What are the eight wastes?

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The eight wastes are defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transportation, inventory, motion and extra-processing. Chapter 1 of the book works through each one with office examples, because most waste in modern work is information sitting still, work done twice, or people waiting on each other.

Lean gives teams a shared language for waste: eight categories that show up in almost every process. Chapter 1 of the book lists them with examples deliberately drawn from offices and service work rather than factories.

Defects: work done incorrectly that has to be done over, like a report built on the wrong data or an order sent to the wrong address.; Overproduction: making more than is needed, or making it too early, like a 50-page report nobody reads or brochures printed for an event a tenth that size.; Waiting: time spent idle for a decision, an approval, information from another team, or a slow system to respond.; Non-utilized talent: failing to use people's minds and strengths, like a manager who never asks the front line for ideas.; Transportation: unnecessary movement of work or information, like endless handoffs and approval chains for a simple request.; Inventory: work started but not finished, like a backlog of unread email or a pile of unstarted project requests hiding quality problems.; Motion: unnecessary movement by people, like hunting through a disorganised server or clicking through ten screens to find one piece of information.; Extra-processing: doing more than the customer requires, like gold-plating a project with features and detail nobody asked for.

The point of the list is not memorising it. It is giving a team words for frustrations they already feel. Once a team can name the waste it keeps meeting, it can count it, argue about which one costs most, and pick the first one to remove.

What are the eight wastes?

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