean culture?

Secondly, a familiar Lean concept will be questioned, in this paper that will be customer value. The method used can be referred to as 'conceptual archaeology'. In this method one
takes the present concept – customer value – and starts digging in the source material where
it originally comes from. Then the original is re-read in order to see what was meant in the
original work and whether or not interesting features have been lost somewhere along the
way. An example of such a conceptual archaeology was done on corporate social
responsibility (CSR), which led to the conclusion that much of the richness of the original
reflections about CSR was lost in translation [17]. Basically this process is a similar to
‘Chinese Whispers’, the children’s play where the first child in a row whispers a phrase in
the ear of the second child, the second to the third and so on until the last child has to repeat
the sentence out loud, to see what’s left of the original phrase.

Books on Lean thought in general will pay attention to the concept of customer value. Womack and Jones [12] made it one of the five basic principles and also in Liker's pyramid [1] it is hugely important. But Womack, Jones and Liker got it from Toyota. And Toyota got it from Henry Ford. What happens if one returns to the original work by Henry Ford, mentioned by Ohno [18]?

So in this paper the inside out approach searches for the answers to two questions:

1. Is there something essential behind Lean thought?

2. What can we learn from Henry Ford about customer value?

**3 Results 1: about the essence of Lean thought**

Many authors have given definitions of Lean or main characteristics of it. Of course, there is the pyramid by Jeffrey Liker [1], there are the five elements of Lean thinking by Womack and Jones [12] or the 25 characteristics named by Bicheno [2], there is A3 thinking what John Shook [19] proposes to be the key to the system. Recently van Kollenburg and Kokkinou [16] performed a literature study into the definitions and characteristics (which apparently added up to 736!). Each analysis has in common that one of the essential aspects of Lean thought is the idea of continuous improvement. Therefore, I want to further elaborate on that in order to illustrate the thinking behind Lean thought.

During my career as a Lean educator, at a faculty of a Dutch university of Applied Science specifically concerned with the construction industry, it became clear that it is by no means self-evident to establish a culture of continuous improvement. Of course, every student has to start from scratch in his or her learning career, but the same seems to be the case for the organisations where the students do their internships. The number of organisations that seek to apply Lean thought and continuous improvement is much larger that the number of organisations that succeed in establishing a culture where continuous improvement is part and parcel of company practices. The continuous improvement of many construction companies seems to exist solely of the internship assignments of the students they host.

Why was it so difficult to establish a culture of continuous improvement? The procedures aren't rocket science, so what seems to be the problem? In one of his books on (societal) transitions, the Dutch author Jan Rotmans mentions the paralyzing effect of a stationary view of reality. Transitions need a more dynamic view of reality and a more dynamic way of organising. Rigid blueprint structures or project approaches should be abandoned in favour of more organic approaches to change [20]. And that does not come natural. Change has to be trained constantly, he claims, referring to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk [20].

Transition, continuous improvement, learning organisations; they all have at least two things in common: they share a high appreciation of change, of learning, of dynamism. And they share the awareness that it is notoriously difficult to achieve such a thing. And I think that touches upon something behind Lean thought: a stationary or at least linear view of reality that dominates over a dynamic view of reality. And one could argue that this is deeply rooted in (Western) thought.

One of the philosophers that asked attention for this stationary aspect of Western thought was Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976). One of his hypotheses was that Western thought has had a tendency to objectify reality. In de Zwart [17] this is summarised in four characteristics, one of them being an inclination to Truth. The capital T hints at the absolute status of truth. Western thought, or modern thought, seeks for Truth. It has done so in religion, where God was the highest of beings, and is has done so in the era of the Enlightenment, where universal
knowledge became the ideal of science. The title of the movie about the life of the famous scientist Stephen Hawking says it all: ‘*a Theory of Everything*’ was the positivist ideal. The German Philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883 – 1969) called this belief in science scientific superstition (*wissenschaftliches Aberglaube*, [21]).

The idea of Truth comes with an absolute preference of stability over instability. Instability even means chaos. In medieval times, God was not just a little higher than his creatures, he was the ‘higher than anything that could be thought’ (Anselm of Canterbury), the ultimate and absolute being of beings. There could not be more than one creator, that would make God less perfect and this perfection was eternal. That already was the case with Plato, who could not stand the idea that the reality as we perceive it, with its diversity and temporality was all there was to it. There must exist something behind reality which is perfect, he claimed: his world of ideas, stable and eternal [6, 7].

