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January 24, 2022
The Toyota Way can be briefly summarized through the two pillars that support it: “Continuous Improvement” and “Respect for People.” Continuous improvement, often called kaizen, defines Toyota’s basic approach to doing business. Challenge everything. More important than the actual improvements that individuals contribute, the true value of continuous improvement is in creating an atmosphere of continuous learning and an environment that not only accepts, but actually embraces change.
respect for people—hence the second pillar of the Toyota Way. Toyota demonstrates this respect by providing employment security and seeking to engage team members through active participation in improving their jobs.
I believe management has no more critical role than to motivate and engage large numbers of people to work together toward a common goal.
We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent—attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. —Margaret J. Wheatley, author of Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
the Toyota Production System is a total “living system.” The goal is to produce a continual flow of value to the customer, without interruptions known as wastes.
a philosophy and a system of interconnected processes and people who are working to continuously improve how they work and deliver value to customers.
Continuous improvement means getting better every day and is the driver for building a sustainable enterprise.
“organic organizations are living systems, evolving, adapting, and innovating to keep pace with our complex, rapidly changing world.”
Master class delegate input—characteristics of mechanistic and organic lean deployment.
The Toyota Way—the philosophy, not the book—is centered on learning by doing under the watchful eyes of a knowledgeable coach.
We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something?
Ultimately, its success derives from its ability to cultivate leadership, teams, and culture; to devise strategy; to build relationships across the value chain; and to maintain a learning organization.
“On the shop floor it is important to start with the actual phenomenon and search for the root cause in order to solve the problem. In other words, we must emphasize ‘getting the facts,’ . . .”
The normal pattern is to identify a gap in our knowledge and explain why it is important (problem definition), advance a notion about the way things might work (hypothesis), explain the study design (methods), present the findings (results), discuss the implications of the study, and suggest further research (discussion/reflection).
how do we develop people who think this way? Toyota’s answer is the coach-learner relationship and daily practice.
Toyota has developed each of its executives, managers, and supervisors as coaches over many decades, something few other organizations have done.
Acknowledging that our comprehension is always incomplete and possibly wrong. Assuming that answers will be found by test rather than just deliberation. (You make predictions and test them with experiments.) Appreciating that differences between what we predict will happen and what actually happens can be a useful source of learning and corrective adjustment.
when we respond to goals and problems by assuming we already understand the current reality and solution, by neglecting to test our assumptions, and by viewing failed predictions as personal failures that have no learning value, we are not using a scientific mindset, and we are not learning to think more scientifically in the future.
our general human tendency is to assume with great certainty that we know far more than we really do.
Our primitive brain hates uncertainty and drives us to assume we know the right answer or there is a known best way.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman provides an exhaustive and science-based explanation of the many biases that interfere with scientific thinking.9 He boils it down to “fast thinking,” which is fast, automatic, and emotional and feels really good. Jumping to conclusions based on something we thought worked in the past is fast thinking. Scientific thinking is based on “slow thinking,” which is slow, deliberate, and systematic, and generally speaking we find it arduous, boring, and even painful. He presents the “law of least mental effort,” which is how our brains prefer us to live, because
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Toyota’s philosophy is based on long-term systems thinking and a clear sense of purpose.
What is our vision and what are we trying to accomplish?
As Mr. Cho queries in the opening quote: “Why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something?”
for Toyota a major reason for creating lean, or what Krafcik called “fragile” systems, is to surface problems so people can scientifically solve the problems one by one and learn.
our evolutionary past did not reward slow and deliberate thinking, and we are still products of that evolution. We have many nasty habits such as letting our faulty impressions of past experience cloud our judgment of future possibilities and seeing the current situation through cloudy and biased lenses.
In many organizations, problem solving often amounts to putting Band-Aids on processes; typically, the problems reoccur, and the organization never gets to a higher level of performance.
Toyota developed TPS to address pressing problems—not as a way to implement known solutions.
Thus, the key to its operations was flexibility. As it confronted this challenge, Toyota made a critical discovery: when you make lead times short and focus on keeping production lines flexible, you actually achieve higher quality, better customer responsiveness, better productivity, and better utilization of equipment and space.
