Lean leadership and concepts have become essential for businesses and schools to become competitive, efficient, and ensure that value is being added at every level. The term Thinking People System (TPS) is sometimes used to replace the term Toyota Production System (TPS), but the ideas are the same.
Lean is a continuous process where wastes are systematically identified and reduced, thereby making the most of materials, systems, and people talents. The process and the results are fun and engage everyone like engineers improving the processes they are directly involved in. My favorite training videos on lean are at www.fastcap.com/content/lean-videos.
The eight wastes are:
- Defects
- Overproduction
- Waiting
- Unused Talent
- Transportation
- Inventory
- Motion
- Extra-Processing
The lean implementations that I have seen at public schools have been handled, like bureaucracies handle everything...not so much fun...just another burden...same old wasteful educational objectives.
Paying attention to lean learning can result in students being ready for college and careers much younger, like home educated students and students from foreign countries.
Of course learning the right things is the key, not just learning anything!
Here is a graphic to illustrate the point from higher education:
