During one Kaizen event I stepped back for one day and began to observe the operation that we were trying to apply Lean to. I watched how the operation functioned. I immediately became aware of several things that could be done to improve the operation. Where did these idea come from??? Being new to manufacturing and new to Lean, how could I have come up with these ideas???

Then it hit me. I realized that Lean is simply the application of common sense in a structured way. Lean provides a way to communicate my common sense ideas. Lean provides a way for the workers to communicate their common sense ideas.

The reason this hit me as an interesting observation was that I kept expecting Lean to tell me how to fix the process. Lean, Six Sigma and other continuous improvement systems will not fix any process. People and common sense fix processes. Lean helps explain and structure the approach, but people create the solutions to the problems.