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John Shook: “A Technical Problem or a People Problem?”

John Shook dives into some of the messy issues of true root cause in his most recent post.

We touched on a similar issue here a few months ago. But it is always worth coming back around to people because because in this system (actually in any system) there are always two issues with people.

  1. People are the most fallable part of the process.
  2. The process cannot operate without them.

The reflex is often to go into total denial about #1 and expect people to be vigilant and perfect every time. “Weed out the bad apples, and everything will be fine.” Of course that doesn’t work.

In John Shook’s example, he traced through Ohno’s classic “5 Why” example.

1. Why did the machine stop?
There was an overload and the fuse blew.
2. Why was there an overload?
The bearing was not sufficiently lubricated.
3. Why was it not lubricated sufficiently?
The lubrication pump was not working sufficiently.
4. Why was it not pumping sufficiently?
The shaft of the pump was warn and rattling.
5. Why was the shaft worn out?
There was no strainer attached, and metal scrap got in.

Then Shook asks a really interesting question:

Why was no strainer attached?

Why not indeed? Isn’t that somebody’s job?
And now, as he points out, we have transitioned from “technical” to “people.”

Maybe the standard work for the maintenance worker or machine operator didn’t go far enough. Or maybe the standard work did specify changing the strainer but the worker failed to observe the standard. How was the standard developed, how was it communicated and trained? How easy was it to “forget” to change the strainer?

Coming, as I do, from mostly “brownfield” environments, the existance of standard work in the first place isn’t something that we can take for granted.

Nevertheless, Shook is making a critical point here. It does not matter whether there was no standard work, or whether the standard work broke down for some reason that we do not yet know (another “Why?”). This is still a process problem. We must start with a working assumption that the team member cares, and is doing the very best job possible, given the expectations, the resources, and his understanding at the time.

I am aware of a couple of cases where engineering change implementation pulled up short of actually observing the new installation and looking for unforeseen problems. One of them was quite subtle, and actually took a few weeks to find the basic cause, much less the root cause.

Another resulted in a bolt snapping during final torque. Messy to fix, but better in the factory than in the field.

These are additional cases where technical problems resulted from process breakdown, and in both cases, it was a case of unverified or blindly held assumptions, and not following through with the customer process.

Shook concludes with two really important points, and I can’t agree more. First:

…the work design must also include the “human factors” considerations that make it possible to do the job the right way, and even difficult to do it the wrong way.

I like to say “Make the right way the easy way” if you want things done in a certain manner.

Which brings us to Shook’s final point: You have to look at the total package – the human and the technical as an integrated system. You can’t separate them because. You can’t “take people out of the process.” All you can do is construct the process to give people’s minds the most opportunity to focus on improving the work rather than burdening them with making sure they get it right.

Always work to support people to do the right thing in the right way. If the organization carries a belief that it is necessary to force or “incentivize” people to do the right thing, then there is a people problem, but it isn’t with the workers.

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Jim Collins: How the Mighty Fall – Business Week

I am a big fan of Jim Collins. His book Good to Great outlines attributes that I have seen in every successful organizational transformation.

Now he has a new book out. I haven’t read it yet, so I am not going to offer a review, just tell you about it. But the title and premise is intriguing:
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In

There is a great article and excerpt of the book on Business Week online, including  a video of Jim Collins describing the stages (preceded by a short advertisement).

In short, Collins’ research shows that a great company can fall, and when it happens, there are five stages of decline. According to Collins, Stages One through Three are invisible from outside. The company looks great, but it is rotting from within. It is only at Stage Four that things visibly go south, and they do so very quickly. But there is also good news: The company can recover and return to greatness from any of the stages one through four, but not five.

While this whole story is fascinating, it is the nature of Stage Four that brings things into pretty sharp focus for me.

The stages are:

Stage 1: The Hubris of Success. Things are going great, and the company acquires a sense of entitlement for that success. “We deserve this success because we are so good!” In Collins’ words:

When the rhetoric of success (“We’re successful because we do these specific things”) replaces penetrating understanding and insight (“We’re successful because we understand why we do these specific things and under what conditions they would no longer work”), decline will very likely follow.

I think this idea of “penetrating understanding and insight” is what characterizes the idealized Toyota Production System. It is also seen in every example that Steven Spear covers in Chasing the Rabbit.

When an organization shifts away from questioning its own success as thoroughly as its failures, and begins to assume that its continued success is simply a matter of continuing to do what they have been doing, the seeds of decline are sown.

This ship is unsinkable.

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More.

Companies in Stage 2 stray from the disciplined creativity that led them to greatness in the first place, making undisciplined leaps into areas where they cannot be great or growing faster than they can achieve with excellence—or both.

