Customer Lean: A Good Time to Revisit an Evolving Idea

What we're learning — and where CCL is headed next

A few years back, we started asking a question that felt a little uncomfortable: are we teaching lean to the right people? Employees, yes. Leaders, absolutely. But what about customers — the people whose participation, cooperation, and behavior are often woven directly into the processes we're trying to improve?

That question became the seed of what we've been calling Customer Lean.

What We Mean by Customer Lean

We're still refining the definition, honestly. But the core idea goes something like this: in most service delivery situations, customers do a significant portion of the work — checking in, filling out forms, navigating self-service systems, preparing for appointments, following up afterward. Organizations spend considerable energy optimizing the parts of that process they control directly. What seems underexplored is the customer's role in that same system.

Customer Lean is an attempt to bring customers into the improvement conversation rather than around it. Not just gathering feedback after the fact, but building shared understanding of how the process works, what creates friction, and how both sides might collaborate to make things better. It's a shift from telling customers what to do toward learning together about what's working.

We've been exploring this idea at conferences over the past couple of years — at the LEI Summit, at POMS, at Process Palooza, and at the Lean in Higher Education International Conference in Cambridge. The conversations have been genuinely encouraging. People recognize the concept quickly, often sharing their own examples of customers being nudged into lean behaviors without anyone explaining why, or of improvement efforts stalling because the customer side of the equation was never addressed.

We're learning that the idea resonates. We're still figuring out exactly how to implement it well across different contexts.

Why This Connects to Where CCL Is Heading

CCL has been going through its own process of reflection and adjustment. We've shifted from open-enrollment workshops toward a Partner/Host model — one where an organization commits to hosting a session, brings their own people, and helps shape the learning agenda around problems that actually matter to them. Our working phrase for this direction is Better, Faster, Easier: better outcomes through focused engagement, faster results through shared commitment, easier access through local hosting.

What we're noticing is that this model already behaves a bit like Customer Lean in practice. When a host organization co-designs a workshop with us, they're not passive recipients of a curriculum — they're active contributors to a shared improvement process. The content gets sharper. The learning sticks better. The relationship deepens in ways that open-enrollment formats rarely produce.

Our Manufacturing Lean Leadership Forum is another early experiment in this direction. A small group of committed organizations meets regularly, rotates hosting duties, and drives the agenda collectively. It's still early, and we're paying close attention to what's working and what needs adjustment. But the premise — that participants learn better when they help design the learning — feels consistent with what Customer Lean is pointing toward.

An Honest Acknowledgment

Customer Lean is not a finished methodology. We don't have a definitive implementation guide or a robust set of case studies to point to — yet. What we do have is a growing body of experience, a handful of promising proof-of-concept experiments, and a lot of open questions that practitioners keep raising in ways that suggest we're onto something worth continuing to explore.

If anything, what we're most curious about right now is how organizations might apply Customer Lean thinking in their own contexts — particularly in service environments where customer co-participation in the process is already happening, just without much intentionality or structure around it.

An Invitation to Explore Together

If this idea connects with something you're working on, we'd genuinely enjoy a conversation. CCL's Partner/Host model creates a natural space for that kind of applied exploration — where we can work through a real problem together rather than presenting a theoretical framework from a stage.

We're still learning what Customer Lean becomes when it meets real organizations with real constraints. That's what makes it interesting.

— Dr. Eric Olsen, Director, Central Coast Lean