Hoarderism

Workspaces work best when there is minimal clutter, and everything has a specific purpose.

This goal is derailed by hoarderism, one of several Lean afflictions that can prevent your company from reaching its potential.

Hoarderism is the inability to throw anything out, or even send it to the red tag area because of a fear that it might be needed someday in the future.

Hoarderism flies in the face of both 5S and the red tag process. The goal of both of those is similar. The idea is that the is “a place for everything, and everything in its place”, and that things that don’t have a place get moved out of the production area.

The urge to hoard makes sense. If you think you might need something later, you would have to either track it down, or buy a replacement. Both are not great options. Hoarding is a way to manage the risk of incurring a future cost or of a problem shutting down production. This argument stands up. It is a valid point that you should not get rid of things you might need.

The problem is that the flip side of the calculation is never considered. There is a cost to holding onto a lot of stuff. You need space to put it. And if you want to find the hoarded item in any reasonable amount of time, you need to manage the storage area.

The reality is that searching through hoarded piles is never a simple task. It takes a lot of searching, and there is no way to accurately predict when you will hit paydirt. Sometimes, you even end up giving up before you find the item and have to buy it again anyways.

Most people can’t be talked into not hoarding. They have been conditioned their whole professional lives to ‘make things happen’ and ‘just get it done’. Being able to dig around the piles a bit and use what they find to solve problems reinforces the lesson that hoarding works.

There are a few steps you can take as a leader to help reduce hoarderism.

Set Clear Expectations

The first thing you can do is to be clear about how you set expectations when there is a problem. If you expect miracles, people will need to be prepared to work miracles. That means piles of ‘just-in-case’ stuff.

When something comes up, make sure that the actions you expect are realistic. Have the person responsible for the solution come up with a plan that includes the resources they need. How you respond to their list of things they need to come up with will dictate how much they hoard in the future. If you give them time and money or help in getting what they need then you show you are serious about not hoarding. If you give them a hard time about delays or cost, you are teaching them to hoard.

Build and Promote a Red Tag System

A red tag system requires a few things. The first is to assess what you might need in a work area. The immediate use items should be stored in the immediate area. But you might have tools you need for monthly maintenance, or items that are used for 6-month audits.

And you have things that are used when there are problems. For those items, do two things. First…

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