Donna Sherriff is a New Zealand based improvement and operations management specialist. Seeing a need for simple, no fuss, improvement advice she started The Lean Minimalist blog in 2017. Donna writes articles offering advice and tips for rapid and sustainable business improvement based on over 15 years in Senior Management roles. She also writes about her own personal improvement journey, minimalism, and her life long struggle against the tyranny of cookies.
As I watch our team members explain how they or their team personally changed their own work processes for the better, I am reminded both of how far the culture has come in nearly three years and of the truth that lean culture grows out of the empowerment and commitment of people.
In a previous post I talked about my family’s intention to spend more time in nature, living off the grid. Since then, we’ve spent a lot of time at our small piece of paradise and I’ve observed a number of developments in my two daughters since they’ve had ‘more of less.'
The process involved in losing furniture weight is actually pretty simple and comes about through a few easy steps:
I think the answer lies in a more minimalist and mindful approach to food like the monks in the Dalai Lama's Cat. If I begin to consider food as something that should fit in with my values and beliefs, my mindset starts to change.
If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve struggled a bit with motivation this year and have been slowly working to overcome this. Today I came across what […]
As the days passed I started to notice a pattern of the things I was using regularly in the house; bathroom, bed, dining table, couch, kettle, a plate, a few cups and so on. This led of course to realising all the things one person doesn’t use when living alone. The expression, ‘rattling around’ suddenly became real to me. I was ‘rattling around’ our downsized house
From the outside looking in, the whole concept seems simple. And yet, there I was on a recent rainy weekend, surrounded by a pile of random crockery, struggling to let it go out of my life. The reality is, handling items that have been part of your life can bring back memories and the emotions that arise can make it hard to let go.
Plagued by a vague feeling that I wasn’t achieving, but with no proof available either way there were only two choices. I could stick to the plan, find ways to motivate myself and focus on moving forwards in blind faith or I could choose to do nothing, knowing I was making a deliberate choice not to move forwards. Without external feedback, there is no false hope that by some miracle, changes would happen. There is only following the process, or not.
To these leaders, the message is simple. If we waited for others to be doing improvement as a condition for us to do improvement, we would never do improvement. We can only improve ourselves and our own processes and set an example for others. How do we encourage others to improve? By setting the example.
If it wasn’t for this two month commitment to focusing on process, it is unlikely that I would have come to this conclusion. I would have measured my results, found them wanting, reset and just carried on and on, not getting into the details of why I wasn’t succeeding.
Our family recently took a big step on the path to living a more intentional life by purchasing a small piece of land in an out of the way town […]
Without a strong Why for change I believe it’s easy for the part of our brain that prefers comfort, rest and a lack of discomfort of any kind to convince us that our need for change is much less urgent that our need to eat, sleep or watch TV.
The beauty of this tool is that it helps teams to develop all the parts of a process at once, so that measuring and managing is considered at the same time as developing processes and writing procedures. It's also easily communicated to multiple process users, making it much easier to achieve a standard approach.
Motivation is constantly slipping away from us. Sometimes staying motivated is as difficult as picking up the spilled jelly my four year old has dropped on the dining table. You just can’t seem to get a grip on it no matter how hard you try, it just slides through your fingers.
The lean world is fairly divided on the legitimacy of 8th Waste - the waste of untapped human potential. To me it’s pretty clear that if you’re following the principles of respect for people, it’s very hard for this waste to exist and in fact, it’s not really waste, it’s just a sign that your fundamentals aren’t in place yet.
What’s interesting is that on a regular basis we have found that the solution to achieving better flow and simplicity in our house has often been a piece of furniture leaving our possession.
Whether it’s at home or at work, having lots of stuff does not necessarily mean its the right stuff. In fact, too much stuff leads to all kinds of inefficiencies […]
