There’s something that amuses and annoys me: the strong comeback of the word Lean. Lean Startup, Lean Canvas, Running Lean, Lean manager, Lean this Lean that. What’s going on? The future of agile in Lean? Ha ha what a joke!!!

The overuse – even within the agile community – of the word Lean is quite understandable for several reasons, but none of them are good:

Lean sounds more serious but it’s outdated

Supposedly, agilists are hippy cowboys, Lean guys, that’s serious stuff, it comes from industry (there we go, we’ve just screwed up). For all the professions that don’t acknowledge the paradigm shift of our complex period it’s very convenient to invoke Lean, supposedly from Toyota (The Toyota Lean). We’re starting to pay the backlash of agility: too many misunderstandings, recuperations, failures are promoting a completely corrupted agile. That’s exactly what happened to Lean in the 1990s. So to sound serious, to avoid saying “agile” which scares the existing system (but yes it decrees the end of the previous system…), we talk about Lean. This is not a good reason. It’s another escape. Especially since the Lean we’re referring to is archaic. We invoke the Lean of non-waste: we completely forget the one about respect for people and continuous improvement.

The period is no longer about Lean, standardization, continuous improvement on the elimination of waste through involvement and respect for people. The period is about adaptation, about NON-standardization, about NON-linearity, about NON-repeatability, induced by the complexity of our times. Adaptation rather than standardization (as Romain so nicely slipped in during a discussion).

Lean is for large structures…

Another myth, Lean (and supposedly not agile) adapts to large structures, to “scaled” organizations, it’s again the non-adapted image of industry that emerges. Yet we know that: a) agile is perfectly suited for very large organizations, and that b) the solution for scaling will not come from industrialization (at least that’s my conviction).

Marketing

Lean Startup, MVP, etc. good marketing, but let’s not make more of it. One could argue that the word agile is the same: good marketing. Yes in part, it’s a catch-all word, but at least it doesn’t appeal to notions that are outdated, it carries reflections and notions of the current world.

Lean Startup, for example, is not at all based on industrial Lean but on its “kaizen” pillar: continuous improvement. But not at all a continuous improvement by a work team in an industrial framework of a factory chain. This “Lean Startup” should actually be called “Agile Startup” because it mainly involves notions of adaptability to the market. It’s actually the word Startup that reminds us that this reactive, adaptive approach is linked to the market.

Lean startup -> Agile Startup -> pleonasm -> Agile.

In short “Lean Startup” is just the marketing translation of “Agile”, which itself is the marketing translation of “complex times”.

“Lean”, the last gasps of a past world

Finally, what bothers me about this abusive use is especially the return of old patterns, the resistance of the old system: industrial Lean, the idea that we’ll scale by homogenizing in a matrix (industrial) way that no longer have a reason to be.

Agile is to Lean, what Lean was to Fordism.

I would like agilists who for marketing reasons orient themselves toward Lean to have…the dignity to remember (themselves) this.

Lookin’ for adventure and whatever comes our way

Feedback

Thomas