"Fat Thinking and Lean Thinking" (approximately 2011, published on ribbonfarm) is Rao's most direct engagement with the Deming and lean manufacturing tradition, developing a critique of lean's assumptions and proposing "fat thinking" as a complementary or corrective mode for complex, uncertain environments. The essay positions Rao within a broader conversation about organizational efficiency that includes the Poppendiecks' lean software work and the Deming quality tradition.
The Argument
The essay's central claim is that lean thinking — in its Toyota Production System form and in its many derivatives including lean software development — systematically eliminates what Rao calls "fat": the slack, redundancy, exploratory capacity, and excess capability that make organizations resilient and innovative. Lean's core logic is elimination of waste; fat thinking argues that what lean calls waste is often the productive surplus that enables adaptation to unexpected conditions.
The "fat" metaphor is deliberate and against the usual valence: in organizational contexts, fat is typically pejorative (bureaucratic bloat, inefficiency, waste). Rao rehabilitates it as a description of organizational slack and exploratory capacity — following Tom DeMarco's argument in Slack that organizations need unused capacity to respond to change. The argument is that lean environments, precisely because they are highly optimized, are brittle: they perform excellently under expected conditions and fail under unexpected ones.
Engagement with the Lean Tradition
The essay engages substantively with the lean tradition without being a wholesale rejection of it. Rao acknowledges lean's genuine contributions — the identification of specific forms of waste, the emphasis on continuous improvement, the focus on process quality rather than output inspection — while arguing that lean's assumptions (stable, predictable production environments; clear distinctions between value-adding and non-value-adding activities) do not transfer well to complex, rapidly changing, or exploratory domains.
This positions the essay in dialogue with the Poppendiecks' lean software development work, which itself grappled with the translation of lean manufacturing principles to knowledge work. Where the Poppendiecks largely affirm lean's relevance to software, Rao is more skeptical about the conditions under which lean logic applies.
Relationship to Tempo and Deming
The essay's intellectual content connects to tempo-book through the shared interest in how organizations navigate uncertainty. Lean thinking, in Rao's reading, is an optimization for tempo consistency — doing the same things the same way with minimum variation. Fat thinking is an optimization for tempo flexibility — maintaining the capacity to change direction when conditions change. This maps onto the Boydian interest in OODA loop agility over stability.
The engagement with Deming is implicit rather than explicit — the essay is more engaged with the lean manufacturing and lean software literature that derives from Deming than with Deming's own original work. Rao's critique of efficiency-at-the-expense-of-resilience connects to heterodox readings of Deming that emphasize his system-thinking and his skepticism of narrow optimization.