This one really struck me. Is this the what Toyota went through in the last 5-7 years in their pursuit of #1? Clearly they overreached, even they say so. Even as early as 2003 they were seeing eroding of the TPS discipline in their North American and European plants. They shored that up, and continued their aggressive expansion of production capacity, got into big trucks, and in general seemed to bypass their traditional patient-and-relentless growth strategy.

Other industries suffered this as well. The last few years saw unprecedented (and it turned out, artificially generated) growth in sales across sectors. As one of my friends put it “When times are this good, everybody’s a genius.” Put another way, when there is more demand than supply, even a “supplier of last resort” gets great business, and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking it is because “our products are great, and customers like us.” It is possible to carry that belief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary – like customers telling you to your face that they bought your stuff because they couldn’t get it from your competitors.

Inventories start to grow, quickly, as nobody wants to miss a sale; factories are expanded, quickly, for the same reason. There is almost a fear of failure here, but it is fear of failure to get more rather than failure to succeed. If success is taken for granted (see Stage One), this one follows pretty directly.

We are going to set an Atlantic crossing speed record.

Here is a question: Who didn’t experience this to some degree over the last 5 years?

Things get interesting next.

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril. There are warning signs of over-reaching, that things are not going to go this way forever. But what struck me more was the cultural aspect: Shutting out the truth.

In Stage 3, leaders discount negative data, amplify positive data, and put a positive spin on ambiguous data. Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility. The vigorous, fact-based dialogue that characterizes high-performance teams dwindles or disappears altogether.

When leaders start suppressing dissenting views, when they equate disagreement with disrespect or unhealthy conflict, they start insulating themselves in a cocoon of denial.

If the organization is pre-disposed to avoid conflict to begin with, then this stage is really easy to slide into. Vigorous debate is part of sound decision making. When that stops, or is never allowed to surface in the first place, the organization is self-centered and vulnerable.

When leaders start attributing the warning signs to anomalous, one-time, temporary factors – and believing they are exercising that penetrating understanding and insight when, in reality, the “analysis” is no more than the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion they have shifted from rationality to internal belief-based decision making. (also called “wishcraft.”)

Reports of ice ahead.

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation.

The cumulative peril and/or risks gone bad of Stage 3 assert themselves, throwing the enterprise into a sharp decline visible to all. The critical question is: How does its leadership respond? By lurching for a quick salvation or by getting back to the disciplines that brought about greatness in the first place?

So things have gone to hell in a handcart, and the leadership starts looking around for how to get out of the spin. They have ignored all of the warning signs up to this point, but now they are undeniably in trouble. What to do?

As I said, this is where it gets really interesting from a personal / professional level.

There is no doubt that, at this moment, the proverbial “burning platform” exists. There is clearly a sense of urgency… Pick your clichés from “change management” literature here.

“Hey – I just read this book about lean. Let’s bring in this hot-shot consultant to lean us out.” And so it begins. The Search for the Silver Bullet – the magic that will fix everything. And it doesn’t have to be “lean.” It might be x-Sigma (put your favorite buzzword in place of the ‘x’). Maybe everybody reads The Goal and starts looking for constraints. Or the leaders leap from “program” to “program” looking for the solution. While each “initiative” is kicked off with great deliberate fanfare, in reality the leaders are panicing.

They fail to see that leaders atop companies in the late stages of decline need to get back to a calm, clear-headed, and focused approach. If you want to reverse decline, be rigorous about what not to do.

Here is my take on this. These leaders who leap from “solution” to “solution” are still in hubris and denial. They are still looking outside of themselves for the problem, and the solution.

My last post, How the Sensei Teaches, describes leaders who teach by being students. This requires humility, something totally incompatible with hubris. If they want to bring in that hot-shot consultant, they need to tell her “We really need help up here, please teach us” rather than “Go teach our people how to be lean.” They need that consultant to be a true sensei, not just a technician.

Oh – what is Stage Five? Collins calls it Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death.

My words are “The boat sinks.”

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How The Sensei Teaches

In a previous post, I talked about Steven Spear’s observation about how a sensei saw a process and the problems. Jeffery Liker, Mike Hoseus and David Meier have done a good job capturing how a sensei teaches and summed it up in a diagram in the book Toyota Culture. (for those of you following at home, the diagram is figure 18.9 on page 541).

I want to dissect this model a bit and share some of the thoughts I had.

This is the whole diagram:

How a sensei teaches

This diagram strikes me in a couple of ways.

Let’s zoom in to the left hand side.

sensei-do-loop1

I’m calling the part I’ve highlighted in red the “sensei do-it-loop.” That is, the sensei says “Do this,” the students do it, then the sensei says “Now, do this.” Repeat.

