It’s easy to think that standards REDUCE creativity. One of the big surprises in Lean is the exact opposite: when used rightly, standards INCREASE creativity and flexibility. They do so by capturing the ideas and improvements we make to a process, and spreading them to everyone who performs that process. The improved process then becomes the new baseline for the NEXT improvement.

For this snowball effect to work, we need more than a written standard. We need a system to gather improvement ideas from our people, test those ideas, approve successful ones, update our standard, and train the updated standard to everyone who uses that process. Many companies will decide that this is “too much work.” They will put off working on standards and instead focus almost entirely on getting orders out the door.

In my view, diverting effort away from standards is a mistake. 

THIS is the big opportunity in Lean: if you DO the hard work to get the standard system in place, you end up with a sustainable competitive advantage: continuous improvement by everyone in your business.