by Rother, Mike
While taking problems at face value is a basis for Toyota-style continuous improvement and adaptation, inside many other companies I find way too much of either sweeping little problems under the rug or placing blame, both of which inhibit the ability to see reality and adapt to actual conditions. When you combine hiding problems with the popular idea of trying to manage from afar via targets and managerial accounting metrics, it means that even less accurate information gets through to managers, who thereby either fail to lead in the making of appropriate adjustments—small course corrections—or try to do it too late.
A lot has been said and written about learning organizations. With the way it applies PDCA, Toyota has developed a learning organization in a pragmatic way.
1. What is the target condition? (The challenge)
2. What is the actual condition now?
3. What obstacles are now preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now?
4. What is your next step? (Start of next PDCA cycle)
5. When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?
Figure 6-21. The five questions
The Five Questions
The five questions in Figure 6-21 are a summary of Toyota’s approach for moving toward a target condition, and are perhaps the most useful information in this book, now that you know what they mean. They are highly effective in practice.
The five questions come into play once you are “on the staircase,” that is, in the PDCA phase of the improvement kata, after a target condition has been established. The questions build upon one another. The better you’ve defined the target condition, the better you’ll be able to assess the current condition. The better you assess the current condition, the better you can recognize obstacles. The better you recognize obstacles, the better you can define your next step. Note that before a target condition has been established, the order of questions 1 and 2 is reversed from what is shown here.
This sequence of five questions is a device to give you a routine and mental pattern for approaching any process or situation, and to help you learn the improvement kata. The questions distill part of the improvement kata down to a point where it becomes accessible and usable by anyone. They are a “minikata,” if you will, perfect for practicing. I keep the five questions in mind any time I visit a process, and apply them to many other activities as well. I highly recommend that you use and internalize them.
What Toyota Emphasizes in Problem Solving
Despite what the words “problem solving” might lead us to think, the primary focus in problem solving at Toyota is not solutions, but understanding the current situation in a work system so deeply, firsthand, that the right solution (called a countermeasure) becomes obvious and practically falls in your lap. Most of the effort of problem solving at Toyota is placed in grasping the situation—deeply understanding the conditions that led to the problem—as opposed to hunting for solutions.
We often mistakenly think that good problem solving means solving the problem, that is, applying countermeasures, and we may even propose and apply several countermeasures in the hope that one of them will stop the problem. In contrast, in Toyota’s way of thinking if the solution to a problem is not yet obvious, it means we have not yet understood the situation sufficiently. Time to go and see again (Figure 6-22).
An example: A factory that makes precision-cast turbine blades for aircraft engines was experiencing a quality problem. One of the last processes in the turbine-blade value stream is a spray-coating line, much like a paint line, and some blades were coming out of the coating process with dents from banging against one another. Due to the damage, these expensive parts would have to be scrapped. Engineers quickly put forth a number of potential countermeasures, such as hanging the blades farther apart on the coating line chain conveyor, putting a protective shield between each blade, and so on.
Figure 6-22. What does “problem solving” mean?
One engineer took a different approach and simply observed the coating process in action. After about three hours of watching he noticed something at a point in the process where the chain conveyor makes a 90-degree turn. As the turbine blades went around this corner, some of them would rotate counterclockwise a little and slightly unscrew the hook upon which they were hanging. When the hook became unscrewed far enough, it allowed the blade to swing and on occasion contact the neighboring blade. Once the engineer understood the problem, then the right countermeasure became obvious: prevent the hooks from unscrewing.
Few of us actually take the time to keep observing a process until the cause of a problem becomes clear. We tend instead to reward firefighters and expediters who temporarily fix a problem. We will explore Toyota’s thinking about problem solving in more detail in a case example in Chapter 8.
It Keeps Going
Once you begin working with the improvement kata at a process, there is no end (Figure 6-23). If the target condition is achieved with some consistency day in and day out, it may be time to develop the next target condition for this process. Without a target condition (challenge) to strive for, a process will tend to slip back.
Figure 6-23. Reaching one target condition sets the stage for the next target condition
This is the time to make an overall reflection, to summarize what was learned in this complete improvement kata cycle in preparation for the next. While you are working to achieve the current target condition, you will usually begin to see elements of what should be the next target condition. If not, then you’re probably not struggling enough with process details.
You may not arrive at a target condition 100 percent. For example, it is unlikely that a production process can ever be 100 percent stable. At production processes you may reach a state where you are just reacting to deviations and abnormalities, rather than still striving to reach a challenging target condition. A question I sometimes ask myself is: “Are we still working under a challenge here?” If not, then it may be time to define the next target condition.
