Consistent Lean Enterprise Culture
Domain 3: Consistent Lean Enterprise Culture
This domain tests how leaders make lean survive leadership changes and daily pressure. Questions focus on leader standard work, gemba, visual management, tiered daily management, accountability, hoshin kanri, catchball, coaching, yokoten, and change sustainment.
Core rules
- Culture is the pattern of daily behaviors reinforced by systems, not a poster campaign.
- Leaders have standard work: go to gemba, check process versus results, coach, and remove barriers.
- Visual management makes normal versus abnormal obvious at the point of work; escalation has an owner and a time frame.
- Tiered meetings connect the floor to support functions; each tier reviews the few metrics that drive action.
- Hoshin kanri aligns breakthrough objectives through catchball, not top-down assignment alone.
- Accountability means owning the process and the response, not blaming the person.
- Yokoten spreads a proven countermeasure horizontally with the standard, not just the result.
Worked example
A plant's 5S audit scores are high, but tools disappear and the floor reverts within weeks. Leaders respond with another audit. A stronger design: define leader standard work for daily area checks, post a visual board showing tool location and shortages, run a short tier-1 huddle with an escalation path, and track process adherence-checks completed and shortages closed-rather than audit score. Reasoning: the audit measured appearance; the culture needed daily behaviors and a response system. When leaders do the checks and act on abnormalities, the standard becomes real.
Traps
- Equating culture with employee satisfaction scores or posters.
- Choosing "empower employees" while removing all standards and accountability.
- Treating hoshin as a once-a-year document rather than a deployment and review cycle.
- Confusing yokoten with copying a tool without adapting the standard.
- Selecting a charismatic speech over a management system that sustains behavior.