Lean initiatives start out strong, with healthy principles and exciting rhetoric. But we still run into issues along the way - people become bottlenecks, teams wage war against other teams, deadline pressures make us break our WIP, blame still rears its ugly head. Why do these still happen to allegedly enlightened lean teams? What happens when our lean team fights with other non-lean teams? Why do we instinctively keep promising deliverables by certain dates - even when we know we can't reliably do so? Jim Benson discusses the fetid underpinnings of the human psyche and how knowledge workers are extremely susceptible to them.
