Teaching lean thinking through game: some challenges

Teaching multifaceted concepts such as Lean philosophy to students/employees that have never had any contact with it may be a quite challenging task. The challenge, when teaching students, is to create a context so that they can imagine and understand why Lean philosophy is important and how it can work. On the other hand, when teaching employees/practitioners, the challenge is to translate the Lean thinking into their own context and facilitate their learning process through the different issues of Lean thinking. Overall, the challenge is to create an experience with all the relevant technical as well as social concepts such as: pull production, cycle time, work-in-progress, balancing, teamwork, communication, etc. This paper describes two Lean games, their setup and associated use of the game. It reflects on the setup up and use of the games, and draws recommendations for future utilization of games in education, having in mind the learning outcomes for the students.