In my last piece, I spoke about how Lean is evolving, from improving how work is done to questioning whether the work needs to exist at all. That shift is becoming more relevant every day, and sometimes simple analogies bring it to life best.
Take the humble lawn mower. Petrol lawn mowers have been around for decades, and they have improved over time. We’ve seen self-propelled versions reduce effort, mulching options remove the need to collect cuttings, and ride-on mowers increase speed and comfort. All useful advancements.
But these are incremental. The core process hasn’t really changed. Someone still needs to be there. The mower still needs fuel, maintenance, storage, and timing. The work is still fundamentally the same. As a Lean consultant, if you gave me a petrol mower process, I’d start improving it. And I did.
I made sure there were always two petrol cans, so we never ran out mid-job. I scheduled an annual service before the season started. I built a compost heap close to the garden. I even designated a specific spot in the shed, so everything was easy to access.
All classic Lean thinking, reduce waste, improve flow, make the job easier. And it worked.
Cutting the grass became quicker and somewhat easier. But even with those improvements, there were still parts of the process that were hard to fix.
Timing, for example.
If you were going on holiday, you had to cut the grass beforehand, otherwise you’d come back to something resembling a meadow. If you didn’t, the first job when you returned was a heavy cut. The process still depended on you being there at the right time. The work still existed.
Now introduce a robotic lawn mower, such as the Eufy one I use. Everything changes.
There’s no weekly mowing job. The mower runs continuously, little and often. There’s no panic before the holidays. No catch-up when you return. The lawn is just maintained.
Many process steps disappear:
– No petrol management
– No setup and pack-away
– No manual mowing
– No dependency on timing or weather
Instead of improving the process, the process is largely removed. And what’s left is a different type of work, setup, occasional maintenance, and oversight. This is exactly what is happening in Lean today.
Traditionally, Lean has focused on improving workflows, making tasks faster and more consistent. That still has value. But increasingly, the bigger opportunity is to ask: why does this work exist at all?
In many small businesses, there is still a huge amount of “petrol mower” work, but it often shows up as legacy processes or working around systems that were never quite right.
We get used to this. We improve processes. We become comfortable with the new process. But like the petrol mower, even a well-optimised process can still be inefficient because it exists in the first place. Modern digital tools, automation, integration, and AI are the robotic mower equivalent. They remove the need for large parts of the work altogether.
The challenge is this: what motivates us to change?
Most of the time, it’s external. A neighbour gets a robotic mower. A colleague mentions a new system. You see something working differently and realise there’s another way.
The same applies in business. Are we aware of the “robot mower equivalents” in our own processes? Often, we’re not. Because we’re busy improving what we already have. So how do we find better ways? We have to get out of our own processes. Talk to other business owners. Attend events. Share experiences. That’s where new ideas come from.
In my experience, the biggest breakthroughs come when we move beyond traditional improvement and into what I’d call advanced process improvement – the equivalent of a robot mower, where the focus shifts from improving the work to removing it altogether. But that kind of change rarely starts inside the business. It’s usually driven by people who are willing to challenge the status quo – often through conversations, exposure to others, and seeing different ways of working. When someone questions not just how a process is done, but whether it needs to exist at all, that’s what drives real change.
Consultant, LeanBPI
Lean hasn’t changed in its principles. It’s still about maximising value and minimising waste. But the tools available today allow us to go much further than before.
Sometimes, the best improvement isn’t another refinement of the process.
It’s realising there might be a completely different way of doing it altogether.
For further information contact John O’Shanahan at joshanahan@leanbpi.ie, ph. 087 7444 887 or visit www.leanbpi.ie
