Lean is a huge field, well documented.
Lean is a key part of Open thinking
There is nothing new about Lean. It has been around since WW2, and its roots go back even further. But Lean thinking is still usually applied in narrow contexts such as manufacturing production lines. It needs to be more generally understood for all value flow.
This isn’t the place to cover Lean – there are many books – but, at its core, Lean is about understanding what the customer sees as value, aligning your business to that, and removing everything else.
There are many tools to align with the customer view of value, including customer journey maps, persona maps, empathy maps, customer value propositions, and business model canvas.
Lean seeks to remove three factors from flow of work:
Inconsistency (lumpiness, surges, constraints)
Overburden (trying to do too much, trying to push too much in). See Slack.
Waste (7 or 8 forms of unnecessary work, depending on the version)
Those forms of waste:
Lean is an extensive body of knowledge which brought us many of the concepts in Open. All managers should understand it.
See also Value Stream Mapping
Note: be careful of Lean