Foreword

When I first met Jan, he had already spent his year at Harvard and was starting to enjoy success at Medway. He came across as a thoughtful, confident, problem solver with time to tease away the obvious and an interest in the profound. I particularly liked his appetite for taking abstract concepts and turning them into workable process.

So when I first saw the sketch of a rocky cavern, descending into the darker realms of failure before climbing the far bank into operational sunshine, I felt Jan was onto something. I was taken by the distinction he drew between the underlying state of an organisation and the way in which it was perceived – even by those inside it. I found his narrative insightful and his illustrations lent credence to it. And now, a dozen or more years since we first met, Jan’s track record has justified the promise: he has applied his ideas sufficiently often to lay claim to having a system, and he has enjoyed enough success to claim that it works.

Although Lean Thinking has made its mark on Jan, you will not find an ideological commitment to Lean, or indeed, to any other of the manufacturing philosophies that have proven popular with theorists of late. Rather, you will encounter a pragmatic approach that blends to taste and morphs around the problems. By presenting a framework of ideas, Jan encourages you to join in and think your way through. For me, the practicality is the heart of the attraction of this book, and the combination of an accessible framework with the eclectic illustrations makes this book well worth the read.

We have stayed in touch over the years and I have enjoyed seeing these concepts hit the public domain through a set of articles in the Health Service Journal. Some of the ideas we discussed when first we met – such as problem-knowledge couplers – are not as prominent as they once were in putting the story together. Some things have assumed much greater importance: the more mundane business, for instance, of drawing the right pictures to influence the right people when sculpting a more agile service from the mass of processes that preceded it. And sometimes the right people are surprising people in surprising places.

And so I find myself commending this framework to you along with the narrative that gives it life. I hope you enjoy the ideas and find enough in here to put into practice for yourself. But above all, I hope it encourages you to take a thoughtful approach to the management problems you face, and that you, too, can succeed in teasing them apart. Enjoy …

Professor Terry Young