Picture the lobby. The Quality Management certification on the wall. The Lean initiative plaque next to it. The lobby looks like an organization that has its act together.
Behind the lobby: the corrective action log with seventeen open items, four of which are the same problem under different names. The value stream map curled at the edges, last updated fourteen months ago. The quality procedure saying one thing while the floor does another.
Most businesses have two improvement systems where they should have one. Quality Management and Lean were designed to solve the same problem. They have been running as separate, competing systems for decades — different languages, different metrics, different organizational empires — and collectively producing less than either would achieve working together.
This episode introduces the gap, the cause, and what thirteen episodes of Out of Chaos is going to do about it.