The Need for Organisational Resilience - Chapter 3

soldiers, hunkering down in rigid fortifications, their expertise in defending a casemate or

bunker of little value in the open field. They were bound to watch from the distance, forced to

remain inactive as the Germans bypassed them.

Lean instead of Mean

The concept of Lean is not to be mistaken for a headcount or an attempt to address cost-

cutting pressures by indiscriminately reducing resources and capabilities. It is indeed a

focussed effort to distinguish between costs associated with waste, and with value. Value is,

as mentioned before, anything in the value stream of an organisation that helps to realise the

customer perspective. Hence, costs that deliver value to customers need to be ring-fenced,

maintained and enhanced. Costs that are incurred but do not contribute to the creation of

value, are considered to be waste, and need to be scrutinised. These may include wasted

inventory due to overproduction, or wasted movement, or wasted time because of

unnecessary approval procedures or replication of procedures, or because of bottlenecks

and potential error spots.

However, although some costs do not directly add value, they may be critical in

supporting (e.g. as back office functions) and enabling customer facing value production. It

may seem prudent, in the light of cost cutting pressures, to scrutinise back office functions,

such as running a data centre for an airline. But, if coupled with essential value-adding

operations, indirect value-adding functions need also to be strengthened and made more

robust so that they can bounce back from adversity; or develop their capabilities to provide a

competitive advantage.

Refocussing instead of Restructuring

Enhancing the flow of value-adding activities also goes hand in hand with being able to

refocus the centre-of gravity (COG) of activities if necessary. The Pull concept refers to

refocussing the organisation’s attention to what, when and where value needs to be created.

All too often, Lean is seen as an excuse to restructure, an exercise in moving resources and

capabilities around, with the sole purpose of combining and/or displacing resources and

capabilities.

From a Lean perspective though, resources and capabilities need to be reconfigured

and restructured, to address the Pull factor in the value stream. Likewise in 1940, resources

and capabilities were reconfigured to Panzergroup Kleist, for the purpose of having the

biggest impact where it was needed. The main purpose was to change the work itself, for a

limited period of time, to produce the maximum value progressively, quickly bringing a

competitor to its knees. Such Pull not only requires an organisational ability to dynamically

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