Occasionally you will not achieve a target condition on time, but this is sometimes acceptable. Why? Because we learn the most from failures.
For a few years I chaired a manufacturing conference in Munich, and one year several speakers, in presenting improvements they had made, ended their presentations with a photograph of the award—a trophy or plaque—they had won. After this happened a few times in a row, I felt compelled to point out that sure, Toyota too would show its awards, but this would not be the last slide in its presentation. Toyota’s last slide would describe the next challenge. It is okay to celebrate successes, but we should always be looking ahead and focusing on a target condition and the next step. If we decide to use awards, then they should not be seen as an end, but rather as a beginning, a doorway to more learning.
The benchmark to beat is yourself and your current condition.
Summary of Part III
Part III explains Toyota’s improvement kata, the fundamental approach for continuously improving and evolving throughout the organization. The improvement kata cannot be described in a few sentences, but now that it has been explained in Part III, it can be summarized with the simple diagram in Figure P3-3.
The improvement kata operates within an overall sense of long-term direction, which may represent an ideal state that might not ultimately be achievable. It is a direction giver. From day to day, however, the improvement kata often operates within the scope of a nearer and more specific target or need.
Figure P3-3. The improvement kata
With the direction in mind, the improvement kata itself is then often applied at the process level. It begins with developing an understanding of the current condition at the process, which typically requires firsthand observation and analysis of the situation.
With a good grasp of the current condition established, and the overall direction or target in mind, the next target condition for the process is described. In other words: “How do we want this pr
ocess to be operating?”
Once the target condition is defined, a series of PDCA cycles toward that condition begins. These cycles uncover unforeseen obstacles, which are what need to be worked on in order to achieve the target condition. It is in particular here that learning and adaptation take place, based on feedback from the PDCA cycles.
These three stages of the improvement kata build upon one another. The better your analysis of the current situation, the more precise your definition of the target condition will be. The more precisely you define the target condition, the better and more quickly you can recognize obstacles to it.
Once the target condition is achieved, these stages of the improvement kata are repeated, of course, since the long-term vision has not yet been reached. Before that is done, however, an overall summary reflection on what has been learned in the last pass through the improvement kata takes place.
Note that the horizontal axis in the diagram is not to scale. Adequately grasping the current condition, for example, may take a long time. In reality the stages of the improvement kata also overlap. As you try to establish the target condition, you will often find you need more information on the current condition. As you PDCA toward the target condition, you may gain insights that allow you to add detail to the target condition.
The improvement kata is presented here via examples primarily from manufacturing, which is where the research took place, but the same routine can find application in many situations. By learning about Toyota’s improvement kata, we are no longer copying Toyota’s solutions. Now we are learning the procedure, repeatedly applied, by which Toyota develops its solutions, and how those impressive Toyota statistics mentioned at the start of Chapter 1 are achieved.
Adaptive Persistence
By embedding the improvement kata into daily work, Toyota has done something elegant: it has developed a practical and universal method for evolving along unforeseeable routes toward only generally defined long-term visions. This could be called “Adaptive Persistence,” a fitting phrase coined by Richard T. Pascale in his famous 1984 California Management Review article.
To paraphrase Mr. Pascale, Toyota’s continued success is not due to perfect up front decisions and plans (that is, perfect aim). Many priorities become clear only as you strive to move toward something, rather than through advance planning. Thousands of PDCA cycles toward target conditions contribute incrementally and cumulatively to Toyota’s cost, quality, and market position. Toyota finds the path along the way based on what is being learned along the way. In hindsight, then, what seems to be strategy emerges.
Toyota does not really have any solutions to offer us, but rather a means for us to sense situations and develop appropriate, smart responses. Toyota’s executives, managers, and leaders are operating on the basis that organization survival arises from adaptation to unfolding events, on the way to a desired condition. They do not think of good versus bad situations, but of problems as something to be expected and as opportunities to more deeply understand and further develop our work processes. Toyota’s strategy for moving toward a vision is target conditions + PDCA; which is to say, the improvement kata. Furthermore, Toyota’s executives, managers, and leaders see as perhaps their main task teaching people the improvement kata in a learn-by-doing mode, which will be the subject of Part IV.
A Way of Thinking and Acting
It is important to realize that the improvement kata is about behavior routines (Figure P3-4). It is a routine of thinking and acting that harnesses our human capability to improve and to solve problems. When we view and interpret what Toyota is doing in this light, it becomes easier to grasp, and we can go further in our own efforts to compete on a similar basis.