While this first loop is the starting point, all too often, it is also the ending point.

And in this loop, process improvement actually happens, everybody applauds at the Friday report-out. The participants may even prepare a summary of key learning points. And perhaps, as follow up, they will apply the same tools in a similar situation. (As much as I hope for this outcome, though, it doesn’t happen as often as I would like.)

A lot of consulting engagements go on this way for many years. Some go decades. I am sure processes improve, and I am equally sure it is very lucrative for those consultants. But even if they are extraordinarily skilled at seeing improvement opportunities and pointing them out, these consultants are not sensei in the meaning of this diagram. That distinction is made clear in the next section.

This is where the learning happens.

Sensei Learning

I have highlighted the learning loop in red.

The sensei is primarily interested in developing people so that they can see the opportunities and improve the processes themselves. He wants to move them along the continuum from “Do” to “Think” so that they understand, not only this process, but learn how to think about processes in general. When the sensei asks the questions, he is forcing people to articulate their understanding to him. He is really saying “teach me.” In this way he pushes people to deepen their own understanding from “think it through” to “understand it well enough to explain to someone else.”

Think about Taiichi Ohno’s famous “chalk circle.” The “DO THIS” was “stand here and watch the process.” He had seen some problem, and wanted the (hapless) manager to learn to see it as well. Ohno didn’t point it out, he just directed their eyes. His “test” was “What do you see?,” essentially repeated until the student “got it.”

The second leap here is from “Think” to “Self Learning.” At this point, people have learned to ask the questions of themselves, and of each other.  So when he asks his questions, the sensei is not merely interested in the answers as a CHECK of learning, he is also teaching people the questions.

These questions are also a form of “reflection.” They are a CHECK of what was planned vs. what was done; and what was intended vs. what was accomplished. The ACT in this case is to think through the process of improvement itself, not simply what was improved.

Until people learn to do this, “Self Learning” does not occur, and the team is forever dependent on external resources (the sensei, consultants) to push themselves.

But the sensei is not through. Once people have a sense of self-learning, the next level is capability to teach others. “All leaders as teachers.”

Learning to Teaching

Someone, I don’t know who, once said that teaching is the best learning. I can certainly say that my own experiences back this up. My greatest ah-ha moments have come when I was trying to explain a concept, not when it was being explained to me.

I would contend, therefore, that a true sensei is not so much one who has mastered the subject, but rather one who has mastered the role of the eternal student. It is mastery in learning that sets apart the very best in a field.

Thus the sensei‘s work is not done until he has imparted this skill to the organization.

As the leaders challenge their people to thoroughly understand the process, the problems, to explore the solutions, so do the leaders challenge themselves to understand as well.

They test their people’s knowledge by asking questions. They test the process knowledge of their people by expecting their people to teach them, the leaders, about the process. Thus, by making people teach, they drive their people to learn in ways they never would have otherwise. The leader teaches by being the student. The student learns by teaching. And the depth of skill and knowledge in the entire organization grows quickly, and without bound.

So Here Is Your Question:

If your organization is typical of most who are treating “lean” as something to “implement” you have the following:

You have a cadre of technical specialists. Their job, primarily, is to seek out opportunities for kaizen, assemble the team of people, teach them the mechanics, then guide them through making process improvements that hit the targets. This is often done over the course of 5 days, but there are variations on this. The key point is that the staff specialists are delegated the job of evangalizing “lean” and teaching it to the people on the shop floor.

Again, if it is typical, there is some kind of reporting structure up to management. How many kaizens have you run? What results have you delivered? How many people have been trained? Managers show their commitment and support by participating in these events periodically, by attending the report-outs, and by paying attention to these reports and follow-up of action items.

Now take what you have just read, and ask yourselves – “Are we getting beyond the first loop, or are we forever just implementing what is in the books?”

How are you reinforcing the learning?

Who is responsible to learn by teaching?

I’ll share a secret with you about a recent post. When Paul and I took Earl through his own warehouse that Friday night, neither of us had been in there before. While I can’t speak for Paul, everything I knew about warehouse operations and crossdocks, I learned from Earl. I didn’t teach him anything that night. Paul and I did, however, push him to teach us, and in doing so, he learned a great deal.

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Russia’s Factories Gear Up for Efficiency

This article in Business Week offers a glimpse into some of the opportunities, and challenges, facing Russian industry, both in dealing with the global recession, and their tremendous work to get out from under the legacy of a state run economy.

Two things really jump out at me. First, this particular CEO (other than the fact that he is 26 years old(!) is taking a proactive approach to the recession. He is taking responsibility for dealing with the problems, not simply playing victim and blaming the economy.

