Creating a Lean R&D System

xxi

Introduction

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

People oen ask what Lean looks like in research and development (R&D),

or ask to see a site that is operating in a Lean way. is gives me pause

because Lean in R&D doesn’t necessarily look dierent than any other

R&D environment, but it does feel dierent, and its operations might as

well be on dierent planets for all of the similarities they share.

at said, I am le with the unenviable task of describing a feeling.

Luckily, nearly every human has experienced this feeling and, therefore,

we just need to link ourselves to it through analogy. For most of us, there

was a time in our lives when we were a part of a group, perhaps a sports

team, perhaps a choral or jazz ensemble, perhaps just a group of very close-

knit friends, who achieved this state or feeling. Eventually, your group had

worked together, been together, practiced together, performed together,

and, perhaps, gotten into and out of trouble together long enough that

each member felt he or she had intimate knowledge of what the other

group members would do in a given circumstance. You just knew, without

speaking, signing, or even looking at each other what would come next.

Any emerging circumstance will t seamlessly, naturally into the group’s

ongoing activities. e jazz band that pulls a yell out of the audience and

distills it into a trumpet solo that then passes to the brass and on to the

rhythm section has felt this. e hockey team that ows to the puck, passes

without looking, adjusts to the greatest and least eort of its opponent,

and scores seemingly without eort has experienced this. e friends who

just know that, because it is Tuesday and the sun is out, Frisbee in the park

is on (and bring extra water because someone will bring a new friend to

join the group) has this feeling.

e feeling is an intimate sense of community, of belonging, combined

with an indescribable but intensely energizing feeling of being “on.” It

involves trust and shared experience, a common purpose, and a sense of

xxii • Introduction

place. It involves a sense of personal commitment to others, and a group

commitment to the person, but it neither involves nor requires a hierarchy,

only shared capability, knowledge, direction, and common bonds.

ose grand words may strain credulity, and yet I watched teams at

Pzer build just such trust and condence, collaboration, and capabil-

ity, and do so in short order. Moreover, the same values that accrued to

our group of friends, our sports teams, and our musical ensembles, when

they reached that level of connection, accrued to these R&D teams. eir

performance jumps to an almost ridiculous level. Following one example,

a team’s speed of scientic discovery increased by a factor of six; their

newly developed scientic approach invalidated several disease hypoth-

eses being actively pursued in the laboratory and, much more expen-

sively, in the clinical trials of many global pharmaceutical companies.

at same science identied likely causal pathways that no one had yet

identied, creating uncharted opportunity for the team to pursue.

Other levels of performance changed just as dramatically. Scientic

milestones were never missed. Progress was made on previously intrac-

table problems. New paradigms of research, testing, and data manipula-

tion emerged. New paradigms of project and scientic management were

created, freeing up as much as 50 percent of management’s time to invest

in creating even more eective environments in which people and inno-

vation could thrive. e whole atmosphere within the work area changed.

It was noticeably calmer, happier, and more energized than other work

spaces in the company. Conservatively, the level of performance increased

a good two orders of magnitude in just ve months.

at said, concrete outward signs of change were dicult to quantify,

since, fundamentally, the dierences between Lean and non-Lean R&D

arise from dierent assumptions about how the universe works and how

people work, interact, and ourish in that universe, as well as about how

best to construct an environment in which people can create and deliver

valuable innovations within that universe. ese dierent assumptions

have no outward physical component. e same people still read scientic

literature, still design and execute experiments in the same laboratories

with the same equipment they always did; they just think about their work

in a radically dierent way, and that makes all the dierence.