To go lean: strive!

Thirty years ago, when I first studied how Toyota engineers transformed a production cell at a supplier, I didn’t understand much. I saw them work regularly with people dead set against changing anything, and still succeed. The result was a 100% percent quality improvement and a 30% productivity improvement. It took me years to realize that the real result was a 30% total cost reduction when the product was renewed, as the learning from doing step by step improvements was incorporated in the new product design (cost reduction they split with the supplier).

But I did see something extraordinary was happening before my eyes. So I badgered them for their method, their roadmap, their plan. They kept saying they didn’t have one. Just solve one problem after another – safety, quality, productivity. Until one day the lead engineer, quite annoyed with my constant badgering said: “we don’t have a roadmap. We have one golden rule: we make people before we make parts.”

What was that all about? What I saw back then was straightforward PDCA: they took on a problem, planned a change, discussed and educated the people about it, tried it, checked the effect and then discussed some more about whether to adopt, adapt or abandon, and moved on to the next change.

This was the foundation stone of their approach. But then in order to orient the problem finding, I realized they’d also set up a pull system (pulling boxes at takt time from logistics) and a rudimentary andon (having a team leader there to respond to operator issues). As a I kept learning about lean, I realized they had a full learning system to strive for improvement – their famous Toyota Production System:

1. How can we improve customer satisfaction in terms of safety, quality, delivery, cost, and morale?
2. How can we reduce lead-times and get closer to one-piece-flow?
3. How can we spot issues closer to where they appear and respond faster to correct before the defects spread down the line?
4. How can we engage more operators in kaizen, not just to solve problems but also to spot problems and volunteer suggestions?
5. How can we improve conditions so that people are better trained (Manpower), equipment is better maintained (Machine), components always available in the right quantity at the right time (Materials) and standardized work constantly checked, challenged and updated (Methods)?

If you strive to respond to these 5 questions, you'll find yourself building radically different relational protocols on the shop floor: different ways that people interact between themselves and with the work. There clearly was a second layer to this onion - the lean learning system:

But what about the executive level? Several years later, as I continued to study how the system evolved, I came across a series of videos by Mr. Fujio Cho explaining to North American Toyota executives the values underlying the TPS, the attitudes to acquire – as I remember them:

1. Genchi genbutsu: go and see to the real place to understand the facts, push for kaizen and get people to agree on the problem.
2. Kaizen: improving operations continuously always driving for innovation and adaptation, never to be satisfied with the status quo.
3. Challenge: forming a vision for the long-term by clarifying challenges and meeting them with courage and creativity to realize our dreams.
4. Respect: making the greatest efforts to understand others, foster trust and accepting responsibility for situations and the need to change ourselves.
5. Teamwork: stimulate personal and personal growth, share opportunities for development and maximise individual and team performance.

The last two had me puzzled for years. Surely, teamwork should be about taking collective responsibility and respect stimulating personal and professional growth, not the other way around? It finally dawned on me that Mr. Cho was not defining respect and teamwork, but as with the TPS, he was outlining what to strive for in order to achieve respect and teamwork. To achieve respect, show understanding and accept responsibility. To create a team, first develop people. This was a third layer of the onion.

As always, it was not a system-centric perspective, but a people-centric vision of how to align individual fulfilment and corporate destiny by forming the best teams, who would set up the leanest systems, which would lead to the highest commitment to customer satisfaction and cost performance.

Here again, the framework shows you what to strive for, and how to develop different relational protocols between executive and teams. The executive lessons from this onion were to first go the workplace with the intention of finding opportunities for kaizen. There, seek out a leader willing to engage in improving things and help them to explore problems and frame them in a way that others could understand (the origin of the lean “tools”), then get people to share their countermeasures and deepen their understanding of the problems in order to change where change was needed, whilst keeping what worked – distinguishing legacy (we want to get rid of) from heritage (we want to preserve). Or, in the terms of my mentor, friend and co-author Orry Fiume: double the good, halve the bad.

With Orry Fiume, Dan Jones and Jacques Chaize, we put together all the case by case lean transformation attempts we had personally witnessed and we eventually realized lean thinking meant a radical cognitive change, a change in how we look at situations and get into issues. Rather than follow the instinctive 4D of defining the situation (in our minds), deciding what to do, driving the execution and then dealing with the unavoidable consequences, we needed to learn to first, find problems (in the real world) by striving for flow, face the problems we have no immediate solution to by accepting the challenge, framing this challenge in a way that everyone can understand and contribute in order to, finally, form smarter solutions from all brains, not just one brain and many hands.

Still, although this 4F versus 4D insight now governs how I think about lean transformation, it’s easy to succumb to the curse of knowledge and forget how such understanding is forged: by building up each layer of the onion. This means first teaching PDCA, then the TPS framework and finally the Toyota Way executive value system.

When you’re in the thick of it, the core question to any lean transformation is: how? We know the answer: develop people before you develop products or service. But again, how? There is so much to know – how can they possibly absorb all of this? Rather than cramming heads with lean knowledge, I believe we can reproduce learning curves. First teach PDCA on concrete problems and make managers realize they need to engage and lead their teams, not just push more work on their staff. Then teach the TPS to stretch horizons and visualize a path to the vision of zero waste, a waste-free society. Once they have got the hang of the system (and yes, one difficulty is that it is a system – customer satisfaction, just-in-time, jidoka, standards/kaizen and mutual trust are interrelated and interdependent) then teach people how to lead with the Toyota Way by stepping forward on the two feet of continuous improvement and respect-for-people. In this way, each layer can scaffold the next and we can build collective understanding from individual insight – and initiative. 

The lessons of thirty years of studying what makes Toyota different? To paraphrase a zen saying: lean mind, beginner’s mind. When the world is messy, things get confused and people push back or backslide, maybe it’s best to go back to the beginning and see it all from a beginner’s mind. Forget everything you know and look at the situation by standing in their shoes, looking from their eyes, as it is all new. Then let your experience and knowledge flow threw and open up new insights and new ways to experiment and discover a new path.