Whether I am speaking about lean to an audience of one or 100, if the conversation goes on long enough the question inevitably arises: “What’s next for lean?” I always manage an answer, typically tying it to the theme of the discussion, speech, or intended teaching but never quite giving the same answer. Is this because “what’s next” keeps changing? Did the last “next” thing already happen between speaking opportunities? Or am I just inconsistent? There may be truth to all three, but on deeper reflection I must admit that my answers have sometime been a bit flippant. I don’t think this one is an important question, and in some cases my answers have been designed to shock people into this realization.

What is the future of lean? Here are a few of my past favorite answers to this question:

Toyota, circa 1985. This was my standard around the year 2005. In 1985 the Toyota Production System was fairly robust and rapidly maturing; supplier development efforts were afoot. Toyota was being stretched but responding vigorously to the rise in the Japanese yen, expansion of sales into the U.S. market, and a changeover from Taiichi Ohno’s generation of leaders to the next. The early golden years? Perhaps. It’s interesting that analogous challenges are facing Toyota again in 2010.

Quality. Some Six Sigma Black Belt types jump on this answer in delight: “I knew it! Lean is not about quality!” In fact my point is that lean started with a quality focus brought first to Japanese companies by W. Edwards Deming. It was built on a solid foundation of total quality control at Toyota, embedded as a continuous improvement culture through QC Circles, with the often-neglected jidoka pillar being half of what makes lean work: quality built into every process. What the Japanese call the “QC methodology,” we now so lovingly call “A3 thinking.” The future is the past. Back to basics. But I think the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) has already made this point sufficiently, no need to linger on this one.

Lean hiring is the answer I’ve given to a few audiences that didn’t to get the message about the respect-for-people part of lean. One has to be careful in attaching anything “lean” to the employment process because there is the unfortunate stigma of job elimination associated with lean. Lean hiring is what Jeffrey Liker and David Meier begin to talk about in Toyota Talent. Lean hiring has little to do with streamlining the recruiting and induction process, though this should of course be done. Lean hiring has to do with having the right kind of lean culture to begin with, having leaders at the highest levels who have risen up through this culture (as opposed to being flown into the board room from other companies), the firm committed to growing the right kind of people to fit the culture and long-term vision of the company, and the recognition that this requires careful selection and hiring of people. Although the know-how for this is here, for most companies achieving lean hiring is decades out.

What’s lean today? If we can't even agree on this...

Lean everywhere is probably the safest answer to “What's next for lean?” We now have lean dentistry, lean health care, lean government, lean accounting, lean banking, lean manufacturing, lean logistics, lean distribution, lean startups, lean supplier development, lean Six Sigma (ironically not slimmer than Six Sigma itself, but this is another topic), lean bakeries, lean railroads, lean software design, lean IT, lean product development, lean sales, lean consumption, lean marketing, lean purchasing, lean airlines, lean librarians, lean lawyers—the list goes on. Antarctica and Greenland may be the only major land masses left on earth where there are no active and ongoing lean implementations.

The death of lean. As management fads in the West, suggestion systems are dead. Quality control (QC) circles are dead. Total quality management (TQM) is dead. The wrongly named just-in-time movement is dead. Six Sigma lives on but in faded glory. Lean’s days are, as are all days, numbered. The flip (but not flippant) side of this is that QC circles, TQC(M), and all the other half-efforts and past management fads are not dead but merely parts of lean that companies have not yet recognized as integral to the methodology. The term “lean” deserves to die once it has had its day and has spawned a better, more holistic and timely management model (fad).

Lean ethics. Ironically, lean ethics would not be a trim version of corporate ethics at all but rather a set of practices and principles far more robust and constraining of current business. In fact, lean not wrapped up in a thick layer of ethics is like a nerve cell without its myelin sheath: The message soon gets lost. This is one answer that I believe in, not a flippant response at all.

I may be wrong and “What's next for lean?” may indeed be an important question. I can't deny that in the mind of the person asking, it must be important enough to ask. I do appreciate the curiosity that drives someone to ask this. If I do find a real answer to this question, I won't hesitate to share it.