Womack’s ‘Beyond Toyota’ is wrong challenge…’beyond lean’ is…
Posted by steven_spear | Under Innovation, high velocity organizations, leadership and innovation, organizational learning, process excellence, toyota Friday Jan 8, 2010In a recent e-mail, Jim Womack urges the lean manufacturing community to get beyond Toyota, implying that what can be learned from Toyota has been, in particular tools of shop floor production control.
That is the wrong challenge, in my view. The real challenge is to expand beyond understanding lean as a set of tools, and more aggressively pursuing an understanding of the comprehensive approach to managing organizations so they are capable of self-diagnosis, learning, and relentless internally generated improvement and innovation.
After all, Toyota didn’t displace GM, Ford, and the rest because it out value streamed them. It displaced its rivals because it out discovered them.
The MIT International Motor Vehicle Program, of which Jim was head, identified enormous disparities in performance among auto makers. The first pass revealed very different approaches to process design and problem solving as recorded in The Machine That Changed the World, circa 1990. While one could squabble on the details and nuances, the overall tone was right one: Toyota had figured out how to manage an organization so it was constantly adapting and improving in a relentless pursuit of perfection. Process stabilization and the associated ‘removal of waste’ was a first step in gaining stability. That stability then was the launching pad for discovery and improvement.
At that point of (incomplete) discovery, the community should have pushed forward to understand better how improvement and innovation–learning–could be fostered, sustained, accelerated, and applied.
Had it, they would have discovered something like the ‘four capabilities’ –system design, problem solving, knowledge sharing, and leadership that are described in Chasing the Rabbit (to be redubbed and relaunched as The High Velocity Edge in May, to capture more clearly the relentlessness of innovation).
Instead, a ‘movement’ got started around the tools of lean manufacturing. In fact the second book, Lean Thinking, is organized by tool.
Here’s the problem. The tools, as discussed in lean are only _a partial_ application of capability 1: approaches for converting chaotic processes into structured ones. Missing, even at that point is that compliment in capability 1–designing processes so they are ’self diagnostic,’ able to call out problems when and where they occur.
The tools don’t get into the other capabilities.
To be quite succinct, the issue is not ‘getting beyond Toyota.’ The issue is getting beyond ‘lean’ and converging on the full management system Toyota invented, used with such success, as have others–an approach to creating organizations capable of self diagnosis, learning, adaptation, improvement and innovation.
Lean, alone, does not make that possible.
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I’m not sure if that’s beyond lean. That’s because aspects such as those are what many of us consider to be “lean.” We’ve been focused on learning as a core aspect of a lean for so long that it’s a central principle in our description of a lean organization and a lean leader.
I don’t think we need to call it something new, but to evolve the definition. Very few people were beyond the tools back in ‘89. The Machine That Changed the World was a starting point, but certainly didn’t get it right. Lean Thinking wasn’t really about thinking at all, as you suggest, it was just about the tools.
Part of the problem is that there isn’t really a “lean community” in the sense that there is a shared understanding of lean and what it means to move forward. There are many opinions. Many are valid. Unfortunately, some are not. Most vary a bit. And there is no authority.
There are still people out there that think that lean is 90 percent about 5S, which I personally find hard to believe but the evidence is there. And then there are many of us who look at lean as a way of thinking, a way of leaders engaging, a way of solving problems, a way of designing work and systems.
The community must evolve, but I doubt it will ever really converge.
Th way I read Jim’s email (disclaimer, I do work for him at LEI) was that we need to move beyond simple “Toyota worship” (my words) and the lean community (whatever that means) needs to quit just copying Toyota and become experimenters and innovators, reporting to each other what THEY are doing instead of just all reading the latest book saying what Toyota does.
It seems like you’d be on board with that approach, right?
“The Relentlessness of Innovation” might have been a good title. “High Velocity” runs the risk being misinterpreted the way the word “lean” does? Just asking…
Commenting on Steven’s post, not Jim’s e-mail, I would firmly say that the aim should be to “surpass Toyota” and not “surpass lean”.
At Toyota they say “beat Toyota” not “beat world class manufacturing” or “beat benchmark operational excellence”. Their target is to be better than the best - themselves. That would require Toyota to look holistically at themselves - not just the so-called lean aspects but all other areas that make them great or bad. That is the same exercise every company needs to go through - benchmark the best, copy and adapt what is good and learn from their mistakes.
There are many practices at Toyota that we will not be able to effectively copy because the historical, social or macroeconomic factors are not there for us today like they were for Toyota 1950 - 2000. That doesn’t mean the underlying philosophy shouldn’t be copied and adapted. We should also learn from benchmark companies in other industries, as long as the philosophies do not conflict.
There is no agreed definition of lean. The 5 step approach and the definition that has been burned into everyone’s mind thanks to LEI is woefully inadequate.
