Five “Why?” Not Five “Who?”

I  recently spoke to an executive from a Canadian manufacturing company that supplies Toyota and has several years of experience implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS). He said his biggest disappointment was that their corporate culture still doesn’t support surfacing problems. People are afraid they will be blamed, so they hide problems.

This seems to be a generic problem across manufacturing and service. When I interviewed Fujio Cho, the first head of human resources for Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky plant, who is Japanese, he said that what most startled him when he first came to the United States was that Americans didn’t like to say they had a problem. The very word “problem” suggested blame. Cho said his biggest problem was getting Americans to pull the andon chord. I asked what he did and he said he had to go to the shop floor every day (as president) and encourage them to please pull the chord even if it stopped the line. Eventually the employees felt comfortable about pulling it.

It’s a generic problem. I believe it has to do with fear and a feeling that exposing a problem suggests we aren’t competent. The challenge is to convince people that there are always problems and a problem is an opportunity to improve the system, not point fingers at individuals. But this takes years of very consistent behavior. Start pointing the finger and it is over. It also helps to have clear agreements on what should be happening and then highlighting deviations from the plan objectively.

The point of visual management is to clearly highlight problems, as is the kanban system, and the metric boards. In all cases, we should judge the quality of the lean system by asking: Is the standard clearly defined and visible? When there is a deviation from the standard is it immediately clear and visible—ideally at the moment it occurs? Do we check every day for deviations, prioritize them, and work at solving them? When someone highlights a problem, do we immediately go to work to understand the root cause and take corrective action?

In my experience, the answer to these questions is usually, no. In some types of service work, it’s more challenging to see the problems. Then we are left to focus on schedules, cost, and general performance relative to targets on key performance indicators. The obeya (big room management) used for product development at Toyota has become a powerful tool in service organizations to track progress vs. target by function. People need to be responsible and accountable for performance—and that is different from blame. Being accountable means they highlight problems, take responsibility for ensuring that the problems are solved, and show a sincere desire to improve, including themselves, when they understand what happened.

About The Author