The eight wastes, in a lab

Between 1948 and 1975, Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda developed what became the Toyota Production System. Part of it was a disciplined way of naming waste, muda, and Ohno set out seven categories of it. He assembled them rather than inventing them from nothing; several map onto process-chart symbols that had been standardized in American industrial engineering the decade before. But he made them usable, and Western manufacturers adopted and extended them under the banner of lean.

An eighth was added later, outside Toyota: non-utilized talent. It’s usually credited to Jeffrey Liker, who set it out in The Toyota Way in 2004, though it had been circulating among Western lean practitioners before that and Toyota itself never adopted it. Worth knowing, because it’s the waste that matters most in a laboratory.

When I was first taught these properly, alongside a few years of real experience in procurement and operations, it was like a light going on. I suddenly had language for things I’d been looking at for years without being able to name them. That’s what the eight wastes give you: not a new insight, but a vocabulary precise enough to have an argument with.

Why labs never got the treatment factories did

Manufacturing applied lean rigorously and transformed its productivity. Procurement, operations, professional services and laboratories largely didn’t. I think there are two reasons.

The first is visibility. On a factory floor, waste is physical. You can see work in progress piling up. You can see somebody standing idle. You can see defective product coming off the line. In a lab, the same waste is hidden inside email threads, spreadsheets, approval queues and people’s heads. Nobody trips over it.

The second is pressure. Western manufacturing faced an existential competitive threat in the 1970s and 1980s, and the motivation to adopt lean was survival. Most other domains never had that forcing function.

A caveat worth stating, because it’s where naive lean evangelism comes unstuck. Lean doesn’t transplant cleanly into every setting. The research is fairly clear that it fits environments with high routinization and low individual discretion, and fits professional and specialist work considerably less well. A laboratory isn’t an assembly line, and anyone who tells you to run one like one hasn’t spent time in either. What travels isn’t the tooling. It’s the discipline of looking at work and asking which parts of it are actually adding value.

The eight wastes, in a laboratory

What the numbers actually support

You’ll see a figure quoted widely, that knowledge workers spend around 41% of their time on discretionary activities that could be handled competently by someone else, or eliminated. It comes from a Harvard Business Review article.

The Federal Demonstration Partnership has run a faculty workload survey for two decades. In the 2018 wave, more than 11,000 principal investigators across 111 US institutions estimated that around 44% of the time they spent on federally funded research went on administration and compliance rather than research itself. That figure has barely shifted since 2005.

It’s US academia and it’s weighted towards grant administration, so it doesn’t map perfectly onto an industrial biotech. But it’s a large sample, it’s consistent across three waves more than a decade apart, and it points the same way as everything I’ve seen inside commercial labs.

What to do with the lens

Don’t turn this into a scoring exercise. The eight wastes are a way of looking, not an audit checklist, and the moment they become a form to fill in they stop working.

Use them in conversation. Walk a process with the people who run it, and at each step ask where the waiting is, where the rework is, where somebody is doing something twice. People recognize their own working lives instantly in these categories, and once they have the words, they’ll hand you far more than you could ever have found on your own.

That’s the real value. Not the taxonomy, the permission it gives people to name what they’ve been putting up with.