August, 2014

The Confucian roots of Lean

Lean is still often seen as a set of tools to eliminate waste in processes, but the understanding that Lean is actually much deeper than that is spreading. However, even in the Lean community, the extent of that depth is rarely understood or discussed in detail.

In this post, I will strive to elaborate on the deep connection Lean has with Confucianism, what this means for the content of Lean, and what this means for the adoption of Lean in the Western world. Understanding this connection opens rich insight into Lean as well as to the reasons it is so difficult to adopt Lean in the West.

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Dynamic capabilities in personal career planning

Have you ever been asked where you will be in five years? Or what is your career plan? With the pace of change in the world being as rapid as it is, and with no signs of it slowing down, these questions do not make quite as much sense as they perhaps used to.

The same applies to strategic management, and there one of the more popular answers to rapid change has been the adoption of the dynamic capabilities framework. Interestingly, its teachings apply equally well on an individual level when it comes to career planning.

I have written about dynamic capabilities in more detail before, but in this post I wish to explore the application of dynamic capabilities to individual career planning as an intriguing analogy.

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Use of LEGO bricks in teaching collaborative problem solving

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an important 21^st century skill. CPS is important, because both manual and non-manual work are increasingly non-standard, and because of this, the requirements for both problem-solving and collaboration at work are increasing.

In this post, I will take a look at how the use of LEGO and LEGO DUPLO bricks can help children learn collaborative problem-solving skills. One might argue that simply playing with such toys is already excellent practice, but I will demonstrate how formal teaching tasks can also be designed around the use of these tools, which enable systematic practice, and, if desired, assessment.

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