Lean Sensei

Lean Sensei describes mastery in awareness of Lean acquired over the course of many years in the transformation of the gemba.

In Japan ‘Sensei’ is an honorable term used by the students for their teachers. Thus, it literally translates as “person born before another”.

Sensei is a Japanese word for « master »,

Lean Sensei’s Role in building people:

A Lean Sensei provides more focus towards challenges until people learn to adopt and work towards change providing leadership from their presence, flow, compassion and commitment

A Lean Sensei is not the person that know more about a Lean argument or a given reality but is the person that utilize his experience and knowledge to elicit in his disciple’s new points of view and doing so he help them to discover new ways of seeing and behave.

In an organization, Lean Sensei can help the leaders and managers to develop lean practices through firsthand experiences on the workshop. Kaizen helps manager to improve the technical and cooperation skills of their area by developing better processes. The job of lean sensei is to support during the experience period.

An experienced Lean Sensei know that a lean thinking culture can only happen when more experienced person in the management continuously coaches and guides the less experienced one. Thus, good teachers within an organization or outside of it, is important for improving staff’s knowledge and corporate culture along with the business, processes and the product.

Support of Lean Sensei:

In Lean, real learning happen through practice and in particular through the application of the Plan-Do-Check-Act Deming cycle. The Sensei is the master coach in creating the psychological conditions that put his disciples through the PDCA cycle.

Some good Aspects of Lean Sensei:

• Acts and provides leadership with their presence
• People come to learn from Sensei
• Providing lessons rather that solution so people can do it by themselves and learn
• Challenging tasks and targets, becomes easy in the presence of a sensei
• Helps in preparing goals, road map, plans of a project aligning with organizational goals.
• Asking questions to the people for improving their insight about the problem.
• Teaching people 6G through their experience
• Providing right path to their disciples and ensures they follow the path

6G (see this definition) and to learn more, we invite you to have a look at our newsletter n°23: the 6G .