Making Lean Work

Before You Map a Value Stream

Everyone wants to map a value stream.

Almost nobody is ready to.

The brown paper goes up. Sticky notes appear. A current state, a future state, and an action plan are created.

Three months later, the map is still on the wall.

The action plan isn't.

That's not a Value Stream Mapping problem.
It's an improvement strategy problem.

The best Value Stream Mapping books all agree on one thing: the workshop isn't the start of the journey, it's the middle. Most organisations jump straight there.
Before you map, ask six questions:

1. Is the business VSM ready? Value Stream Mapping exposes improvement opportunities, but if the process is unstable or incapable, a different improvement strategy will deliver greater results first.

2. Are you mapping the right value stream? Choose the one linked to business strategy or to flow, not the noisiest problem.

3. Have you done the pre-work? Understand demand, current performance and the real process before drawing a map.

4. Have you got the right people? Process owners, decision-makers and a facilitator prepared to challenge the room.

5. How will you design the future state? Build it from data and a deep understanding of value and flow - not by voting on sticky notes or driving random acts of improvement.

6. How will you sustain it? The workshop doesn't deliver results. Leadership routines do.

Miss any of these six, and you haven't mapped a value stream.

You've decorated a wall.

Value Stream Mapping isn't the improvement strategy.

It's one step in a leader-led continuous improvement strategy.

How does your organisation decide when it's ready to map a value stream?

🔴 Consistency of purpose is putting Principles v People
Here's something most improvement leaders won't say out loud.

Mature businesses, with solid track records. Decades of improvement activity.
And yet, still going to market to hire their next OpEx leader. Their Business Excellence Director. Their Head of Continuous Improvement.

Think about that for a second.

If your improvement approach was genuinely driving business-wide improvement, driving real change and developing people - that pipeline would come from inside the business.

The next generation of improvement leaders would already be there.
The fact that they're not is worth thinking about.
But it doesn't stop there.

What about the other senior roles: Operations Directors, Plant Managers, VPs? Are those bypassing the people who came up through the business and improvement activities too?

If they are, no wonder improvement teams struggle to get buy-in. No wonder the organisation never fundamentally changes.
And no wonder the organisation changes its improvement strategy and approach every few years.

Because the message being sent — whether intended or not — is that improvement is a support function. Not a leadership path. It’s Not core to how the business thinks and operates. 😱

You can't build an improvement culture when the people who embody it never make it to the table where decisions get made.

The hire tells you everything about what the organisation actually believes.
But here's the harder question for the C-suite:

If your most capable improvement people aren't being developed into your next generation of leaders — what does that say about your succession strategy? Your culture? Your actual commitment to change?

You don't get to claim continuous improvement as a strategic priority while systematically excluding it from your leadership pipeline.

The org chart doesn't lie. Neither does the job advert.

The answer isn't a better hiring process. It's a different improvement strategy. One that doesn't create a specialist function the business works around, but builds capability into every layer of leadership.

That's how you stop plugging the holes and making the same hire.

, , ,

🚩I've had the same conversation with three different leadership teams this month. And it wasn’t easy.

Most mature organisations didn't lose their continuous improvement culture because of a bad decision. They lost it gradually, many between 2020 and now, while everyone was focused on surviving.

Here's what that actually looked like:
> Daily standups became Slack 🤣
> Visual management boards became forgotten Miro boards and Sharepoint pages
> Gemba walks became a mix of solution-jumping or just stopped entirely
> 'Psychological safety' became a slide in an all-hands briefing

The tools are still there. The frameworks are still there. But the improvement culture is gone.

Toyota has had to reinstate its foundations multiple times over the decades. Not because they forgot the tools. But because senior leaders recognised that an improvement culture doesn't sustain itself without proximity, repetition, and leadership that actually models the behaviour - not just talks about it.

The organisations doing well right now aren't the ones with the best tech or the biggest improvement teams. They're the ones who noticed the gap and did something unglamorous about it:

• Structured daily management, actually done
• Visual mgnt that lives where the work happens, not on a screen nobody opens
• Leaders' priorities realigned, with them present on the floor, not just on the call
• Honest conversations about real problems, not just symptoms
• CI thinking that's disciplined and consistent, not seasonal. Combined with agile and growth-minded activities

None of that is new. That's the point.

The question isn't whether your organisation has lots its way and let standards slip over the past five years.

Most did.

It’s whether your leadership has the self-awareness?
and the humility to say so?

Most leaders I speak to already know the answer. That's usually the problem.

Glad to be doing this work again with another digital business. Getting the basics back in place, stronger and better than before.