I recently spent an evening with my two grandsons, watching as they played and sometimes playing myself. But they were not just playing and neither was I. They were learning, as all children do when they play. And they were working -- after all, isn’t problem-solving work?

I was also learning. James, age five and a half, wanted me to play "Army Man" with him but first he had to teach me how to play his game. I had to learn the game and I also had to learn how James wanted to play/work. Robert, age two and a half, was busy working alone, making a new configuration of his space ship. For him, I was not a partner to join in his game or a manager to tell him how to play. I was a coach he could ask for help when he wanted help. Robert wanted to do his own thing, with help only when he asked for it. James wanted a teammate and he wanted to teach me what he knew. These two boys were doing what children all over the world, in every culture, love to do -- just get lost in time, playing, working and learning. In the jargon of education, the boys were using their "preferred learning styles" in a "discovery learning mode." They were reminding me that much of what we call work involves very early patterns that develop into our adult learning styles. What is important about that reminder is this: learning in our preferred style is more like play and learning in some other style is more like work (in the bad sense).

So what does all this have to do with lean manufacturing? Well, just about everything -- because it is a mistake to think that lean is one-size-fits-all. If lean is going to work for you and your fellow workers, it can only work as play, as creative discovery.

That’s how it was for Taiichi Ohno, who invented lean manufacturing. One day he was challenged by his boss, Toyoda Kiichiro, to "catch up with America in three years. Otherwise, the automobile industry of Japan will not survive." He really felt the burden of his mission when he learned that at that time, it took nine Japanese workers to produce as much as one American. But then it occurred to him that there couldn’t be that great a gap between the two nations in dexterity or energy. The gap must come from something else: "Japanese people are wasting something. If we could eliminate the waste, productivity should rise by a factor of 10."

But where was the waste? Each of us might have our own way to approach that question. Ohno’s method was to do just what my grandsons were doing a few days ago. He didn’t read books or consult experts or worry about how other people might solve the problem. Instead, he used what was his preferred learning style. He went out on the shop floor just to watch and consider what he saw. Eventually, when he had to come up with a name for this, he called it kaizen, which translates as "continuous improvement." He could also have called it "continuous learning" or "discovery learning" because that’s what it is. He could also have called it "play" -- because using your preferred learning style to solve problems is really play and work at the same time. Discovery learning is like play. It is fun. It can also be the most effective and competitive thing you can do for your process.

In Ohno’s case, it was revolutionary. He discovered seven wastes common to most manufacturing environments:

• waste of overproduction (work in process stock, finished goods inventory)
• waste of time (operators waiting as a machine works)
• waste in transporting
• waste of processing (performing operations that are not essential)
• waste of stock on hand (raw material stock)
• waste of movement (motions not needed)
• waste of defective products (quality inspection, repair)

Not bad for play. Managers, let me encourage you to pursue lean manufacturing in your own preferred learning style without worrying about whether that approach is "work" or not. Just see what you can discover. Don’t imitate what works for others. Learn what is the most fruitful and creative way for you and your company. Taiichi Ohno had one advantage over many of us. Like my grandsons, he knew how he best went about learning: "The time that provides me with the most vital information about management is the time I spend in the plant." Knowing that, he knew how to solve any problem in the right way.

Lean manufacturing begins when you get everyone thinking in terms of play. Call it "discovery learning" or even "kaizen" if you have to, if it needs to sound more like "work." But don’t forget that really it is play, preferred learning style. Some employees will want to learn on their own. Others will need team members, kind of like me and my grandson James playing.

Call it play but learning and practicing this new kind of management can be plenty of work. For example, letting people learn the way they learn best, even if it is not your way, can be tough on you at first. But the road to lean is not "my way or the highway." It’s more like "my way or your way or her way or whatever way will work best." You may need to work at becoming more than a manager by playing at being other things: sometimes team member, sometimes coach and advisor, sometimes teacher, sometimes student. James and I were a good team even though we were child and adult, grandson and grandpa, because he taught me how to work with him and I listened. Coaching like I provided for Robert’s spaceship construction project would not have been any good for James. It would have turned his fruitful play into something boring and tedious -- the negative something we think of when we use the word "work."