Consider the following counterintuitive truths about non-value-added waste within the philosophy of TPS: Often, the best thing you can do is to idle a machine and stop producing parts. You do this to avoid overproduction, which is considered the fundamental waste in TPS. Often, it is best to build up an inventory of finished goods in order to level out the production schedule, rather than produce according to the fluctuating demand of customer orders. Often, it is best to selectively add and substitute overhead for direct labor. When waste is stripped away from your value-adding workers,
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He learned to observe the value stream of the raw material moving to a finished product that the customer was willing to pay for, and he learned to identify “stagnation” where value was not flowing.
This is why TPS starts with the customer. Always ask, “What value are we adding from the customer’s perspective?” Because the only thing that adds value in any type of process—be it a manufacturing, service, or development process—is the physical or information transformation of that product, service, or activity into something the customer wants.
Rather the power behind TPS is a company’s management commitment to continuously invest in its people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.
From the executives to the shop floor workers performing the value-added work, Toyota challenges people to use their initiative and creativity to experiment and learn. Toyota is a true learning organization that has been evolving and learning for most of a century.
My version of the Toyota Way is based on four Ps: philosophy, process, people, and problem solving. In this new edition, I represent the four Ps as interconnected pieces of a puzzle with scientific thinking at the center.
Sakichi Toyoda’s personal and professional philosophy continues to influence Toyota today through what the company has distilled as his “five main principles”: 1. Always be faithful to your duties, thereby contributing to the company and to the overall good. 2. Always be studious and creative, striving to stay ahead of the times. 3. Always be practical and avoid frivolousness. 4. Always strive to build a homelike atmosphere at work that is warm and friendly. 5. Always have respect for spiritual matters and remember to be grateful at all times.
Kiichiro incorporated three principles that he developed in the loom company to become the core of TPS: just-in-time, jidoka (from his father), and standardization of processes and labor harmony.
The philosophy of Toyota to this day is to think beyond individual concerns to the long-term good of the company, as well as to take responsibility for problems.
They all learned to get their hands dirty, embraced challenges enthusiastically, learned the spirit of innovation, understood the values of the company in contributing to society, and committed to self-reliance.
Henry Ford wrote great words about flow and the elimination of waste in his book Today and Tomorrow.11 For example, in Chapter 8, entitled “Learning from Waste,” he said: Saving material because it is material, and saving material because it represents labor might seem to amount to the same thing. But the approach makes a deal of difference. We will use material more carefully if we think of it as labor. For instance, we will not so lightly waste material simply because we can reclaim it—for salvage involves labor. The ideal is to have nothing to salvage.
Within TPS, one-piece flow is the ideal to strive toward: pure value added from the start to the delivery to the customer—without interruption and without rework. The blockages to flow are all waste.
It may seem counterintuitive, but Ohno considered the fundamental waste to be overproduction, since it causes most of the other wastes.
The seven wastes are obstacles to flow and are observable, while waste of employee creativity is a broader concept of what could have been.
lean thinking focuses much of its attention on reducing the non-value-added.
You have eliminated scheduling of individual operations that tend to push lots of inventory and replaced the information flow with pull systems so each process only builds what the next process needs when it needs it (Principle 3).
As Rother and Shook point out,16 always develop a future state to strive for. Don’t stop at mapping the current state and chasing waste.
develop a vision of a system that will achieve the organization’s goals and then systematically strive to achieve that vision through kaizen. Always make the purpose clear.
its purpose is clear and unwavering: add value to customers and society for the long term,
Putting the community and customers first is also in the DNA of Toyota.
The Toyota Way 2001, as it is still called, is defined as a house with two pillars—respect for people and continuous improvement (see Figure 1.1). Respect for people extends from the team members on the shop floor to every one of Toyota’s vast network of partners, to its customers, and to the communities in which Toyota does business. Some versions of the model show respect for people as the foundation of continuous improvement, because only highly developed people who care passionately about their work and about the company will put in the effort needed for continuous improvement. Continuous
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