Weekly insights on lean thinking applied to technology transformation. Practical guidance from practitioners who've been there. No hype.
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How to See Invisible Work (and Wrangle It) In Part 1 of this two-part series, we established a core operational truth: you can’t improve what you can’t see. But surfacing invisible work is only half the battle. ...
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Invisible systems of knowledge work are likely to produce more slop than value Lean thinking has consistently championed standardizing work, placing local efforts in a global context, and surfacing problems so the ...
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A month ago, I spoke with an engineer who spent 40 hours drafting a meticulous time study of a 20-hour custom fabrication job. He painstakingly analyzed 18 timelapse videos, at times scrubbing frame by frame, to mark ...
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A forward deployed engineer is dropped into your domain. A forward developed one is built out of it. This is the final part of a series1 on the forward deployed engineer. Part 1 followed the money into the role and ...
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The choice between renting expertise and building it is a century-old decision, and both experiments have run at scale. Only one of them compounded.
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Everyone is hiring for a skill set that barely exists. The capability you need is already on your payroll. This first article of a three-part series[1] examines the role of forward deployed engineers (how they work and ...
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Toyota's AI strategy isn't a platform purchase. It's a bet on its own people. Inside the training, certification, and shop-floor communities building capability.
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The PDCA loop that every lean person already knows also applies to working with a large language model (LLM), but with Prompt replacing Plan. The model does the Do. Check and Act stay mainly with you. Our previous ...
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Gene Kim, DevOps leader and co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization, joins Tyson Heaton, LEI Executive Director of LeanTech/AI, and Art Smalley, Toyota veteran and LEI advisor, for a lively, enlightening, and ...
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Anthropic and OpenAI are following SpaceX and moving toward massive IPOs in the coming months. Meanwhile, college graduates are booing commencement speakers who even mention AI. At the University of Arizona this spring, ...
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Most organizations are still trying to apply AI to existing workflows: faster coding, faster document generation, faster analysis, faster search. This risks paving the cow path — making the existing process faster ...
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Every lean person knows PDCA. Plan, Do, Check, Act. It is one of the most familiar disciplines in our field.
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Leadership Negligence, Not Technology Failure, Sets the Stage for AI's Most Expensive Correction In 1987, Nobel laureate Robert Solow made an observation that still echoes: "You can see the computer age everywhere but ...
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This article went from concept to published webpage on an afternoon walk. I gave my AI assistant the task from my phone, walked, stopped once on a park bench to review the draft and approve it, and pushed it live. ...
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There is a moment in lean transformation work that almost every practitioner has experienced. You have made real progress on the floor, in the office, or in the clinic. Flow is improving. Waste is visible. People are ...
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In a recent Lean Tech & AI Journal article, I suggested that future-state thinking can quietly become fiction when applied in complex adaptive systems.
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AI isn't just disrupting work — it's exposing the organizational immune system. Tyson Heaton reveals who's blocking progress and who's quietly building it.
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I hadn’t attended one of LEI’s lean conferences in over five years. The last one was right before the COVID outbreak shut everything down, and I was honestly curious about what I would find when I walked into the 2026 ...
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A dedicated initiative to help organizations apply lean thinking and practice to the technology layer of their operations, including the design, deployment, and continuous improvement of AI-enabled systems.
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Lean practitioners have long been taught that improvement culminates in a designed “future state.” We map the current condition, identify waste and constraints, and then create a future-state value-stream map (VSM) that ...
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The Bottom Line: For over 14 years, Theodo has explored what it truly means to apply lean thinking to software development — beyond agile frameworks. Its journey began with a failure that revealed the limits of blindly ...
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In IT, we don't talk much about lean anymore. And for a long time, that made perfect sense. We didn't need to talk about it because we had successfully baked it into our systems. We adopted agile to tackle the waste of ...
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In previous articles in this four-part series, we explored why the impact of AI varies so widely across organizations. The technology itself is increasingly accessible and powerful, yet results remain uneven. Some teams ...
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THE BOTTOM LINE: People first, technology second. Most lean leaders remember to work from this principle, but it’s easy to forget if your organization is in the middle of a digital transformation or when new ...
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The AI landscape shifted significantly in 2025, bringing valuable insights on implementation and application — along with the benefits that a lean tool — value-stream management — can provide for 2026. The State of AI ...
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In my previous article, I made a point that might seem counterintuitive given the billions being spent on AI: technology is often the easy part of the following equation: Impact = Technology × Behavior × Management ...
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We arrived at Viwinco with the confidence that experienced lean coaches usually bring. The problem looked straightforward: they were laminating two pieces of glass with a polyvinyl butyral (PVB) interlayer, and they ...
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Once a week, I take an electrician's class. It's a fallback in case AI obliterates white-collar work. An 18-year-old whiz kid sits next to me. Last Friday, attempting to stay current with the youth, I asked him what he ...
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Editor's Note: We selected this article because it offers a rare lean tech practitioner's perspective on how AI is actually changing work — not through hype, but through 400+ hours of hands-on experimentation. Régis ...
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In my last article, I introduced a simple but unforgiving equation: Impact = Technology x Behavior x Management. If any of the three components approaches zero, the product collapses. Impressive tools, great people, or ...
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This article was written by Claude, the artificial intelligence service by Anthropic, based on the transcript from an LEI interview with Fabrice Bernhard, Co-Founder of Theodo. When Fabrice Bernhard, Co-Founder of ...
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In my recent articles, “Five Levels of AI Collaboration” and “Navigating the Hype vs. Reality in the AI Landscape,” I explored how leaders can think more clearly about AI’s potential and limits. Yet after the excitement ...
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Several universities today offer degrees, certifications, and certificates in lean management, far more than a decade or two ago when many executives were getting acquainted with lean thinking and having to examine ...
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About a year and a half ago at O.C. Tanner, I was doing a shop-floor visit when a night shift team leader showed me something that changed how I think about AI and manufacturing. He'd taught his iPhone to spot defects ...
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What Explains All the Waste and Variation? Why do two people use the same AI model and get completely different results? One produces clarity and insight; the other, noise and frustration. Why do some think technology ...
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Once a week, I take an electrician's class. It's a hedge against AI obliterating the white-collar economy. At 39, I still have at least 25 years before retirement, and I'd like to acquire an AI-proof skill that could ...
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Last week, we hosted a webinar exploring the intersection of lean thinking and artificial intelligence. Tyson Heaton interviewed Toyota veterans and lean leaders Art Smalley and John Shook about the history of AI in ...
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After four decades watching automation promises in manufacturing, I've learned to separate the real breakthroughs from the demos. But the signals surrounding AI couldn't be more confusing. Geoffrey Hinton, the ...
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A recent LinkedIn post stopped me in my tracks: “The irony of chasing 10–15% productivity gains through AI when teams are burning 50–80% of their capacity on low-value work and/or multi-tasking is ripe.” AI’s potential ...
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Lean Meets AI This is the first in a series of articles in which the Lean Enterprise Institute and I will explore the unfolding intersection of lean and artificial intelligence (AI) in the years ahead. Each month, we'll ...
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