Ford created what he called a flow production (also known as mass production), which involves continuous movement of elements through the production process. Ford used mass production to fabricate and assemble the components of his vehicles within a few minutes rather than hours or days. Unlike craft production, the mass production system delivered perfectly fitted and interchangeable components.
It was only in the 1930s that Toyota, inspired by Ford’s flow of production concept, developed several novel ideas that became known as the Toyota Production System (TPS). After studying Ford’s production system, they understood that the mass production system employed by Ford could not be used by Toyota. The Japanese market was too small and diverse for mass production. The customer’s requirements ranged from compact cars to the most luxurious vehicles, but Ford’s mass production system focused on standard products which could not meet all the customer demands.
Therefore, Toyota collaborated with the engineer Taiichi Ohno to build upon Ford’s ideas and found a way to make high quality and low cost products that met the changing desires of the customer. They created a unique pull system, which then became the backbone of lean manufacturing, to avoid overproduction and meet the diversified customer demands.
Ideas from the Lean movement in manufacturing became internationally known and recognized during the 1990s and gradually began to be applied to software.
Lean is centered on defining value from the customer’s viewpoint, continually improving the way in which value is delivered, and eliminating every use of resources that does not contribute to the value goal.
The concept of continuous improvement, or Kaizen (which comes from two Japanese words, Kai and Zen which mean “improvement” and “good”), is at the heart of Lean philosophy. The goal of continuous improvement is to help identify opportunities for work process enhancements. This is done by empowering every individual worker to achieve his or her full potential, and so to make the greatest possible contribution, helping workers grow professionally and personally, allowing them to take pride in their work.

Lean and Agile are truly blending philosophies. Agile has distinct practices that match the main Lean principles and below are highlighted a few similarities between them.

Respect for people.
People refers to every possible actor in the whole ecosystem of product development: customers, workers, teams, managers. All people contribute in their own way and collaborate across skills to build and deliver a product. Respect for people is essential for Lean, and Agile embraces this principle too, as emphasized in the Agile Manifesto.

Continuous flow of results.
Agile mirrors the flow principles of Lean that have proven to be successful. Agile is about working smarter, rather than harder. It’s not about doing more work in less time, it’s about generating more value with less work.

Focus on customer value.
Customer value is defined, in Lean thinking, as the perception of what products and services are worth to customers. In truly Agile organizations, everyone is passionately obsessed with delivering increasing value to the customer. Everyone has a clear line of sight to the end-user and can see how their work is adding value to that customer, or not.

Eliminate waste.
One of the key elements of Lean is to relentlessly identify and eliminate anything that doesn’t create value. Agile supports this concept as well, by maximizing the amount of work not done so that the team focuses on building the simplest solution, doing the least amount of work possible in order to deliver the right value.

Continuous improvement.
This is where Kaizen, a Lean method for continuous improvement, comes into play. Kaizen focuses on improving and evolving processes to better support the evolution of the product and enable Agile teams and organizations to reach their goals of frequent, iterative value delivery.

At the end of the day, we’re all realizing that it’s not about picking one process or methodology and following it like it is gospel. It’s about combining all our best practices and learnings together and then using what makes sense for our teams.

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This post was inspired by
History of Lean
Lean and Agile - Ideas that work together
How lean and agile relate and how you can win by using both