…Andrey Gartung, the 26-year-old CEO, believes the global economic crisis offers an opportunity to boost productivity. This year he is adding new product lines, ordering every department to trim costs by 15%, and asking workers to ferret out waste wherever they find it—with prizes of up to $300 for the best ideas. “The companies that will survive are the ones that are efficient,” Gartung says.

With that kind of attitude, I think Mr. Gartung will go far.

But the thing that really jumped out was the incredible magnitude of the opportunity.

Despite Russia’s 7%-plus economic growth recently, much of its industry is little changed from Soviet times. Factory productivity is just 16% of the U.S. level, according to Strategy Partners, a Moscow management consultancy.

That means, friends, that they have an 84% upside. If they can harness that, think about what it means in terms of competition.

Russia, of course, is not without its problems – political, social, economic. The little tidbit that the CEO of this factory is the owner’s son comes out about 2/3 of the way down, as does the fact that the owner is a member of the Russian Parliament. Though I am sure that Mr. Gartung is sharp and competent, in general, this kind of thinking is not going to help Russian industry as a whole.

But rather than focus on them, take a look in the mirror. What is your productivity upside? What is your attitude about these economic times? Do you honestly believe your operation is as good as it can get? Or are you satisfied with 15 or 20% of what it could be?

Consider Toyota’s response to their first quarterly loss in decades – essentially saying treating the loss as evidence of a problem.

Remember that old definition of insanity: “Continuously doing the same thing, and expecting a different outcome.” If you don’t like the results you are getting, then dig in and try something else.

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Evidence of a Problem

In most references describing the process of good problem solving, the first real step is to explain what actually is the problem.

It is easy to get tripped up at this stage and describe the problem in terms of the desired target, or in terms of “lack of” a specific countermeasure. That, of course, skips over the whole point of gaining a deep understanding of the situation before moving too far into intestigating causes.

I heard a great way to frame that first bit of description tonight from Richard.

“What is the evidence of a problem?”

That word, “evidence” does a much better job of conveying the point that this should be a description of the things that are observed, heard, felt, etc. rather than any kind of analysis.

In many cases a “big problem” is actually evidence of many small ones. “Too much inventory” is one of those. So is “defect rates” or any other aggregated measure. If you are running KPIs you probably know that, because they aggregate so much, they are often relatively insensitive until things are so far into the hole that it is a mess to untangle. Better to instrument your processes at much finer levels and get “evidence” in real time.

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Genchi Genbutsu in a Warehouse

Now and then something comes across that makes it all worth it. And nothing is more “worth it” to me than to know something I said or did contributed to someone’s insight or impetus to do something spectacular.

Yesterday Earl sent me an email that is one of those times. I was going to edit it from an email to me into a story about Earl’s experience. But instead, I decided to just publish it (with his permission) pretty much as I got it. But to be clear, this is about Earl, and his learning, not about me or my teaching.

Mark,

I received this email [see below] the other day from John.

John was one of the lean leaders working for me in Rochester when I was the Lean Director for Kodak’s Global Logistics team and you were the Lean Director for Equipment Mfg. He is now a professor at RIT teaching lean.

One of the things he does with every class is bring them through his old operation in Kodak. The operation is an outbound crossdock for all of Kodak Park where, through applying our lean principles, primarily “flowing at takt”, we have taken a 2,000,000 square foot (186,000 m2) warehouse and replaced it with an 85,000 square foot (<8000 m2) crossdock.

Along the way we reduced the costs by 70%, improved the reliability to +/- a few hours, and amassed an enviable safety record….and as you can see in his note, we’re making it better every day.

When I think back to how we got here, I have to go back to what started as an innocent Friday night, when you, Paul Cary, and I were sitting around his office and you and Paul were pushing on me that we weren’t really thinking about lean in the right way in Logistics, and I was pushing back that “you didn’t understand”….that we just move pallets around the warehouse.

I can remember like it happened yesterday, but it was actually a few years ago, you and Paul looked at each other, looked at me, jumped up and said “Let’s go see”, so we did.

Several hours later, we emerged from the warehouse, not tired and worn out, but energized and excited. You had helped me to see what was invisible to me (and everyone else around)….even though I was the local “lean expert”.

The approach was classic “Mark”, and I have to admit I’ve stolen it and used it as my own many times, although not nearly as effortlessly. At your insistence, we entered through the outbound dock door, as you pointed out, “closest to the customer”. As I started to walk through and into the warehouse proper, you stopped at the door, and made me stop and describe what I was seeing.

The “Five Why’s” were relentless, and I think it was something like 30-40 minutes before we even moved off that spot, but the seeds were planted right then and there. I had now started to see the whole warehouse as “waste” and totally unnecessary if we could only get product flowing at takt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve relied on the lessons learned that night to guide me when I get in the middle of something unfamiliar to me.