The era of the Enlightenment in the end seems to have been secularised, famously coined ‘the death of God’ by Nietzsche ((1844 – 1900), the famous aphorism about the death of God is taken from *Human all too Human*), but that does not mean that the preference of universal and stable truths had diminished as well, as the title of the aforementioned movie already indicated. Science also seeks for universally applicable laws and methods and in philosophy post-modern thinkers that are critical of the idea of fixed truths are easily being accused of relativism. Dostoyevski’s famous quotation: ‘if God is dead, than everything is allowed’ (in the novel *The Brothers Karamazov*', 1880) hints at the consequences of the loss of certainty, of stable truths, at least in the realm of morality.

Koskela and Kagioglou [14] likewise distinguish between *substance* and *process* metaphysics and conclude ‘first, that it is the inappropriate metaphysical choice that is at the root of many of the problems of production, and, secondly, that the neglect of explicit metaphysical considerations has effectively concealed this situation’. I would go further than that: for many people there is not just a choice, but a struggle. It is extremely hard to move away from a certain way of perceiving reality. Change is not perceived neutrally, it is threatening, it is *normatively* inferior to stability. To put it more in Lean terms: the idea of a standard procedure as a point of departure for improvement, rather than a definitive conclusion of a search for a one best practice is extremely hard to accept if one has a strong inclination to stable and fixed truths.

So the first result of examining a concept like continuous improvement leads to the awareness of a rather fundamental barrier for people to adopt continuous improvement practices: people might hesitate, because a world with no end to change seems chaotic and threatening. To quote Nietzsche: ‘man is something that must be overcome’, which is a fragment taken from his *Thus Spoke Zarathustra*, originally published in 1883. This last quotation brings me to a second result of this exercise: what is it that has to be overcome?

Continuous improvement leans upon the idea that one carefully examines a problem. The five times why and the DMAIC procedures presuppose a thorough and cautious approach to a problem, as does the A3 problem solving process. During the years as a Lean educator, I found it interesting to see that the favourite research method seems to be the interview. Rarely students (and the professionals who coach them) choose for themselves to measure a problem. They often choose to approach a problem by means of interviews, collecting opinions – how valuable these may be – instead of measuring facts. It takes effort to take the step towards measuring a problem.

What we’ve learned from neuro scientists is that there is a distinction between type 1 and type 2 thinking [22]. Type 1 thinking is intuitive and prefers to jump to conclusions. It is the kind of thinking that is required outside in dangerous situations: it is more successful to mistake a stone for a lion than vice versa. Based upon superficial knowledge quick decisions have to be made.

Type 2 thinking is the more sophisticated type of thinking: reflective, analytic, scientific. It is the kind of thinking that is quite modern, compared to the type 1 way of thinking. Type 1 thinking is connected to the older parts of the brain, seen from an evolutionary point of view, while type 2 thinking belongs to the more recently developed parts of the brain, like the frontal cortex.

Because type 1 thinking is rooted in the oldest, most primitive parts of the brain, it is a very strong way of thinking. Many people absolutely trust in their intuitions, in their first impressions, although scientific research has proven that this way of thinking is not at all reliable. The frontal cortex has quite a difficult task overruling the quick and superficial conclusions of the primitive parts of the brain. It takes training and certainly doesn’t come by itself to be critical, reflexive, scientific.
Lean thought, with its thorough approach to problem solving, belongs to the realm of type 2 thinking. One has to be prepared to postpone one's conclusions and really try to figure out the facts behind a problem. Many people absolutely don't like to do such a thing as postponing their conclusions and do thorough research into a problem and its causes.

So, is the thinking behind Lean thought a kind of thinking that is difficult to practice, simply because it does not fit with the most deeply rooted thinking routines? Continuous improvement, with its slow procedures, belongs to the realm of the part of the brain that developed most recently, and that has difficulty overruling the habits of type 1 thinking.

During the centuries, a number of writers have written about the struggle between these types of thinking, without knowing about neuro sciences. An example from ancient philosophy is Plato describing in his Faidros [23] the soul (*psyche*) as a chariot, with a rational part of the soul being the charioteer, who has to control the other, less rational parts of the soul. Of course, this looks like what we encounter for example in Christian tradition; here it is sufficient to say that it seems that what has been discovered scientifically about the brain, already was preluded by many ancient thinkers, and also Nietzsche [24] seemed to have an understanding of this paradoxical characteristic of the brain when he claimed that ‘man is something that must be overcome’.

In a very brief manner I tried to show how the thinking in Lean thought might differ from the thinking behind it, with the Lean principle of continuous improvement as a starting point.