The argument of whether we need to refresh the definition of lean is valid but this is not a question of going beyond lean to lean plus, but to rename and expand its boundaries and to pry it away from the dogma of a few. Shared purpose and principles are what we need.
The naming was unfortunate, limits people’s perception of what it is, and turns people off to what is actually a great thing. Lean is a catch name and it’s here to stay for a while.
Thanks for posting. Jon, I agree with you wholeheartedly the emphasis should be on competition.
When I first met Toyota people, I was struck by their paranoia that GM was but a slumbering giant, capable of rising up and swatting them. That was in ‘95.
In ‘00, GM was really fading as a credible threat, but within Toyota there was boundless concerns about the ‘Koreans’ and the competitive threat they posed (see Alex Taylor cover in Fortune this week).
In ‘05, it was that there were hundreds of Chinese car companies making it impossible to even see where the threat was coming from!
What I was reacting to was the assertion that somehow Toyota had been sucked dry of learning opportunities. To the contrary, there is an enormous amount to be learned about creating an organization capable of incredible rates of broad based, internally generated innovation and invention.
Even to the extent Toyota stumbles, there is much to learn about spread and sustaining momentum.
Cheers,
Steve
Toyota’s philosophies stem from their culture and tradition, which we may not import! I agree that we spent so long learning from Toyota and less time in comprehending the tenets so that they produce comparable results to their originating culture.
TPS has been published in the ”Toyota Way” can we do the same here? Or we should create an xPS that is relevant to organization ‘x’?
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Steve,
I think you are right on the money. One example of the folly of treating Toyota as tools: there is a new book out describing workers’ antipathy to ‘lean’ in car manufacturing; it describes lean as merely the latest management device to control and exploit workers. It’s title: We sell our time no more’ Stewart et al. Another: lean as tools has been employed by our tax office. Over the three years of tool-head mania the result is they collect less tax (some 25bn of tax owed not collected) and the failure demand from people with problems appears in downstream organisations costing the UK taxpayer some £300K per year in further public services.
Ohno taught by having people study their systems, a light-year away from the tools movement. When the tax office debacle was exposed on a radio program and the union were complaining about standardised work (entirely wrong in service design), Dan Jones (Jim’s man in the UK) said ‘they’ll get used to it’. I hope they never do.
error: £300K should be £300M!
sorry!
I love it! You’d think that we learned what Deming was trying to tell us was a way of thinking, not TQM. We have made the same mistake twice now in the US. Bye-bye GM and Chrysler (or at least shells of their former selves). We are perpetuating the same thinking problem. What new thinking has evolved in lean? The only new thinking seems to be coming from the UK from the man commenting above me. But woe to those that challenge the tool kingdom in the US. In Graban’s words . . . agggghhhh!
“Lean as tools” is all the fault of the person or organization doing it that way, not “Lean” itself.
Tripp - what are you quoting me on? Care to disclose your financial relationship with the man from the UK?
Oh, sure. We have a partnership, but I receive no funds from Vanguard or John Seddon. Sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t require more than “I like what you are saying and I believe this thinking would be good for America.”
I know we have been through this many times, but someone promoted lean in the US. As Steven smartly points out above, Lean Thinking is laid out in tools, LEI promotes tools in workshops. Just going to the source of the confusion.
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I think it is quite clear to an increasingly number of people, including those in LEI, that tools on their own won’t cut the mustard. In the last few years there has been an increasing emphasis on leadership and management, in order to create the right environment where the 4 capabilities described in “Chasing the Rabbit” can flourish.
Steve,
When it comes to Lean, especially Lean Thinking the tools are out of question (at first).
Lean Thinking is -for me- an attitude of how people see the world around them. Lean Thinking starts with the customer’s point of view and experience. Isn’t that what Jim Womack and Daniel Jones write in Lean Thinking?!
For me this book is still the cornerstone of Lean Thinking. Of course everybody of us has different experience. The folks around who are engineers see Lean from the engineerical perspective. They see a problem and apply the appropriate tools. What about a biologist? He will see lean from a totally different perspective and still he will have a lean attitude. And an economics, what I happen to be, will even expand the view (up to the Google Earth - like approach). Aggregation of small events into larger dynamic patterns is how he will approach the scene.
Combining these different perspectives in valuable dialogue (even at the expense to give up personal views that one thought to be the correct and only ones) will lead to what I would call Lean-2.0.
The tools the web offers us nowadays makes it possible to communicate much more open across different boundaries (such as language, time and place).
We are all in one boat, called EARTH, and we together collectively have the unique chance to make the world a better place through applying lean thinking.
Hoping these lines are not to overwhelming and off-topic (in some sense) I wish everybody a great day
Ralf