Personal resistance

With all its layers of complexity and challenges, there is a kind of waste that manufacturing and services don't have to deal with, but the artist does: personal resistance.

When you work in a car manufacturing company, the final goal is having a car, and there is no second guessing about that. If you'd tell to your boss "I'm unsure if we should build a car", he'd probably suggest you politely to start looking for another job.

However, in the uncertain world of art, where you work with materials come out you don't know from where, intuitions, strange urges and glimpses, and things that can sometimes be true and false at the same time, self doubt and internal resistances come with the territory. In fact, in some cases maybe they are necessary to get the project right. Sometimes you just know that a song is not there yet, or that its moment is not right, and all you can do about it is wait. Neil Young spoke of that process as 'a window that opens'. Like I said before, in this field we are dealing with forces that we only know partially.

The Lean tools come handy to face this kind of waste too; first and most obviously, you want the tools to be ready to go when the light turns green. But also, by systematizing your process, you identify and corral the real enemy: it used to be mingled with "laziness", "procedural boredom", "lack of time"... Now you've taken care of those elements, and what is left, now you know for sure, is the resistance:  self doubt, fear of failure or success... the whole parade of ancient monsters. They are big and scary, but now are in the open, and that is the first step towards their defeat.