Researchers disentangle the Lean-resilience paradox

PEX Network’s key takeaways:

• Researchers have examined the Lean-resilience paradox in a new paper.
• The Lean-resilience paradox questions Lean’s validity and effectiveness in dealing with disruptive events within organizations.
• “Overall, we argue that organizations with higher levels of Lean implementation may be able to adapt and restore more easily from severe disruptive events than organizations with lower implementation levels.”

Researchers have examined the Lean-resilience paradox, a concept that questions Lean’s validity and effectiveness in dealing with disruptive events within organizations.

The balance between ‘fragility’ and the resilience of modern production systems is a common concern with organizational approaches such as Lean, the paper states. The researchers addressed this gap by discussing the impact of Lean on organizational resilience.

This is important, since organizations must be both Lean and resilient to enhance operational performance and ultimately survive, according to the authors.

The PEX Report 2025/26 found that Lean is used by 40 percent of surveyed organizations to support business transformation.

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The Lean-resilience paradox

The researchers define Lean as a set of practices and principles that help organizations continuously improve their products, processes, and services through systematic waste elimination and active people engagement.

Meanwhile, a system becomes resilient when it can design and implement internal and external physical, informational, and relational processes that absorb and adjust to disruptive events, either restoring performance (e.g. financial and/or operational) or repositioning it at an acceptable level.

Lean is widely regarded as a strategic management approach to increase competitiveness by systematically eliminating waste through the active involvement of employees, the researchers wrote. Nevertheless, during low-probability, high-impact disruptive events, many organizations utilizing Lean face severe negative implications, which raise doubts about Lean’s effectiveness.

“As a theoretical means to overcome the Lean-resilience paradox, we adopt the concepts proposed by Biringer et al. (2013) and consolidated by Bruckler et al. (2024), which define resilience capability through three categories: absorptive capability, adaptive capability, and restorative capability.”

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Disentangling the Lean-resilience paradox

By discriminating the effects of Lean adoption across different capabilities, the researchers disentangled the Lean-resilience relationship. “Overall, we argue that organizations with higher levels of Lean implementation may be able to adapt and restore more easily from severe disruptive events than organizations with lower implementation levels.”

In turn, organizations with lower levels of Lean implementation might present greater organizational slack that favors the absorption of the implications caused by such disruptions, which is less expected in high-Lean organizations.

“Our study disentangles the inherent paradox or tension in the relationship between Lean and resilience, showing that a time dimension is introduced by the different capabilities that explain the differing impacts of Lean. This leads to opportunities for further investigation of Lean and organizational resilience.”

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