Figure P3-4. The improvement kata is about behavior routines
I did not know these things in my early days of trying to benchmark Toyota, and in hindsight it showed in my efforts to communicate with Toyota people. For example, in the early 1990s, I was involved in a lot of setup-time reduction projects at stamping processes in Detroit. During a trip I made to Japan at that time Toyota people would ask me, “How are those setup-time improvement projects going?” I would of course proceed to tell them about the most successful projects, where teams were able to reduce setup time by 70 percent or more. Yet our Toyota hosts never seemed impressed with what I was saying. They would sort of shrug and soon change the subject. I assumed I was not improving enough for their standards and that I needed to generate even greater setup time reductions.
Today I can understand better what was happening in those conversations: that we were operating with two different mental models. I was not presenting my setup-time improvement efforts in a format that the Toyota people could relate to or understand (as depicted in Figure P3-5). While I was explaining outcomes—how much improvement we had achieved—what they wanted to hear was something like, “The original condition was x. We set a target condition of y. We achieved z, and learned the following in the process.” The degree of improvement was actually not that important to them. What they were interested in was what we were striving to achieve, why, how we were approaching it, what we were learning, and how we were teaching people.
Figure P3-5. The improvement kata is a mental model
Sometimes I wish I could go back and redo some of the conversations that I had on those Japan trips. But then maybe they served their purpose, since we learn from problems.
What Kind of Discipline Is Needed?
Sometimes managers and senior leaders remark that “we just need more discipline.” The thinking seems to be that if people in the organization would adhere more closely to their work standards and do what they were supposed to do, there would be fewer problems.
Unfortunately it does not work this way. Keep in mind the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy, which states that even if we follow the work standard, a work process will tend to slip toward chaos if we leave it alone. No matter what, there will be problems that the operators, if left alone, will have to work around. The process will decay.
Discipline is needed, certainly, but not in the way we have perhaps been thinking. The kind of regimen we need is for everyone—and especially executives, managers, and leaders—to follow and stick to an improvement kata; to a thinking and behavior routine for how we go about improving and adapting. At this point it should become clear to you that (1) Toyota’s success is about behavior routines; (2) if you want to emulate Toyota, then changing people’s behavior patterns is the task; and (3) this is a different undertaking than trying to implement tools, techniques, or introduce a series of principles.
For many of us, the improvement kata is different than our current way of thinking, and it takes practice to change that way of thinking. But once you do get it, the improvement kata in itself is not that complicated. This makes sense too. Since Toyota wants to have everyone in the organization involved in continuous improvement and adaptation, they would not utilize a method that is only accessible to specialists.
The pattern of the improvement kata also simplifies a manager’s or leader’s job. Once leaders have learned the behavior pattern, they can be clear about what they need to do in any situation—how to proceed— to manage people. A leader using the improvement kata also does not need to know the solution to a problem, and in fact it is detrimental for the development of people in the organization to be given solutions by their leaders. What the leader needs to know is how people should go about understanding a situation and developing solutions. The leader should have firsthand experience with the improvement kata pattern, and know how to guide people through it so they learn it.
Learning about the improvement kata has given me a more effective way of engaging and leading groups of people, and I am more relaxed in the face of uncertainty because I know how to proceed. Take the case of the stereo speaker factory mentioned in Chapter 5, where getting the time it takes to hammer in brass inserts to be the same whether there are eight or as many as 18 inserts was part of the ta
rget condition. An initial response and push-back you may often get in response to a challenge like this is a somewhat provocative, “Well, please tell us how you think that is supposed to be possible!”
In the past I would try to answer that question by describing possible solutions. Not only would I fail at that, I would also be failing to tap and develop the capability of others. Today I answer such questions easily by saying: “I don’t know, and that is how it is supposed to be. If we already knew the answer, it would just be an implementation question, and anyone—including any of our competitors—could do that. I don’t know the solution to the problem, but I know how we can go about developing a solution.”
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly and I did. I said I didn’t know.
—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
Toyota’s improvement kata involves teaching people a standardized, conscious “means” for sensing the gist of situations and responding scientifically. This is a different way for humans to have a sense of security, comfort, and confidence. Instead of obtaining that from an unrealistic sense of certainty about conditions, they get it from the means by which they deal with uncertainty. This channels and taps our capabilities as humans much better than our current management approach, explains a good deal of Toyota’s success, and gives us a model for managing almost any human enterprise.
… it is my impression that, after many contacts with Toyota employees, they view new situations in daily life—whether new problems, solutions elsewhere, partial solutions to the present problems, or chance events—as potential opportunities to improve competitiveness more often than those in other firms.
