The Toyota Production System (TPS) is an approach which has been very successful and widely copied. But the copying has largely focussed on the systems and processes (Kanban for example) and not on the underlying ethos.
This is particularly topical as we see the same issues occurring with agile methodologies. A desire to copy rapidly the success of organisations in agile development has led to the growth in certification and frameworks. The resulting risk is in “doing agile” not in “being agile”.
Toyota’s real achievement is not merely the creation and use of the tools themselves; it is in making all its work a series of nested, ongoing experiments.
Learning to Lead at Toyota
I was reading “Learning to Lead at Toyota” from 2004 in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) (available at https://hbr.org/2004/05/learning-to-lead-at-toyota ). I’ll include some of the key quotes for people who don’t have HBR access, but read the source article if you can.
The article is about a new manager, already familiar with the TPS and believing he is using it in his current role. He is hired into Toyota to run a US plant and expects to start using his skills immediately. Instead he has around three months of training. A training that focusses on “thinking TPS” not “doing TPS”.
The work focussed on improvements in operational availability – a fundamental in manufacturing. Initially the new manager had managed to reach 90% availability at the site he was running. After three months of training, he took the site to 99%.
Key Points
There’s no substitute for direct observation
Learning to Lead at Toyota
This is a well-known Lean principle, widely known as gemba. The principle is that management must learn from what is really happening by observing the place where it is happening. In the article, this is taken to extremes, avoiding deduction about why a machine failure had taken place in favour of waiting for an actual failure to allow direct observation.
This is more generally applicable to managers learning the importance of observing and listening to teams to understand what is really happening. Creating abstract process is rarely effective.
Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments.
Learning to Lead at Toyota
This is a critical part of the thinking around improvements. Improvements are formally proposed by stating the problem, the root cause suspected, the change made, and the countermeasure’s actual effect on performance. A closed loop.
It is easy to promote a change in the hope that it causes some improvement. TPS takes this far further by ensuring the experiments are designed, the outcome anticipated and measured and the measurement compared with the expectation to build understanding.
Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible.
Learning to Lead at Toyota
While most Agile teams would be happy to make occasional improvements, the focus on improvement in TPS is relentless. The new manager returned to his US plant and was pleased to announce that in one day he had observed 7 areas for improvement, 4 successfully implemented. His coach was less impressed than he expected, pointing out that two team leaders who were going through the same training—people with jobs far less senior than the one for which Dallis was being prepared—had generated 28 and 31 change ideas, respectively, within the same amount of time.
Many Agile teams run retrospectives every Sprint, but few have the mindset of continuous experimentation. This needs a level of training and a level of empowerment which many teams do not feel.
Managers should coach, not fix
Learning to Lead at Toyota
To me the key change is the shift of management to a coaching role. Te manager had been rewarded by his previous employer for being a problem solver. At Toyota, managers enable problem solving throughout the organisation. And his training was similarly structured around coaching and enablement.
For managers to shift from a directive to a coaching role can be a huge challenge. It needs the organisation to support, and even expect, coaching as the primary role of managers. This also requires the organisation to empower more junior roles to be the ones that take action. The expectation by managers that they will solve issues by personal action, rather than by coaching others, is perhaps the hardest barrier to organisational change to overcome.
Conclusion
He came out of his training realizing that improving actual operations was not his job—it was the job of the workers themselves. His role was to help them understand that responsibility and enable them to carry it out.
Learning to Lead at Toyota
"Ride the Waves" 