By employing lean philosophy scientists can unburden their minds from repetitive tasks so that spontaneous creative thinking and continuous improvement can occur.
A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) exists so you don't have to think about how to do it.
SOP's are not just written to make experiments reproducible. They also allow your mind to work on other tasks simultaneously.
Have you ever driven your car to work but don't actually remember the drive? That's because it's the same thing every time. Standard Work!!
If you have an SOP you can share the burden of work with others and maybe discover something new.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of the work, but having others assisting can bring new ideas into the mix and spur creative thinking.
These new ideas will allow continuous improvements to be made to the SOP. In lean it's called "kaizen" = good change.
BTW: You need a quick and efficient system for updating your SOP's.
In many instances the SOP's don't reflect the actual work going on. The most common reason given is that it takes too long to get approvals for new SOP's so people just implemented the changes.
An even worse scenario is where people have great ideas for changing the SOP but don't because it's too difficult. This is an example of where creativity is lost because of a bad process and not because of repetitive work.
It's hard to schedule creative thinking from 9:30 a.m to 10:30 a.m. on your calendar and expect to have an epiphany. Great ideas just happen but they only happen if your brain has some down time.
