Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

by Chet Richards

Toyota did not say that they want to shorten the time taken to perform each activity within the system. This is worth repeating: the purpose of the TPS is to shorten overall order-to-delivery time. It does not follow that the best way to do this is to try to compress the time taken by each activity within it. That way would not work and would indeed lead to poor quality. It is more likely that they would shorten the delivery span by finding ways to eliminate activities, since an activity eliminated takes no time to perform (it also adds no defects and costs nothing.) Similarly, they don’t try to rush decisions, like what type of water pump the car will have. In fact, there is a concept within both Toyota’s development and production systems known as “learning how to wait,” based on the notion that it takes less time to do something right than to do it over. Thus they would not be interested in making decisions earlier on the factory floor. They would rather make the decision at the appropriate time, and put more thought (more OODA loop cycles) into it.