I see this so often in the early stages of a business starting their Lean journey. The first steps are usually focused around engaging individuals and teams to start making improvements in their jobs, fixing those annoying little issues that are just plain frustrating. It's a great time because you see a lot of team members taking the opportunity to finally sort out problems and take a bit more pride in their work areas.

Then they start looking further afield, at issues that tend to cross teams or roles. Paperwork is a great example of this. Managing information, data quality, and verification—all tasks that typically arise as consistent problems.

So, ideas are raised. The challenge in the beginning is that they often come from a specific point of view. The whole picture of the process isn’t considered. This is OK, as the team hasn't yet learned collaborative skills.

This is where I see the blocks start to happen: “Oh, that won’t work because (enter reason here).”

While that might be true, the team needs to be encouraged to experiment. Give an idea a go, even if you think there’s a better way. As long as it won’t destroy the business or result in a catastrophic failure, let it go. How else will the team begin to learn the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) process? Trial and error—or, what it really is—learning.

While it’s so easy for a leader or business owner to come in and correct or block an idea for whatever reason, learn to pause, take a breath, and think about the long-term benefits.

If you let them try something different, you’re doing two things:

• Encouraging ideas and empowering action.

• Providing a learning environment.

How cool is that?

So, next time you find yourself about to block an idea, just pause and consider your response. Instead of coming up with reasons why it won’t work, encourage the experiment and then say something like, “That’s an interesting idea, give it a go, and I’ll follow up next week to see how it’s going.”

Follow up and take them through a reflection process to see what worked and what didn’t. You can always change or improve on the recent improvements. You never know, the idea might actually be the best breakthrough of the year! I’ve seen that happen as well.