Creating a Lean R&D System

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The Lean R&D Manager

e Lean manager’s responsibility is to create environments in which

people can ourish. at may not be much of a job description, but it

is enough. If a team is struggling with bureaucracy, clearly the bureau-

cracy barrier is something the manager can work to remove, and a Lean

research and development (R&D) manager will go about doing just that.

If a team’s biases are limiting its ability to see new ways to innovate in an

area crucial to the company, the Lean manager will help the team expose

their mental barriers. When researchers are struggling with communica-

tion issues, the Lean manager will coach them and provide opportunities

for them to grow, and shield them as they work through their skill-build-

ing process. If her team is having diculty getting the right information

from another area of the company, or operating smoothly with it in some

other way, the manager will apply herself to opening doors and building

bridges to unblock the ow of work. Within the community, she will hold

tension against individuals (and the community) who are thinking poorly,

shirking responsibility, or acting inappropriately, while easing the way to

collaborative, supportive, and communicative behavior.

Her job, ultimately, is tending to the nonwork systems that surround,

inltrate, and support the community in the pursuit of its common goals.

If she can increase those systems’ support of learning and collaboration

and reduce the bureaucratic or restrictive burdens, she will prove success-

ful. ereaer, it is the responsibility of each person and the community

as a whole to nd their own paths to growth.

Not surprisingly, from my viewpoint, every person in a Lean environ-

ment is a manager, irrespective of whether or not the company has an

explicit managerial function. Each colleague has the opportunity, hence

the responsibility, to identify systemic barriers in the environment. Each

102 • Creating a Lean R&D System

colleague has the opportunity and responsibility to identify and help

expose barriers holding individuals back. is responsibility comes from

the be state of the Lean person. People who are Lean assume responsibility

for themselves, for the community, and for themselves as members of that

community, and serve both with equal enthusiasm.

In this way, the Strategic Prosecution of Targets (SPOT) team at Pzer,

which had professional managers, found that it could create and manage

its own strategic direction; build its own infrastructure, communication,

and collaboration tools; develop immediate prioritization and experi-

mental design norms; and operate virtually independently. Managers

explicitly stopped dening work, experimental design and direction, and

strategy and priorities. Fully 50 percent of their work time was freed up for

the far more valuable task of coaching and removing barriers to growth

within the organization.

SKILLS A LEAN MANAGER MUST POSSESS

e basic skills of a Lean manager include the ability to see, without preju-

dice, group and system dynamics, individual and group thought, and cre-

ative and innovative processes. She must be able to see physical, mental,

and emotional barriers to innovation within the environment created by

those groups and systems. She must be able to reframe the assumptions

within the innovation environment and, in so doing, to design individual

and group experiences to improve those dynamics as projects progress,

ensuring that the growth of individuals, teams, and knowledge all expand

as much as possible. She must also have the technical skill to manage

knowledge projects, which means she will have to be able to see knowledge

growth, an intangible but critical element of R&D delivery.

SEEING EXERCISES

• Observing group and system dynamics in an external setting

• Letting the environment tell you (listening in the internal environment)

• Observing the internal environment (walking the gemba)

• Mapping