An Opportunity for TIMWOOD
A model for lean thinking in education?
Green Edge recently talked to Professors Ian Jenkinson (Liverpool John Moores University) and Andy Lane (Open University) about some of the challenges in getting systems thinking more widely adopted and taught as a green skill throughout UK education. While systems thinking is widely believed to be an essential skill for Net Zero, its teaching still tends to sit with higher education, while an ever-increasing focus on terminal exams in schools significantly limits opportunities for projects and multi-disciplinary team work - key enablers for learning and practising systems thinking.
One suggestion from our conversation for getting some parts of systems thinking into schools is through the use of models. This has already been done to some degree in the past. Many of us will remember the Water Cycle model from our own schooldays. An oversimplification perhaps, but the use of a picture model in this way sticks in young minds and builds a basic understanding of the world that persists through life.
Models for understanding the Net Zero world - and how to behave in it - are essential. One such model could be TIMWOOD1. This is a model for the ‘7 wastes of Lean’, as practised widely in manufacturing, process and service industries worldwide. Whether implemented as a standalone or in conjunction with Six Sigma, the Lean methodology has inbuilt sustainability outcomes and is increasingly seen as being closely aligned with green goals. Green Edge suggests that an adaptation of the TIMWOOD model specifically for schools education could pay dividends in building an early understanding of how to behave in the Net Zero world and, in so doing, contribute to the education of the Net Zero Natives we will need in the world from the middle of this century.
TIMWOOD is an acronym for: Transportation; Inventory; Motion; Waiting; Overproduction; Overprocessing; Defects. An eighth waste - Skills - is sometimes added to point to either underutilisation of people or deployment of people without adequate training.