## 4 Results 2: customer value

The second research question concerns the lean concept of customer value, so some roots of lean thought are examined in order to see what can be learned from them. For that purpose one of the roots shall be especially looked at, namely Henry Ford's famous book *'Today and Tomorrow'* [25] The reason that Ford [25] was chosen is a result of 'philosophy as conceptual archaeology', where one tries to trace back a concept as far as possible. When one reads Ohno's Toyota Production System [18], one of the important sources from within Toyota, one automatically stumbles upon some of the sources he uses, among which Henry Ford ('*I, for one, am in awe of Ford's greatness*', writes Ohno where he also explicitly quotes Today and Tomorrow).

After reading Ohno, the author immediately started reading Ford, and was struck by some very ‘Toyota-ist’ passages. Of course that shouldn’t have been a surprise, because Ohno already wrote how much he admired this work and that much of his own thought was already present in Today and Tomorrow. In this paper there is no intention to simply summarise Ford, but to read it with a specific Lean concept in mind, which is customer value.

Actually, Ford never mentions ‘customer value’, but instead uses ‘service power’ on several occasions. But what does that add to reading for example Womack and Jones, who claim that customer value is one of the key components of their five-step approach to Lean thought? They approach value from their perspective, which is a (positive) construction of a way of thinking that can be characterised as Lean. They analysed Toyota in order to find the key to their success. Doing that, something got lost which originally was present in the work of Ford: a criticism of practices of his times.

Ford was very critical about some practices in his days: the attitude towards ‘big business’ and the financial markets. At the very beginning of *'Today and Tomorrow'* he states: *'Big business is not about money power: it is service power'* (p. 9), and *'the test of the service of a corporation is in how far its benefits are passed on to the consumer'* (p. 17). He considered that a too dominant position of financial institutions was a threat to the service power of the corporation. Management that is pressurised by financial goals (both interest and dividends) loses attention for the service power of the company (*'pressed from above for interest and dividends, pushed from below to grant more money for less work, he had small chance to give service'*', p. 23).

It seems that Ford was even more radical in his ideas than his successors: although he mentions many of the wastes that have become classics in lean thought, interest and dividend haven't made it to the list of wastes that seriously threat customer value. Of course, Lean thought has always been critical about profit as an end, which can explicitly be traced back to Ford: *'the profit motive (...) is really not practical at all, because (...) it has as its objectives the increasing of prices to the consumer and the decreasing of wages'*' (p. 25). This has made
it to Lean literature, but his opinion about 'absentee dividend takers' is much less apparent.

Another example of Ford's critique of 'the profit motive' can be found in the chapter about his ideas about wages: 'the right price is the lowest price an article can steadily be sold for. The right wage is the highest wage an employer can steadily pay' (p. 140). This is exactly opposite of the profit motive, where wages are always to be reduced. Ford's idea of the profit motive looks a lot like the Marxist critique of capitalism with its infinite tendency to cut wages in favour of the shareholders. Ford calls that the old theory of wages, in which wage depends of bargaining power: 'the old theory, which still persists in business, is that the rate of wages depends on the bargaining power of the worker as against the monopoly power of the employer. Under that theory, both sides lost' (p. 138).

Time and time again, one finds critical remarks like the aforementioned that are completely the opposite of what later thought about the function of a corporation would emphasize. Think of someone like Milton Friedman who in 1970 criticised CSR authors with the (in)famous article 'The only responsibility of the corporation is to increase its profits' [26], a plea for the profit motive of which Ford wrote: 'the face of business is bowed towards the stockholder and not towards the customer, and this means a denial of the primary purpose of industry' (p. 215). And again: 'industry is not money – it is made up of ideas, labour and management, and the natural expression of these is not dividends, but utility, quality, and availability' (p. 215). In this chapter Ford is highly critical about a capitalist society where shareholder value is the ultimate goal of the corporation. Money is just a commodity, and if that is out of sight, Ford foresees great problems, because 'money will get itself ahead of service' (p. 213).

Next to the criticism of financial institutions, Ford already introduces the idea of waste as a threat to customer value: 'a man cannot be paid high wages for standing around waiting for tools. Nor, which amounts to the same, can the public be served' (p. 92). Waiting is directly connected to the 'service power', or rather the loss of it. The same goes for 'stooping to the floor' (p. 92), excess movement, Ford already calls it a waste.

Some of the 'classic' wastes can already be found in Fords Today and Tomorrow, so that does not really add to the understanding of wastes. Re-reading Ford is, from the perspective of the wastes, not revolutionary. It is amazing to see how these ideas were already present in 1926. In the case of his criticism of the financial markets, the sensation is more profound: it provides interesting arguments to add profit to the list of wastes! That would mean that this conceptual archaeology led us to a ninth waste!

