I can’t speak for to many others but the practice of teaching variation is key to understanding Lean and probably a great many other frameworks for improvement.

In our “process” we start by getting staff to define what it is they are trying to achieve, this allows them to own this. In the manufacturing teams this is often straight forward, in the knowledge sector, individuals or small teams are often working on a series of different customer requirements for different clients at the same time.

Focussing on these requirements, they often find they are the same across the many clients they have, just dispersed over a period of time.

Having common outputs then allows us to build the Value Streams and the variation in processes used by different teams or for different clients is exposed.

At this point, in our experience, individuals and teams are much more comfortable asking the question “Why do we use different process, if the requirement/output is the same?”

Where the requirements are different the question is then around suitability of the process for the output.

Finding the reason for the variation helps in identifying solutions and ultimately then, which tools and techniques are suitable.

regards,
Mark Greenhouse