Well, it took us a couple of years, but your invaluable and patient counsel over the next few years shaped a whole organization’s culture. I know better (now) than to suggest “we’ve arrived”, but the principle of using “flow at takt” and making waste visible to drive continuous improvement is firmly rooted in our DNA now.

Aside from the impressive performance statistics of the operation I know you’ll appreciate more that the things you taught me have been dutifully passed along from me to the manager of the area, and through him, to his successor, and now through the college to many more. All we have to do now is close the loop and get you to hire one of the RIT students somewhere!

I’ll not pretend that a couple of hours on a Friday night several years ago was all it took, and I’m forever indebted to the many hours you spent with me afterwards helping me to grow, but it was truly a life changing event, and I thought you’d appreciate seeing a snippet of what it’s led to. Thanks again for all your insight and support in our, and my, journey.

If you ever find your way back East, you have to stop in to see it, drinks are on me. It is pretty wild, but if you do, I might tiptoe carefully around the idea that you’re the guy that taught me to “physically constrain the process to force it to flow at takt”. It was an essential part of our journey, but obviously anyone that would suggest we can change a 2,000,000 square foot warehouse into an 85,000 square foot crossdock can’t be seeing the world the right way! (Of course I have to follow that up with one of my favorite quotes one of the VP’s here used….”If it wasn’t for the fact we already did it, we would have said it’s impossible”. Thanks again.
This is the email he is talking about:

Dave and Tony, thanks again for giving the walk through to my 25 advanced lean class students yesterday. Some observations:

I think the floor was about the cleanest I have ever seen it. It is always clean, but yesterday seemed even more so.

The evidence of continuous improvement is amazing. Yesterday I saw a number of things that I did not see in my last visit Feb 10 – new lane structures, hybrid cards, changes in box 2, clearer e-box sheets, new standard work sheets and visuals, etc.

I really appreciate you taking to heart the input I gave you based on the feedback from my last class on the tour structure/agenda itself. The last tour was very good, this one was awesome. The standard work sheet Dave showed me for the tour was great standard work – content, sequence, timing and outcomes were all vividly clear. I asked for more of a focus on the production control system and you delivered on that request. Dave, in your intro, you sounded like me teaching my class (maybe not a good thing?!?).

[…]I was pleased the students had more time to ask more questions. I keep preaching continuous improvement in class and you guys model it which helps give the message credibility in the minds of the students.

The other thing that struck me, which is not new but seemed different for some reason I can’t explain….. You are moving large volumes of freight, […] and the floor is just so calm. There is no panic, no arguing, no anxiety, just people following the processes, getting product from point A to point B, in a quiet, controlled, efficient way. I still remember when I brought the facilities class over last spring, and especially 2 of the folks with lots of work experience said “I never imagined that a warehouse type of environment could actually look like this.”

Your safety performance is stunning. I know the record when I was there was 534 days. Then we had 2 “old-age” repetitive motion injuries in 2 weeks, then you went 600 + days. Now you are at 200+ days. Absolutely remarkable in a tight space with fork lift trucks moving around. 3 OSHA reportables in 4 years, wow.

I clearly remember “that Friday night.” I think we were in there until 10:00 or later. Paul and I had a really good synergistic style, we reinforced each other, and it was an intense experience for whoever was on the receiving end. This was not the last time we took someone through this exercise.

To be sure, it was Earl and his team that did all of the heavy lifting. All Paul and I did was give him a sense of an ideal flow, and challenged them to discover, and overcome, the obstacles between the current state and that vision – one problem at a time, a couple every day.

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Amazon.com Gets It

Not many people know that Amazon.com is one of the “places to see” if you are looking for companies practicing the TPS. The fact that their sales and profits are hitting records as most others are scratching and clawing to stay in business is telling.

This recent post by Kevin Kelleher on Gigacom really sums the whole thing up with one sentence quoted from Jeff Bezos’ letter to shareholders:

At a fulfillment center recently, one of our Kaizen experts asked me, “I’m in favor of a clean fulfillment center, but why are you cleaning? Why don’t you eliminate the source of dirt?” I felt like the Karate Kid.

If you have to keep cleaning up a mess, find out where the dirt is coming from.

But the philosophy goes deeper.

If an assembly Team Member is continuously spending time cleaning up threaded holes, go find out how the debris is getting in there (or find a way to keep it out). Go and see.

If you keep losing market share, find out why customers prefer your competitors products. (And don’t sit around a mahogany table talking about it, GO AND SEE.)

Other posts on the same site relate to eBay’s troubles trying to compete with Amazon. The difference, I think, is summed up in a quote from an Amazon executive related to me by someone who was a fly on the wall in one of their meetings:

“At an eBay sellers meeting last quarter, my counterpart was booed off the stage. That is not going to happen here.”

