Abstract
The word ‘philosophy’ has been regularly used within the context of Lean thought. For example, Liker [1] insists that a long term philosophy is required in order to become a Lean organization, while Bicheno and Holweg [2] use the word as the title of a chapter to describe what they consider to be the essence of Lean thought.
However, what does this all have to do with philosophy? Philosophy – viewed as an academic discipline – is not the same as the philosophies used in the discussions about Lean. For Lean educators it could be interesting to reflect philosophically upon Lean thought. In this paper it shall be explored what happens if you approach Lean thought from a philosophical perspective. The use of the singular can be misleading: there are different ways to approach Lean thought, so in this paper is described how philosophy can be used to reflect upon Lean thought both from the inside out and from the outside in and demonstrated examples of the inside out approach. This study has implications for further research and is of relevance for Lean (education) practitioners. This paper is built upon the hypothesis that (philosophical) reflection upon Lean thought is relevant because it can improve both Lean practices and the in-depth knowledge of the methods applied in practice.
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de Zwart, J. (2023). Is There Such a Thing as a Lean Philosophy?. In: McDermott, O., Rosa, A., Sá, J.C., Toner, A. (eds) Lean, Green and Sustainability. ELEC 2022. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 668. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25741-4_1
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