Members of mapping teams often argue that “what we are seeing today is not normal” and want to map the process the way it should perform, how it used to perform, or how it sometimes performs. We have observed that, when you ask people to describe a specific process in a value stream, there are at least four different versions: how managers believe it operates, how it’s supposed to operate (i.e., the written procedure, if one exists), how it really operates, and how it could operate.