Kaizen is less about the tools than it is an obsessive curiousity about what the next problem is between you and perfection.

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Kaizen Express – and the Lean Enterprise Institute

The Lean Enterprise Institute has recently published Kaizen Express, an overview of the classic characteristics of “lean manufacturing” and, by implication, the Toyota Production System. As I set out to review the book, I found myself heading in two directions.

One is the content of the book itself.

Over the years, there have been a slew of books with similar tables of contents that describe the various mechanics and mechanisms observed in the Toyota Production System.

The first really comprehensive reference in English was Productivity Press’s translation of Hirano’s JIT Implementation Manual. (Originally a two volume set priced at $900, it appears it is about to be published in a second edition for around $200. I have not seen the second edition.) Back in the early and mid 1980’s, Hirano was about the only comprehensive reference out there. At Boeing we had internal-use reproduction rights, and many of us poured over those volumes, parsing every word.

Kiyoshi Suzuki’s New Manufacturing Challenge (1987) was the book we gave out to all of our suppliers. It, too, provides a pretty good overview of most of the tools and techniques. It is a good basic reference, and I still believe it really takes about three years for a practitioner to outgrow it.

At a more technical level, we have had Toyota Production System: An Integrated Approach to Just-In-Time by Yusuhiro Monden. This book goes into more depth from a system engineering standpoint, and focuses mostly on “Toyota’s production system” vs. a more generic approach.

These three titles are by no means the only ones. A couple of feet of my own bookshelf is occupied with books covering the same basic topics. I only mention these three only because they have been my workhorse references, especially in the days when I was still putting together my own mental models.

Kaizen Express is well at home with this family. It is a solid overview of the tools and techniques that generally characterize “lean manufacturing” and I can quibble with nothing that is in the book.

The presentation itself harks back to the days when all of the decent references came out of Japan. It is a bilingual book, written in Japanese language and graphic style with English translation along side.

On a sidebar note: As a practitioner, dealing with shop floor people and their sensibilities and values, I would rather use a reference that didn’t come across as so foreign. While I fully appreciate that the Japanese vocabulary is a solidly embedded part of Toyota’s culture, that is not the case elsewhere, and some Toyota-trained practitioners would do well to keep that in mind. The concepts are difficult enough to get across without having to overcome language resistance. Add to that the unfortunate truth that many countries, especially in Asia, still have vivid cultural memories of a far more malevolent Japan, and the resistance just increases. I would not give a copy of this book out in China or Korea, for example. There are others which serve the same purpose without bringing up unresolved issues. Memories and emotions run much longer and deeper in Asia than they do in the West.

All of those reservations aside, this book is a welcome review of familiar material.

Now, the second part. I want to go beyond the book itself, and look at its context. This becomes not so much a review of the book, but one person’s opinion (mine, to be sure) of the state of our communities understanding of the Toyota Production System itself.

The TPS is somewhat unique among all of the various “management systems” in the popular business press today in that it grew organically rather than being explicitly designed. Thus, rather than consult standard documents to learn about it, knowledge comes from research.

In the early days, through the late 1980’s, the topic of “JIT” or “Japanese manufacturing techniques” was a quiet, esoteric backwater of consultants and a few committed practitioners. We knew about Harley Davidson, and some of the other early adopters. Danaher was just getting started, and some of the household name early leaders were starting to gain meaningful experience and reputations. The knowledge base came from practitioners trying to make it work, rather than professional academics who are in the business of developing and testing rigorous theory.

In late 1990, everything changed. The Machine That Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Roos published the results of good, solid research from MIT and became a hot seller. It broke out of the practitioner’s technical corral, got the attention of mainline executives and managers, and introduced the buzzwords “lean production” (which later morphed into “lean manufacturing”) into the lexicon of everyday business.

This was followed by Lean Thinking which profiled a number of these companies and put Shingijutsu on everyone’s radar.

The Lean Enterprise Institute was founded shortly thereafter, and in the late 1990’s published Learning to See and introduced everyone to value stream mapping. This was the first of a series of workbooks designed to take the practitioner through the mechanics of implementing various aspects of the basic elements of modern manufacturing techniques.

These workbooks were something new. Rather than the encyclopedic approach of a single book devoting short chapters to descriptions of the various tools, these workbooks went into much more depth on a single topic, such as materials distribution, creating a work cell, the basics of heijunka or mentoring someone through solving a problem.

In the background of all of this, “lean manufacturing” became the hot topic. Writers, consultants, managers were all talking about how to “get lean” and to “lean out” a business. Hundreds of books were published on the topic, a few of them good, many of them re-hashing old stuff in new ways, a few just using the buzzwords to sell bad information.

