The visit to the lean service summit in Noordwijk was interesting in several ways (I might get back to that later). One of the striking things was, that the presentations on organisational change through lean principles and systems thinking (wether applied to services or to manufacturing) seemed to fall apart in two categories:

• organisational change projects where techniques (such as value stream mapping and ‘5s’) where applied, while maintining a command-and-control management structure (in fact, also executing the organisational change in this fashion). This approach was exemplified by e.g. General Electric and (to a lesser extent) General Motors.
• organisational change projects where a lot of attention was paid to empowering employees, getting everyone involved in changing their way of working (as exemplified by e.g. Fujitsu Services and Standard Life insurance), and driving organisational change bottom-up, with a supportive management.

Both approaches deliver large monetary savings and/or allow companies to increase sales without increasing staff size. I am in favour of the latter, and I suspect that change initiatives done in that fashion are more durable (they might actually start an ongoing process of emergent, self-organising change by the employees).

In his closing presentation James Womack said that Toyota was very liberal in sharing its’ way of working. I also saw figures, stating that Toyota is worth more (in monetary terms) than all of other major car manufacturers combined. If Toyota’s competitors choose the first strategy, there is indeed little to fear from sharing techniques, as Toyota will already have evolved their techniques further, since their people will continue to reinvent themselves and the company. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it…