Lean thinkers and negative thinkers

Lean is way of life. Lean is about thinking in lean lines and living that thinking. Lean thinkers always look at the opportunities to improve the current system. They will challenge anything if they feel it does not add value to the end product or the service. Great, isn’t it?

So lean thinkers are very positive and have the “can do” mindset. But all the people are not positive thinkers. This is not an exception in an organization. Some will feel some things as wastes and some people see the same things as opportunities to improve. We generally ignore or criticize these negative thoughts and do not want to listen to them. But for me negative thinkers are as important as positive thinkers. They are not a waste in the organizational setting. In fact they are an asset to any organization.

Negative thinkers are good in finding the possibilities for problems. They will find out any possibilities for failures in a system within minutes. This characteristic alone is a very important to have in designing a successful system like lean. People who think positively generally do not see the problems. But in practicality it is not enough to have only positive thoughts to create a successful system. All the possibilities must be analyzed and necessary actions must be taken to prevent them. Here negative thinkers have a very important role to play.

Lean is all about thinking, planning and executing. Most of the ideas will be in drawing board for most of the time of the project cycle. It will be discussed and planned properly before even thinking about implementing. So the implementation will be well planned and smooth and has a very high chance of failure.

Positive people are good. They make the things happen. But negative people are as important. They will make things not fail.