This explosion resulted in a lot of noise pollution. What had started as peer-reviewed academic research of the automobile industry turned into the “lean industry” – a crowded, bustling bazaar with everyone hawking and touting their “solutions.” This, by the way, included a mountain of junk academic research.

But there was also some really exceptional academic research, especially out of Harvard. While everyone was busy implementing the tools of lean – the things in the tables of contents of all of those books, the success rate was a far cry from the promise. I have experienced this myself a couple of times. But Steven Spear made it the topic of his 1999 groundbreaking PhD thesis at Harvard. Let me quote, and offer my interpretation, of a few key sentences from the abstract of his dissertation.

Researchers have established that Toyota enjoys advantages in cost, quality, lead-time, and flexibility when compared to its competitors in automotive assembly.

There is no doubt here. It’s why we are all reading this stuff in the first place! And while there was considerable anecdotal evidence before that, The Machine That Changed the World offered up a solid base of good research to confirm what everybody was thinking.

Differences in generating value have been attributed to differences between the Toyota Production System (“TPS”) and alternative management systems. Distinctive tools and practices have been associated with TPS.

Those “tools and practices” are what are covered in the classic books I cited earlier. They are also what is covered in Kaizen Express if not by industry in general, certainly by the community of experts.

However, evidence suggests that merely copying these [tools and practices] does not generate the performance advantages enjoyed by Toyota. This has prompted several questions … [including] … why is it so difficult to imitate?

So we (the community of experts) were happily out the there doing the stuff that was in the books, teaching the basics, trying to implement them, and finding it generally difficult to get a lot of traction once the initial novelty wears off.

Meanwhile, the noisy bazaar continued to churn out more and more “solutions” aimed at the “gaps in lean manufacturing.”

“Lean looks at waste, but doesn’t address variation…” so “Sigma” was spliced in. Yet Toyota obsesses on stability and eliminating variation at levels we cannot even fathom.

“We need someone to implement quality in our lean company.” Hello? How can you leave out quality? Yet in our efforts to implement flow and reduce inventory, we did it all of the time!

We try to bring kaizen into administrative and creative process flows – well enough, but upon finding that the “tools and techniques” need to be adjusted somewhat, people draw the conclusion that there is more to it.

All of these things, over the last ten or fifteen years seemed to make things very complex indeed.

So we go back to the basics.

I agree with the principle. But we need to discuss exactly what the basics are.

The second paragraph of Steven Spear’s abstract is pretty clear:

… the tools and practices that have received attention are not fundamental to TPS.

(emphasis added)

Then he brings up things that the rest of us never talk about:

… the … Rules-In-Use promote distinctive organizational features. These are nested, modular [organizational] structure; frequent, finely grained self-diagnostics; and frequent, structured, directed problem solving that is the primary mechanism for training and process improvement.

(emphasis added) (For explanation of what Spear means by “Rules-In-Use” read the dissertation itself, or Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System, which is the HBR summary of his conclusions. Personally, I “got it” a lot better from the dissertation, but then he has 465 pages to make his points vs. 10 pages in the article.)

What has all of this got to do with the little green book, Kaizen Express?

I think it is a great book, for 1991.

But this is 2009. So while Kaizen Express is a welcome refresher of the mechanics, those mechanics are, according to the current standing theory, built upon a foundation of something that Kaizen Express, and for that matter, the LEI has not, to date, addressed. What is missing, in my view, is how the tools and practices outlined in Kaizen Express and its predecessors actually drive daily continuous improvement that engages every team member in the process.

Anyone out there is perfectly welcome to refute Spear’s research and make a compelling case that “the fundamentals” are, indeed, the things addressed in Kaizen Express. But to do so means bringing credible peer-reviewed, published research to the table. It means building a compelling case of documented observations that contradict Spear’s theory. Anything else is simply conjecture.

My challenge to the Lean Enterprise Institute: Your organization is unique. It emerged from the world of academia with very solid credentials, with a great mission to carry this message to the non-academic world. Because of its academic origins, LEI has a real opportunity to be the bridge between the cutting-edge understanding coming out of these top-flight research institutions and translate it into practical things the rest of us can put to use. Extend your charter to taking PhD words like “nested modular structure” and “frequent finely grained self-diagnostics” and giving the daily practitioners some workbooks that lay out how to do it.

Kaizen Express is a great little book.

LEI can do better, though, than to re-publish material that has been out there since 1988.

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Back to Basics

The Lean Enterprise Institute is taking up a “Back to Basics” theme.

But what, exactly, are “the basics” of the Toyota Production System?

This is critically important. Permit me to cite an analogy.

Look at a house. What do you see? What would you say are “the basics?”

