Lean is a way of looking at the world.
It is neither a hunt for waste nor a manual of best practices. I practice this way of looking as a consultant, I research it as a PhD candidate, I teach it at the university, and I wrote a book to tell where it comes from. This page tells how it all fit together, and why none of it is separate.
The thread
Nothing I do today comes from a career plan. Everything comes from a sequence I can date, where each link explains the next.
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A film
Bruce Lee on screen, and the immediate urge to do that. It all starts there, and I cannot help it.
so
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2010 and 2012
A dojo
Karate. Black belt in 2010, 2nd dan in 2012. Years of repeating the same moves to perform them better, not to learn new ones. Rigor, discipline and the art of taking away, long before I knew their industrial names.
and then
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2012, then 2013 and 2014
Crossing to the other side
A federal instructor diploma the same year as the 2nd dan, then 2 years teaching in a dojo. I discover that what drives me is not knowing. It is passing it on.
and yet
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2016
Yellow belt
Industrial engineering, then Lean in workshops, offices and war rooms. In 2012, I was a 2nd dan and an instructor; in 2016, I was earning a yellow belt again, in another art. Green in 2018, black in 2019, master in 2020. You do not skip a level, and you are not excused from one because you have already climbed others elsewhere.
then one day
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2017
A sentence
During my master’s, in a dimly lit room at the university where I now teach, a professor tells me that Lean will not survive the digital age. I do not hear an opinion, I see a mental barrier. I would answer it in more than 130,000 words, and I owe him the spark: the finest movements are born from friction.
but
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A limit
I read, I train, I write, I attend conferences. And I hit a wall: the question I am asking has no available answer. Existing studies cover specific companies, specific environments, specific people. Certification bodies, trainers and some large corporations have drawn generalizations from them that those studies did not support.
so
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Defense planned for 2028
The PhD
If the answer does not exist, you have to produce it, and have it tested by peers. An unvalidated answer is just one more opinion, and this field already has plenty.
and then
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Refusing the shelf
I have seen too many theses gather dust. An answer locked in a file nobody opens is useless, and no one who shaped Lean, since the medieval workshops, ever kept a discovery to themselves. Hence the publications, the book, the courses, and this site.
Research to understand, teach so that it serves. It is the movement of the dojo, with other tools.
What I believe
6 convictions, written at the end of the book, that I have no wish to round off here.
Constant adaptation
No method survives if it refuses to evolve. Lean has crossed the eras only by absorbing each of them.
Balancing standard and freedom
A house that is too tightly laced stops inventing; a house that is too loose stops holding together. All the difficulty, and all the beauty, lies in that setting.
Crises are accelerators
Wars, shortages and pandemics have done more for the intelligence of organizations than decades of comfort.
People are the exact center of the system
The shipyards of Venice, the lines of Aichi and the pipelines of the West Coast tell the same story: the story of collective intelligence that is either called upon or wasted.
The long run
Toyota took 30 years to become Toyota. Organizations that want to do it in a quarter only buy the scenery.
Technology amplifies judgment, it does not replace it
The algorithm sees more than we do; it still does not know what matters. An alert is only worth something if someone has the right to stop.
My definition
An organization is Lean when it shortens the distance between a question and its verification.
A Seattle hospital shortened the distance between the error and the alert. Motorola, between the variation and its cause. A startup, between the belief and the proof. Whole worlds, without a single conveyor belt.
That is why I make no difference in kind between Lean and agility. Agile methods are largely Lean’s offspring: small batches, kanban boards, retrospectives, limits on work in progress, teams organized around the flow. The vocabulary changes; the law does not.
Three verbs
They held in the workshop of a Bruges carpenter in the 15th century. They still hold in a deployment pipeline.
An example, so this does not stay abstract. The next time you are stuck in line at the supermarket, instead of checking your phone, look up. In front of you, a cart filled to the brim: that is a batch. Next to it, the express lane for 10 items or fewer: those are small batches, and see how they flow. An item without a barcode, the cashier raises a hand, and the whole line stops. Between the chewing gum and the batteries, you have just seen the whole difference between producing in batches and producing in flow, and how fragile any chain is at the first surprise.
There is nothing else in my work than that gesture, carried over to larger organizations and to flows you cannot see.
See
Go and look at the facts where they happen, not at their tidied-up reflection. The record rather than the impression. Last week’s calendar rather than the feeling of having run out of time.
Say
Make the work visible, because you cannot improve what you cannot see. A board that shows work in progress and blockers turns diffuse frustrations into problems people can discuss.
Learn
A deviation from the standard is first an opportunity to learn. Nine times out of ten, it is a smart adaptation to a problem nobody had seen.
The art of taking away
My karate black belt is not a curiosity at the bottom of a résumé. It is chapter 25 of my book.
The Six Sigma belt system is borrowed from the martial arts, and it is not a marketing wink. It is the recognition that a skill is not acquired by listening, but by repeating a move until it stops being conscious. I know it because I have worn both, and because I taught in a dojo before teaching at the university.
In 1964, in Long Beach, an unknown 23-year-old steps up for a demonstration in front of rows of black belts and tells them their classical forms are organized despair. A few months later, in Oakland, Bruce Lee faces a kung fu practitioner in private. Accounts differ, down to the outcome; according to Lee, he wins in about 3 minutes, which already seems too long to him. Someone else would have concluded that more techniques were needed. He drew the opposite conclusion: the problem is not what is missing, it is what is in excess.
Three centuries earlier, in a cave near Kumamoto, Musashi wrote the same thing and compared the strategist to the master carpenter. Know your woods, keep your blades sharp, never ask anyone for work above or below what they can do. Ohno, 5,600 miles from Long Beach and without ever having read them, counted unnecessary motion among his 7 capital wastes.
One caution, though. Taking away has never meant impoverishing. Lee trained with an encyclopedic appetite: he absorbed widely so he could cut precisely. Cutting without study does not produce purity; it produces ignorance. That is the misreading that awaits hasty heirs, in training halls as in companies.
“It is not daily increase but daily decrease, hack away the unessential.”
- KarateBlack belt, 2010
- Karate2nd dan, 2012
- KarateFederal instructor diploma, 2012
- KarateTeaching in a dojo, 2013 and 2014
- Lean Six SigmaYellow Belt, 2016
- Lean Six SigmaGreen Belt, University of Strasbourg, 2018
- Lean Six SigmaBlack Belt, IASSC-accredited program, 2019
- Lean Six SigmaMaster Black Belt, 2020
- Lean Six SigmaYellow Belt training and certification at the university, since 2021
- Lean Six SigmaGreen Belt training and certification at the university, since 2026