Yesterday I mentioned in describing the books I am reading that “good habits can add up to lean operations.” I was asked how that was so.

It’s a systematic process.

Waste in time, motion or material points us to opportunities to get leaner. When we see the waste, we say to ourselves, “How do we make that waste go away or lessen its impact?”

Our next action is to begin to try things that are designed to change the impact. It’s one experiment after another. We make some changes until we feel like we have gotten the improvement.

We all have learned that once we have determined a better way, we have to put efforts in place to “sustain” the change. We write down the new procedure. We train the new procedure. We work on it diligently until it becomes a “habit.”

What we know about habits, whether good or bad, is that we do habits on automatic pilot. Which means we do them without having to think too hard about it.

Thus, good habits strung together have the effect of creating a lean operation or a lean person. The more we can do, the better we become.