Lean
- 8 minute read
Based on five key principles, Kaizen promotes a culture of continuous improvement to achieve operational excellence.
The world has changed dramatically since the 1980s, when Lean made its first appearance in the industry.
Today, companies operate in an unstable, unpredictable, and constantly evolving environment. Traditional reference points are fading, and cycles of change are accelerating.
The notion of crisis has become permanent,sanitary, energy, geopolitical, climate-related, technological. Crisis is no longer a temporary episode; it is now a structural condition.
This new context is commonly described by a now widely used acronym: VUCA, which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity .
VUCA is a term that originated in the U.S. military in the aftermath of the Cold War. It was later adopted by business leaders and strategy consultants to describe environments where traditional approaches to prediction, planning, and decision-making no longer work.
Each component of VUCA describes a specific challenge organizations must address.
Volatility refers to the rapid instability of market conditions or operational contexts. Example: Gas prices in Europe tripled following the invasion of Ukraine, forcing ArcelorMittal to temporarily suspend some of its production lines.
Uncertainty reflects the inability to predict events or their effects.
Example: Tesla had to reconfigure its factories to meet rapidly changing demand while anticipating supply chain disruptions.
Complexity refers to the multiplicity of variables to consider.
Example: Schneider Electric coordinates intelligent electrification projects that involve buildings, software, cloud platforms, and energy performance.
Ambiguity describes a lack of clarity or the presence of multiple possible interpretations.
Example: Customer satisfaction data can send conflicting signals for example, a high NPS but a declining repurchase rate.
In such a context, every decision a company makes can trigger wide-ranging and often unpredictable consequences, both internally and externally. The challenge is not only to make the right decisions, but to make them quickly and under uncertainty.
Organizations now face conflicting pressures: economic performance, customer expectations, regulatory compliance, shareholder demands, and societal responsibility.
This requires a new posture,more flexible, more reactive, and more collaborative. In this environment, agility becomes a core organizational capability.
But agility does not mean improvisation. It requires adaptable structures, autonomous teams, decentralized governance, and real-time information flow.
Several large companies have embraced this mindset:
In this VUCA world, information visualization becomes essential. Companies are deploying visual management systems—whether physical or digital—to make decisions understandable, shareable, and actionable.
Adapting quickly, making decisions based on incomplete data, empowering teams, responding to disruptions, and improving continuously—these are the imperatives of the VUCA era.
In this context, Operational Excellence is no longer a strategic option; it is a vital foundation. It helps stabilize what can be stabilized while making the organization more flexible, more adaptive, and more high-performing.
This means:
A powerful example: Sanofi uses digital Obeyas to align strategy, performance, and problem-solving efforts at every level of the organization.
In a VUCA world, excellence can no longer rely solely on rigid plans or isolated standards. It depends on an agile, learning organization, and aligned organization, capable of detecting weak signals, engaging teams, and evolving continuously.
The companies that succeed are not necessarily the largest or the oldest, but those that know how to combine discipline, attentiveness, adaptability, and collective commitment.
Want to see how Operational Excellence drives safety and performance in complex environments? Discover the iObeya case study .
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