Push versus Pull and Discovery Based Management…
Posted by steven_spear | Under Innovation, high velocity organizations, organizational learning, process excellence, toyota Monday Feb 23, 2009In an HBR blog posting, “Managing Resources In and Uncertain World,” John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davision posit that we are in a world moving from push to pull. Why? Push depends on creating schedules and forecasts that are reasonable predictions of what will actually occur. Pull systems are responsive, reacting to what has already happened. Below, my comments on the origins of pull at Toyota (a need to keep scarce resources harmoniously coordinated), its potential (to increase agile responsiveness to changing circumstances), and obstacles to its broader adaptation (a prevailing belief that managers are paid to process data and decide what to do rather than develop people who can continuously discover better what has to be done and how to do that work better).
I appreciated the distinction between push and pull systems, one appropriate when it is possible to forecast need, the other when agility and responsiveness are valued because needs–both of end customers and also of each provider in the supply chain–can not be anticipated well.
The origin of ‘pull’ at Toyota as a solution to a problem is important to understand. The problem was pieces of the whole working in disharmony, thereby idling precious resources–people, machines, and material, and wasting irretrievable time. The solution, pull, was to ensure harmonious coordination–something no schedule could achieve in the absence of perfect forecasting ability.
As I describe in Chapter 6 of “Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition,” ‘pull’ is based on simple rules.
• For the downstream supplier: You cannot provide something until asked.
• For the upstream customer: If you need something you have to go and get it.
While there is variation on the application to accommodate for production cycle times, delivery lag times, and such, the basic rules hold.
Applied perfectly, the rules demand an ‘ideal’ customer-supplier relationship with responses that are on demand, immediate, one by one, without waste, safe, secure, and defect free. Since most are far from that ideal, ‘pull,’ when practiced by Toyota and its affiliates, demands relentless improvement, innovation, and invention in pursuit of perfect agility and responsiveness.
Why hasn’t this caught on broadly? Most managers are not taught that their primary job is to accelerate discovery and the development of people who are great discovers. Stuck in the mindset that managers are ‘deciders,’ they demand more information to make more predictive decisions even as the world’s speed and unpredictability makes such an approach ever more tenuous.
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That would be because most managers do not see that they are a part of a larger system. They view their individual departments as a stand alone unit. If the company as a whole developed the corporation as a single system and reviewed the working parts of that system as if there was a single goal not individual goals it would force managers to consider His /Her impact on the entire system.
This type of structure would force the passage of data from department to department to be based on what would allow the system to be successful not the individual departments. Compensation would be based on the entire system working well not just a single department. It would force managers to collaborate to affect a single system out come. It is what you would call a systems approach to process improvement.
Tony E. Madison