The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), the nonprofit founded in 1997 by Dr. James P. Womack to advance lean thinking and practice in organizations worldwide, has formally launched its LeanTech/AI Initiative, a dedicated effort to help organizations apply lean to the technology layer of their operations.
The initiative is led by Tyson Heaton, Executive Director of LeanTech/AI at LEI, and anchored by a faculty of practitioners whose work is rooted in the Toyota Production System and spans enterprise software transformation, AI-enabled lean coaching tools, and technology-native lean practice. At its core, the initiative rests on a straightforward premise: the same discipline that made lean thinking effective in manufacturing, supply chain, and services (understand the work, build capability in people, improve continuously) is now both applicable and necessary in the ever-evolving technology environments that run modern organizations.
Why Now
Lean thinking has a well-established track record in physical value streams. Applying it to technology environments has been harder. Information workflows are largely invisible, moving between systems and people without leaving a physical trace, which means the waste is harder to see and the work required to surface it is more deliberate. Lean has the tools for this: value-stream mapping, visual management, structured problem solving. What it has lacked, until recently, is a technology layer malleable enough to act on what those tools reveal.
AI is changing that. Information systems are becoming genuinely responsive to the organizations using them. Processes locked inside legacy architectures can now be surfaced, mapped, and redesigned at a pace that makes continuous improvement practical. The technology layer of the business, for the first time, is inside the kaizen cycle.
That shift also creates a familiar risk. The lean community has seen this pattern before, in robotics integration, in ERP implementations, in early digital transformation programs. Organizations that deploy AI before understanding their operations are not improving their work; they are accelerating its dysfunction. McKinsey’s 2025 analysis found that workflow redesign correlates more strongly with AI value creation than data quality, technical talent, or executive sponsorship. The gap between AI investment and AI value is, at its root, an operational execution problem. That is lean’s home territory.
Technology as an Additional Management Layer
Software and information systems have taken on a management function in most organizations, shaping how operational data is interpreted, how work is coordinated, and how decisions get made. AI is accelerating that role. For lean practitioners, this matters because lean management depends on accurate signals from the work: timely, visual, grounded in what is actually happening. When the technology layer mediates those signals, its design is a management question, not just a technical one. LEI’s position is that A3 thinking, visual management, respect for people, and the leader behaviors that sustain continuous improvement become more important in that environment, not less. They are what give an organization the capacity to act on what its systems surface. The initiative’s operating principle reflects that orientation: Humans + AI > Problems.
Initiative Components
The LeanTech/AI Initiative operates across three areas:
- Lean Tech & AI Journal: A practitioner-facing publication on lean.org with more than 30,000 subscribers. Contributors include Art Smalley, John Shook, Gene Kim, and Dr. Steven Spear, alongside practitioners from technology-native lean organizations worldwide.
- AI-powered lean coaching tools: LEI and its faculty are developing AI-enabled tools that embed structured lean frameworks into conversational AI, extending the reach of lean coaching without displacing what effective coaching actually does. The goal, in Smalley’s words: “coaching, not replacement.”
- Network of coaches with technology transformation experience: LEI has been building a network of coaches with deep experience in technology organization transformation, who understand both lean management systems and how technology work gets done. Connecting those coaches to organizations that need them is a central purpose of the initiative.
Initiative Faculty
The founding faculty includes:
- Art Smalley: One of the first foreign nationals hired by Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan, working under mentors trained directly by Taiichi Ohno. Lifetime member of the Shingo Prize Academy. Author of Four Types of Problems and co-author of Understanding A3 Thinking. He is now building AI-enabled lean coaching tools, including RootCoach, an AI-powered problem-solving coach. His framework Technology × Behavior × Management = Impact holds that when any one of those three factors is zero, impact is zero, regardless of how strong the others are.
- Fabrice Bernhard: Co-founder and Group CTO of Theodo, a technology consultancy that scaled to more than 700 employees by applying Toyota Production System principles directly to software delivery. Co-author of The Lean Tech Manifesto (Shingo Publication Award, 2025).
- Steve Pereira: Creator of Flow Engineering, a methodology that adapts value-stream mapping for technology and knowledge work. Co-author of Flow Engineering: From Value Stream Mapping to Effective Action (IT Revolution, 2024). Board advisor to the Value Stream Management Consortium.
- Sandrine Olivencia: Co-founder of Taktique, a lean academy for technology organizations. Co-author of The Lean Sensei (Shingo Publication Award, 2020) and author of Build to Sell (2024). More than 30 years developing lean product and process capability in high-tech industries.
Leadership Perspective
“For years, lean practitioners treated the technology layer as someone else’s problem,” said Tyson Heaton, Executive Director of LeanTech/AI at LEI. “That was understandable when systems were too rigid to improve through lean practice. That condition is changing. AI is giving organizations genuine leverage over how their information systems work, and that opens a real role for lean thinking in how those systems are designed, deployed, and continuously improved.
“The risk is that organizations confuse motion with progress: deploying AI broadly without the management discipline to learn from what it surfaces. The opportunity is that, for the first time, the full kaizen cycle can run on the technology layer of the business, not just the physical one. That is what this initiative is built to support.”
About the Initiative
LEI’s LeanTech/AI Initiative is available to organizations through the Lean Tech & AI Journal at lean.org and through faculty-led engagements for leadership teams navigating technology transformation. The initiative was featured at the 2026 LEI Lean Summit this week in Houston, with sessions led by Gene Kim and Dr. Steven Spear among others.
More information is available at tech.lean.org.
About Lean Enterprise Institute
The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) is a nonprofit based in Boston, Massachusetts, founded in 1997 by James P. Womack to advance lean thinking and practice in organizations worldwide. LEI produces books, tools, courses, events, and research, and is a founding member of the Lean Global Network.