We have all learned a lot during the Covid-19 crisis. A lot has changed over the past few weeks, including – for many of us – the way we work. For millions of people across the world, home working has become the norm. It may even become the “new normal”. During this transition, as I hunkered down in our home in North Wales, I reflected a lot on the learning and benefits folks new to remote working might gain from applying Lean Thinking.
Coincidentally, I had just started reading Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life, co-authored by Marie Kondo. I admit, I’d never read her previous books, but her name comes up quite frequently these days in discussions on 4 or 5S. For those who don’t know her, Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizing guru. She has a popular TV show and a couple of best-selling books that focus on de-cluttering our homes and lives. In Joy at Work, Kondo and her co-author Scott Sonenshein, an organizational psychologist and professor at Rice University, have written specifically about the workplace. In terms of timing, it appears the pair have hit the jackpot – what better occasion to bring the “KonMari method” into our homes and our home working environments than the lockdown the pandemic forced us into?
As I read the book, I asked myself whether the KonMari method might offer anything additional for seasoned lean thinkers and, conversely, whether Lean Thinking might provide additional value to anyone following Marie Kondo’s teachings.