The Two Pillars of Lean

For many teams and organizations, the agile principles are not enough. These teams and organizations need lean thinking to help solidify how agile might work for them.

For many years, people assumed lean was about manufacturing. Because of the Toyota Production System (see, for example, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production [Ohn88]), some people thought lean was a bunch of tools, specifically for manufacturing. Lean is much more than specific tools such as a kanban board, or a principle such as single-piece flow.

There are two pillars of lean: respect for people and a commitment to continuous improvement. (See the Lean Primer for the pillars as well as an excellent and brief explanation of lean.^[5]) The two pillars of lean help us create an agile culture. Lean principles apply to knowledge work as well as manufacturing.

Many teams stumble if they try to use only the 12 principles of agile software development when they adopt an agile approach. When people add the pillars and lean thinking, they can make agile work better for their context.

Lean thinking—using the lean principles—helps agile teams use agile approaches to create better products and deliver more value. Lean thinking helps people and teams realize they need to visualize their flow of work and think about value as they apply the agile principles. If you’re wondering about the source of lean thinking, I recommend reading Lean Thinking [WJ96], Lean Product and Process Development [War07], The Toyota Way [Lik04], and especially This Is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox [MÅ13].

These are the lean principles of software development from Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers [PP03]:

1. Eliminate waste.
2. Amplify learning.
3. Decide as late as possible.
4. Deliver as fast as possible.
5. Empower the team.
6. Build integrity in.
7. See the whole.

These principles specifically address the flow of work and the idea that cross-functional team works together. The agile principles say to work as a collaborative cross-functional team and to deliver often.