Exploring lean generic and lean healthcare cultural clusters

Purpose Lean culture has been noted to be an underdeveloped concept. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding of Lean culture by determining its leading cultural clusters. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis was used to perform top relevant keywords exploration and qualitative analysis on main text of 33 reference books, 21 Lean generic and 12 Lean healthcare, consolidated as three cases (Lean general, Lean Liker et al. and Lean healthcare). Findings Four emergent Lean’s leading cultural clusters: operations, change, collectivity and humanity were identified inductively from ten 10 relevant keywords, namely, in order of importance: work, time, process, Lean, system, improvement, production, patient, people and team. Saliency of the word “time” is noteworthy. Cross-validation of these cultural clusters is demonstrated through sociotechnical systems theory. Research limitations/implications Content analysis is shown to be an effective research method enabling inductive analysis. Identification of four leading clusters should support productive further research on Lean culture. Practical implications The four cultural clusters indicate to healthcare and other domains managers, who wish to improve their Lean cultural transformation success rate, to focus their attention to what their organization actually does (operations), to how improvement happens (change) and to how everything (collectivity) and everyone (humanity) work together in their organization. Originality/value This work applies innovative content analysis on Lean reference books. It highlights the importance of time as an underappreciated Lean culture element. It provides evidence and additional support for link between Lean and sociotechnical systems theory.