The foundational value stream mapping workbook, authored by mike-rother and john-shook with a foreword by james-p-womack and daniel-t-jones. Published by lean-enterprise-institute in 1999. The book won the shingo-institute Prize and became the defining practitioner guide for VSM — one of the most widely used lean diagnostic tools.
Womack and Jones's role
Womack and Jones are contributors rather than primary authors: they wrote the foreword and the book was published through LEI. Their role reflects their institutional position as conveners and publishers of lean practice tools rather than the sole generators of lean methodology. The book is included in the womack-jones KB because it is a direct product of the lean-enterprise-institute and because Womack and Jones's foreword provides the conceptual framing that connects VSM to the broader lean framework.
What the workbook does
Learning to See introduced value stream mapping as a practical shop-floor tool. The methodology guides practitioners through:
1. Drawing a "current state" map of how material and information flow through a production process 2. Identifying the sources of waste (muda) in that flow 3. Drawing a "future state" map showing the target lean condition 4. Developing an action plan to close the gap
The workbook's physical format (spiral-bound, designed to be taken to the shop floor) reflected Rother and Shook's hands-on orientation as practitioners who had worked directly with Toyota.
What TPS concepts are being translated
The book translates Toyota's internal "material and information flow diagrams" — used by Toyota engineers to analyze and improve their own production systems — into a teachable, standardized method. The translation made Toyota's diagnostic practice portable: any lean practitioner could now map their value stream using the same analytical framework.
Key TPS concepts embedded in the VSM method:
Target audience
Lean practitioners, production engineers, and plant managers implementing lean on the shop floor. The workbook is deliberately operational rather than conceptual — it teaches a method, not a philosophy. This operationalism distinguishes it from lean-thinking and machine-that-changed-the-world, which address managers who need to understand lean but may not draw their own maps.
Relationship to other VSM works
Learning to See focuses on single-plant, single-value-stream mapping. seeing-the-whole (Jones and Womack, 2002) extends the methodology to the multi-company extended value stream. Together the two workbooks define the VSM family of tools in the Lean Enterprise Institute's practitioner toolkit. The value-stream-mapping concept entry documents the full VSM framework.