ABSTRACT
https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780429436932/9840589e-5c3c-4116-a3b8-4751b7572a5d/content/unfig10_2.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>One of the things that I spend the most time explaining to people that I coach is that in Lean, the definition of a problem is the gap between what should be happening (the target) and what really is happening now (the current state, or actual) … and unless we know both … we don’t actually have a problem! Although we may feel like something is wrong – a customer might have voiced a concern, we don’t enjoy doing our work a certain way, or we think something we are doing is taking too long – unless we know what should be happening in the situation, and what’s actually happening, and they don’t match, we don’t have a gap. And in Lean, because improving means closing the gap between the actual and the target, unless we know what the gap is, we don’t actually have a problem.
