What a robot lawn mower can teach us about the future of Lean

In my last piece, I spoke about how Lean is evolving — from improving how work is done to questioning whether the work needs to exist at all. That shift is becoming more relevant every day, and sometimes simple analogies bring it to life best.

Take the humble lawn mower. Petrol lawn mowers have been around for decades, and they have improved over time. Self-propelled versions reduce effort, mulching options remove the need to collect cuttings, and ride-on mowers increase speed and comfort. All useful advancements. But these are incremental. The core process hasn’t really changed. Someone still needs to be there. The mower still needs fuel, maintenance, storage, and timing. The work is still fundamentally the same.

As a Lean consultant, if you gave me a petrol mow process, I’d start improving it. And I did. I made sure there were always two petrol cans, so we never ran out mid-job. I scheduled an annual service before the season started. I built a compost heap close to the garden. I even designated a specific spot in the shed, so everything was easy to access. All classic Lean thinking. Reduce waste, improve flow, make the job easier. And it worked — cutting the grass became quicker and somewhat easier. But even with those improvements, there were still parts of the process that were hard to fix. Timing, for example. If you were going on holiday, you had to cut the grass beforehand, or come back to something resembling a meadow. The process still depended on you being there at the right time. The work still existed.

Now introduce a robotic lawn mower. Everything changes. There’s no weekly mowing job. The mower runs continuously, little and often. There’s no panic before the holidays. No catch-up when you return. The lawn is just maintained. Many process steps disappear: no petrol management, no setup and pack-away, no manual mowing, no dependency on timing or weather. Instead of improving the process, the process is largely removed. And what’s left is a different type of work: setup, occasional maintenance, and oversight. This is exactly what is happening in Lean today.

Traditionally, Lean has focused on improving workflows, making tasks faster and more consistent. That still has value. But increasingly, the bigger opportunity is to ask: why does this work exist at all? In many small businesses, there is still a huge amount of petrol mower work — but it often shows up as legacy processes or working around systems that were never quite right. We get used to this. We improve processes. We become comfortable with the new process. But like the petrol mower, even a well-optimised process can still be inefficient because it exists in the first place. Modern digital tools, automation, integration, and AI are the robotic mower equivalent. They remove the need for large parts of the work altogether.

The challenge is: what motivates us to change? Most of the time, it’s external. A neighbour gets a robotic mower. A colleague mentions a new system. You see something working differently and realise there’s another way. The same applies in business. We have to get out of our own processes — talk to other business owners, attend events, share experiences. In my experience, the biggest breakthroughs come when someone questions not just how a process is done, but whether it needs to exist at all. That kind of change rarely starts inside the business. It’s driven by people willing to challenge the status quo after seeing different ways of working.