Organizing Complexity: How Lean Manufacturing Addressed the Failures of Mass Production

I’ve spent my career to-date building operations teams at early-stage companies, and have always been fascinated by the question: how do groups get things done? Organizing Complexity is a series of articles where I’ll be unpacking the structures and systems developed in various contexts, from software engineering to foraging ants, that enable groups of individuals to solve collective problems. The goal of this series is not to reach a forgone conclusion about what is the best system, but instead to shed some light on the process of work.

The commodification of lean management principles is no secret — today you can take courses to become certified as a six sigma blackbelt or get a credential in continuous improvement. The lean philosophy has spread across industries, from agile development to the lean startup model. But before all the buzzwords, back in the mid 20th century lean manufacturing was just the name given to the principles that revolutionized the auto manufacturing industry forever.

Before Taiichi Ohno developed the elements of lean for Toyota, there was only craft production and mass production to compete. It was Ohno’s focus on improved quality and waste reduction that accounted for Toyota’s dramatic improvements in cost, efficiency, and product variety.