Life and Lean

By Michele Ebel - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Do you ever think about the ways that running a household is a lot like running a business? I do – quite a bit, in fact, and over the course of 30-odd years, I’ve learned a thing or two about how to make the most of it. For example, I’ve learned that an ideal process is one that achieves maximum results with minimum resources, and I’ve learned not to waste time on non-value-added activities. Mainly, I’ve learned that, in the home, just as in the workplace, it’s extremely important to optimize the flow. Those of you who know me personally might suspect that I gleaned all these pearls of wisdom from my job as an editor of business cases, but you’d be wrong about that. In fact, I picked up each one of these little gems from my husband, who, as luck of some kind or another would have it, earns his living as a lean-productivity specialist. Yes sir-ee, when it comes to optimizing the flow, our home is a lean-process lover’s Utopia.

Get a load of this: At our house, we have a triple hamper system for our dirty laundry so it never, ever has to be sorted, and we have a triple blue-box system for our recycling materials that owes its existence to that very same time-saving principle. We have a carefully crafted grocery list that ensures we can pick up our weekly supplies along a steady path of consecutive grocery aisles in order to avoid wasting valuable time looking for items, willy-nilly, all over the store. And because lean also means green, every family member has been trained to turn off lights and turn down thermostats, and no one would even dream of running the dishwasher except during the off-peak smart-meter hours. See what I mean? All very efficient and cost-effective and neat and tidy and ... lean.

Here’s another fun little fact I’ve learned over that same 30-year period: Nothing ticks off a lean specialist more than a person who can’t grasp the concept that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You can really mess with a lean-lover’s head, for example, by leisurely digging one hole at a time to plant a row of 50 marigolds on a hot spring day or by getting in the way of the horizontal snow-shovelling strategy with a diagonal strategy of your own. Sometimes I do these kinds of things on purpose, just to see how long it takes for those two big blue veins to pop out along the sides of my husband’s forehead.

Let’s talk turkey here for a minute: Not everything in life fits neatly into the World of Lean. Toilet training a two-year-old, helping a 10-year-old with math homework, getting a teenager to wake up in time for school in the morning, caring for an elderly parent or grandparent – not one of these activities could ever be described as a lean process. As much as they might want to, lean specialists can’t solve every one of life’s problems with a timely and efficient strategy. Sometimes, we need a not-so-lean specialist to step up and fill in the gaps. After all, even the leanest of businesses can derive some benefit from a little resource complementarity.

In our household, my lean-process-loving husband is in charge of strategic planning, and I’m in charge of HR. We co-operate on finance and labour, and it all seems to work out pretty well most of the time. But would I go so far as to say that we’ve become a team of two lean specialists? No. Absolutely not. Because two would be redundant. And redundancies are inefficient. And everyone knows that inefficiencies are ... not very lean.

Michelle Ebel: For over 10 years, Michele Ebel has operated an online copyediting business out of her home in London, Ontario. The Internet allows her to work with clients from all over the world to polish and improve their written presentations of business cases, journal articles, thesis papers, website copy, manuscripts and more.
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