The Simply Lean Pocket Guide for Construction is a great book for tools. The organization of the book presents the tools in the familiar PDCA logic using an improvement workshop 'real world' example. There are about 100 pages of templates and an easy to use glossary.

Discipline is lacking in our industry. This book shows you what to use and when to use it. But use this book along side many other influences during your lean transformation. What worries me is the lack of humanity presented. Doing a 5 Why tends to make people feel defensive. Particularly in our blame culture. There isn't a mention of this. 

That being said, I was astounded at the broad exposure one can receive from reading this book. It uses an example construction company and a Kaizen event to describe the uses of the tools. With a traditional background in Industrial Engineering (IE), it was satisfying to see all the exposure to less used tools typical in IE. 

I get to have so much fun at work, it makes me want to start a TV show called “People are so Funny”. As humans we naturally resist change. It is deep in our bodies to do so. Think about it: if we went around changing how our blood flows or body temperature regulates, we would be a mess. It is a natural biological function, called homeostasis, which keeps these ole bodies ticking away. This same function keeps people and organizations from accepting change. It is just natural. Yet, if we don’t change, learn or grow in business, we are out of business.

What does this have to do with Japanese words? Anyone in a lean transformation knows it is all about change. Change the behavior, change the culture, change the things done and how they are done and change the words….. to Japanese words!

A superintendant joined a project under way and was openly dismayed and dismissive of “all these Japanese terms.” He could not and would not accept this at that time. This was a few months ago.

We get stuck using tools incorrectly all the time. In fact, it is claimed to be one of the biggest mistakes of organizations adopting lean.

A focus on the tools of lean causes inaction and misunderstanding. There are a lot of tools that contradict each other. Confusion occurs - how do we deal with this? Lean is suppose to help; what do I do?