Making the Most of What You Already Have: A Lean Learning Roadmap for Your Organization
Building a Lean culture is a leadership decision before it is a training initiative. The companies that see the greatest return from their LCI membership are those whose leaders treat learning as a strategic priority, not a line item to be delegated and forgotten. Your LCI membership represents a significant investment in your company’s future, and that value isn’t realized by simply paying dues. It’s realized by building a deliberate, structured approach to Lean learning that advances your people and your culture. The resources, the structure, and the support are already in place. The question is whether your organization has a plan to use them.
How to Be Successful as an LCI Corporate Member
1. Establish Ownership First
Before any learning can take root, your organization needs clear internal ownership of the Lean learning function. This means identifying who will serve as your liaison to LCI, ensuring team members are connected to membership benefits, and designating someone to manage your learning strategy, tracking progress, coordinating resources, and keeping momentum alive. These roles may sit with one person or several, depending on your company’s size and structure. What matters is that responsibility is assigned, not assumed.
This isn’t administrative overhead, it’s organizational infrastructure. Research on adult learning consistently shows that structured accountability and clear ownership are among the strongest predictors of training success. Without them, even the best content goes unused.
2. Diagnose Before You Prescribe
The most effective Lean learning plans begin not with content, they start with assessment. LCI’s Lean assessments help drive you to the resources best suited for you by understanding where your organization’s Lean knowledge level currently stands. This baseline transforms your training strategy from a guess into a business decision.
Equally important is establishing a common language across your entire workforce, not just project teams. Distributing the LCI Glossary broadly is a low-cost, high-impact first step toward the shared cultural foundation that Lean adoption requires.
3. Deploy a Layered, Goal-Driven Learning Strategy
Adult learners retain and apply knowledge most effectively when it is delivered across multiple modalities, reinforced over time, and connected directly to meaningful goals. LCI’s member resources are purpose-built for exactly this kind of layered approach.
Your starting point should reflect where your organization is today. For companies new to Lean, foundational eLearning courses can establish a common baseline across your workforce. For organizations further along, the entry point might be a specific operational goal, such as improving Big Room effectiveness, for example, with LCI’s dedicated eLearning course, webinar recording, and Congress presentation deployed in sequence to build deeper understanding. In either case, you can layer in the Lean Learning Series to drive structured group discussion, assign relevant chapters from Transforming Design and Construction: A Framework for Change to deepen conceptual understanding, and use the
Stop/Start/Continue framework to convert learning into action. Apply PDCA to monitor progress and adjust course as you go.
4. Invest in Live and Community-Based Learning
Asynchronous learning builds knowledge. Live engagement accelerates it. LCI’s webinars, Communities of Practice, annual Congress, and Lean in Design Forum give your team members direct access to peer practitioners and industry thought leaders navigating the same challenges. These experiences deepen what your people learn online and connect them to a broader network that extends well beyond your organization’s walls.
The resources, the structure, and the support are already in place. Your next step is to use them.
Log in to the LCI Member Hub to explore Lean Learning Paths and begin building your organization’s customized roadmap today. Need help? Reach out to maryannf@leanconstruction.org.