ENCORE The Visual-Lean Alliance: Two Wings of a Bird

Question: Which is more important—visual or lean? Answer: Bad question. Visual and lean share a single destination: operational excellence. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, explains why visual and lean represent a single comprehensive improvement strategy but with a telling difference in focus, process, and metric. They are allies, yet importantly and exquisitely different. Visual’s name for the enemy is information deficits; its macro metric is motion/moving without working. Its goal? Build flow. Build adherence. Lean targets the critical path; its macro measure is time and its corollary, speed. Its job is to dis-entangle the path that value follows—and then put pull in place. Which is more important: time or information? Another bad question. Like the wings of a bird, visual and lean are separate yet equal in impact. Ask a bird which of its wings is more important, and it will answer by flying off. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.