At first glance, all houses have walls, a roof. They have a door. They are divided into rooms for various activities and purposes. A “basic house” is going to have an entry, a living room, a kitchen, a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom. More complex houses will have more rooms, fancier architecture, higher grades of materials, be bigger, but the basics are all there.

OK, that is a basic house.

I make this point because when people talk about the basics of “lean manufacturing” they talk about the things you can see. If I open up Learning to See, and turn to the “Green Tab” the chapter’s title is “What Makes A Value Stream Lean.” That chapter is primarily (right after the talk about waste and overproduction) a list and description of “Characteristics of a Lean Value Stream.”

  1. Produce to your takt time.
  2. Develop continuous flow wherever possible.
  3. Use supermarkets to control production where continuous flow does not extend upstream.
  4. Try to send the customer schedule to only one production process.
  5. Distribute the production of different products over time at the pacemaker process (level the production mix).
  6. Create an “initial pull” by releasing and withdrawing small, consistent increments of work at the pacemaker process. (Level the production volume).
  7. Develop the ability to make “every part every day” (then every shirt, then every hour or pallet or pitch) in fabrication processes upstream of the pacemaker process.

Now I have to say right now that I have always loved this chapter. I cannot count the number of people I have referred to “The Green Tab” as a fundamental primer. It includes all of the basics, just like our house.

In their latest book, Kaizen Express, the LEI has brought out some more detail on these same points, and added a few “rooms” to the house. One critical aspect they add is various topics that add up to quality. (It’s kind of like leaving out the kitchen or the bathroom if you don’t mention that.) They talk about zone control, line stop, and countermeasures to quality problems. (I will do a full review on this book soon.)

Then on page 99 starts four pages on Employee Involvement where they talk about practical kaizen training (PKT), and suggestion programs.

Let’s go back to our house. The things we said were “the basics” were the things you see when you look at it from the street, and go inside and walk around in it. But in an industrialized country, the modern single family residence is a miracle of accumulated knowledge and technology. The basics are the things that keep it from sinking into the ground, from catching on fire, from leaking and rotting. They are the things you can’t see, but unless you understand them, your house may look like the one next door, but it won’t perform like the one next door.

I have been in dozens of factories that had takt time, some semblance of continuous flow, pull systems, supermarkets, all of that stuff. They had run hundreds, maybe thousands, of kaizen events, and had suggestion programs. All of these things were visible just by walking around.

Yet most of them were stuck. They had reached a point when all of their energy was being expended to re-implement the things that had slid back. Three steps forward, three steps back.

They had read Ohno’s book, they knew the history of the Toyota Production System. They understood all of the engineering aspects of the system, and could install very good working examples of all of it.

But something wasn’t there, and that something is the foundation that keeps the house from sinking into the ground. It is the real basics.

Kaizen Express hints at it on pages 99 – 102, it is true employee involvement. And here is a real basic: Employee involvement is created by leader involvement. Not just top leaders, all leaders, at all levels.

To be honest, a lot of technical specialists don’t like that very much for a couple of reasons. First, engaging the leaders, at all levels, is really hard. It is a lot easier to get things done by going straight to the gemba and doing it ourselves – we show people how to do it, we “engage” them in the initial implementation, and everything is wonderful for the Friday report-out.

But I contend that the foundation of the Toyota Production System is the leadership system. It is the system of leadership that holds up all of the walls that we call takt, flow and pull. Those things, in turn, enable the leadership system to function better. The “characteristics of a lean value stream” evolved in response to the leadership system, in order to strengthen it. It is a symbiosis, an ecosystem.

“But it didn’t start out as a leadership system.” No, it did not. The history of how the Toyota Production System evolved is well documented, and the leadership system was less designed than it evolved. But let’s go back to our house analogy.

Primitive houses only have the “basics” I described above. They don’t have sophisticated foundations, some are just built on skids (if that). But because they lack the basics, most of those primitive houses don’t last.

And there is the paradox. When we say “back to the basics” we cannot only refer to the chronological history of how the system developed. We have to take the most successful, most robust example in front of us today, and we have to look at what fundamental thing holds this thing up and lets it grow more robust every day.

So let’s take a look at what Toyota teaches when they teach someone the basics.

The article Learning to Lead at Toyota was written back in 2004, but I still feels it offers a lot of un-captured insight into the contrast between what Toyota thinks are “the basics” and what most others do. I want to encourage everyone to get a copy, and not just read it, but to parse it, study it, and use it as an “ideal condition” or a benchmark. Compare your “lean manufacturing” and your leadership systems to what is described in here. Ask yourself the question:

Do we really understand the basics?

Note: There are now links to my study guides for Learning to Lead at Toyota on the Resources page.