# 5 Discussion & Conclusion

This paper is a first step towards something like a Lean philosophy. Two questions were asked as examples of how one can approach Lean thought philosophically. When one asks questions about Lean thought and tries to discover what could be the thinking behind Lean thought, it becomes clear that certain habits are not easily turned around. Lean thinking requires an attitude that is by no means evident to the way humans are used to think and work. The reflection upon the concept continuous improvement showed that Western thought seems to prefer a static concept of truth. This means that if one searches for improvement, that will be a quest for one best way of doing things, and the very idea of improvement being eternally provisional seems appalling.

The brain also objects to the slow and reflexive methods of continuous improvement. This helps Lean educator to pay attention to the adaptation of Lean principles. Many students (and professionals alike) try to rationalize their almost natural hesitation towards Lean thought. It is important to be aware of deeply rooted aversions that function as mental barriers in educational processes. Some students are eager to adopt innovative ways, but many must go to greater difficulty to achieve such a thing.

In the first part of this paper only one exercise was executed to show what happens if one searches for thinking behind concepts like continuous improvement. Further analyses are required to analogously shed light upon other Lean principles.

The second part of the paper was dedicated to another way of doing philosophy about Lean thought: conceptual archeology. Using again one concept – customer value – Ford (1926)
was re-read and thus Ohno's statement that much of the principles applied at Toyota are already there to be found was verified. This demonstrated that reading Ford showed that some principles present there were (at least partly) forgotten. The critical attitude towards capital as an end instead of a means is even more sharply present in Ford that in later works on Lean thought.

Is this exercise taking philosophy seriously? Shouldn't that be about fundamental questions like knowledge, righteousness, morality, existence? As a specific and specialized academic discipline, philosophy does not seem interested in something like Lean thought and its concepts. More specific disciplines, like philosophy of management or philosophical practice, could be more suitable for reflections about Lean thought. At the other hand, if philosophy is about asking questions about important things in life or in reality, is Lean thought not one of them? People spend much of their time in organisations and trying to improve organisational practices seems a modern time way of thinking about the good life.

Does such a philosophical approach take Lean thought seriously? One of the positive aspects of Lean is that seems to have a certain no-nonsense approach to improvement. Go to the gemba and see what is going on there. Does this paper propose to leave the gemba and retreat in a library? It certainly does not! The philosophical approach seeks to think about Lean thought and see what can be learned from that, in order to improve Lean practices. If one is aware of the barriers that may exist between people and their possibilities to continuously change, it may be easier to coach them.

Furthermore, we must not forget that Lean concepts have a certain background, and an approach that wants to apply the concepts immediately, may forget to reflect upon the backgrounds of the concepts. If Lean thought has to do with a thorough analysis of a problem at hand, why should that not apply to Lean thought itself? If one asks five times why on the gemba, why not do that to the method itself? This paper is built upon the hypotheses that 1) thorough elaboration of the methods used will improve the practical use of them, and 2) that returning to the classics of a debate can improve one's understanding of the thinking behind it. Doing that, one may even be rewarded with insights that can be excitingly new.

Lean thought has become a rather complex body of knowledge. It takes effort to understand the concepts that are so familiar to Lean practitioners. Returning time and time again to the basic concepts 1) helps newcomers to adapt to the professional standards required and 2) helps experienced professionals not to take any of them for granted. Furthermore, in the times we live in, with many transitions at hand on a macro level (e.g., circular economy, sustainable energy), we shall need the ideas of continuous improvement, of Lean thought to implement the many changes that we will encounter. A deeper understanding of what these principles are and why it can be so difficult to implement them, can help improving practices on a micro level in order to achieve transitions on a macro level. But it may be necessary to reflect upon the connection between the two levels. Lean thought must then perhaps be reconsidered and refined as well, and philosophy can help to bridge the societal level and the organisational level. Chapters like the last one in Van Kollenburg's [11], about Lean thought and the 21st century challenges, should perhaps be granted a more equal position next to the more traditional Lean methods, which now make up the largest part of the book.

Although there is not a Lean philosophy as such, other than the everyday use of it, and there is not a chapter on Lean thought in philosophy books, that doesn't mean that there cannot be a Lean philosophy. Philosophical methods can be applied to deepen the understanding of the thinking behind Lean, and about the clarification of the concepts used in the Lean body of knowledge. In this paper an exercise to show the above was carried out. Many such exercises are waiting to be performed.
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