Tag Archives: whole-systems

Quality of Work Life and the Toyota System

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WebImage1Books on lean management and the Toyota Production System are too often presented as if this system has been a virtual heaven of production efficiency and worker satisfaction. In the author’s enthusiasm, questions about stress and work life are rarely raised or they are glossed over. In Japan there have been serious issues raised about the quality of work life at Toyota plants and Toyota has openly addressed this issue itself, along with its union, and conducted its own whole-system redesign to improve the attractiveness and reduce the stresses of working within their system.

For the past month I have been sitting here, very focused, on completing another book (yes, one more!) on transformational change management, or whole-system architecture. Lean is a description of a desired state. Within lean is an incremental change process – continuous improvement. But, it is not a process of significant or transformational change. It is the “Where are we going?’ but not, the “How do we get there?” Many companies fail in their adoption of lean because they do not address the “whole-system” and misaligned structure, information systems, HR policies and other cultural drivers inhibit the transformation to lean. Whole-system architecture is a way of addressing the needed transformational change.

The good thing about book writing (you should try it!) is that it forces you to think, to research, and to organize your thoughts. While doing my research I came across what I think is a very interesting article on how Toyota addressed significant quality of work life issues. For those of you who are serious students of lean you may wish to go to the source and read the entire article.

Quality of Work Life and the Toyota System

In the 1990′s Toyota faced its own labor crisis with a 25% rate of turnover among new recruits to the workforce, an aging labor force, and a general aversion among young Japanese to working in factories. This raised serious questions within Toyota about their own system and how it impacted the quality of work life. The following paragraphs are quotes from an important study of what Toyota did in response to this crisis, a study that has been overlooked by most proponents of lean manufacturing.

“Facing up to the labour shortage and to the exhaustion of the whole work force, the management and the union at Toyota began to question the production system and the method of managing work. They concluded that a radical resolution of the crisis of work could only be found in a reorganization of the production system to make work more attractive, for they were in agreement that the cause of the labour shortage was the nature of assembly line work and the Toyotaist method of managing work.”

“The management of efficiency lay in the reduction of the number of workers, which was accomplished by Kaizen activities on production tasks and procedures. This in turn was based upon the ideas of ‘just-in-time’ and ‘autonomization’ (labour saving) which had been sustained and developed by T. Ohno. But the underlying cause of the crisis of work that Toyota was experiencing was precisely this system for managing productive efficiency. Therefore the idea of ‘just-in-time’ was questioned. ‘Just-in-time should not be applied to people’, according to a section leader at the Motomachi factory. ‘If the number of production workers is increased, productive efficiency will be lowered. But we should not think solely about productive efficiency’, according to the personnel management department. The implication is that the reduction in the number of production workers should not be pushed too far. In other words, ‘lean production’ should not be applied to production workers. Otherwise, work will continue to be detested by the younger generation and will continue to tire production workers and supervisors. Hence the committee proposed to modify the management of costs.”

“This questioning of the production system has finished by modifying the idea of ‘just-in-time’ and the management of productive efficiency: ‘just-in-time should not be applied to people’, and ‘we should not think solely about productive efficiency’. Hence a humanization of the production system and of work was launched. By investing massively to improve working conditions, by developing a new conception of the production line, by allowing segments of the line to keep buffer stocks, by making social relations of work more equitable and rational, Toyota has changed the rules of the game. For Toyota, ‘lean production’ appears to be the model of the past, because it placed too much pressure on people. The new strategy at Toyota is to give a more humane dimension to its production system but without hindering productivity; even if progress remains slow, and is held back by the old Toyotaism.”

“In terms of team work, four production workers form a work team which is responsible for a segment composed of a series of connected tasks (three or four tasks). The work team takes responsibility for the quality of its tasks, whereas on traditional lines, each person is responsible individually.” [1]

The Imperative to Redesign… Periodically

Thomas Jefferson is reported to have said that “Revolutions in human affairs, like storms in the natural environment are, from time to time, a necessary and desirable thing.” He is also reported to have suggested every twenty years. The point is that every now and then we need to rethink our system of organization – the social, technical and economic system – or the “whole-system architecture” in order to assure that we are adapting to change in the internal and external environment. This is exactly what Toyota has done.

The lesson of Toyota’s experience at its own plants is that the lean system of production is not simply a technical, mechanical, system in which the only goal is to improve production efficiency by eliminating waste; although, that will always be one of the goals. It is also necessary to design a system that takes into account the human factor, the social system that enriches the work and the quality of work life.

The other lesson from the above study is that the Toyota Production System, or lean, is an “open-system” able, no required, to adapt to the environment in which it lives. Like every organic system, it either adapts or dies.

[1] “Humanization of the production system and work at Toyota Motor Co and Toyota Motor Kyushu.” By Koichi Shimizu, In Enriching Production: Perspectives on Volvo’s Uddevalla Plant as an Alternative to lean production. Sandberg, Ake, Editor, Digital Edition, Stockholm. 2007. P. 398.

 

Is Lean a Change Methodology or an End State?

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Is lean where we are going or how we are getting there?

Let me suggest that lean, like the term implies for the human body, is the absence of waste (fat), continuous flow of materials without interruption, and total engagement of people, resulting in high customer satisfaction. Without getting into a debate as to whether that is complete definition or not, (see previous posts) lets accept it just for the sake of the real point I want to make in this post.

But just as a lean body is a condition or state we would all like to achieve, it in no way describes a methodology for achieving that state. To achieve a lean body you could have liposuction, exercise every day, become a vegetarian, or just have good genes. I am sure we would not confuse the end state with the method of change or achieving that end state.

Change management methods are something completely separate from lean. The absence of sound change methodology is a major weakness in many lean implementations. Now, let me suggest that there is micro-change and macro-change; or, continuous improvement and what I like to call whole-system architecture. Both may be right at different times.

I spoke at a Toyota suppliers conference some years ago and the president of a supplier company got up and described the process of Toyota’s consulting group coming into his plant and completely redesigning everything. They sent all the workers home and told the president he had to stand by and not interfere. They ripped all the equipment out of the floor, moved everything around, completely reworked the flow, redesigned the jobs of both workers and managers, and then instructed them when they returned to the plant. This young president described it as a rather traumatic experience.

I sat with the Toyota consultants at lunch and asked them why they didn’t ask the workers to participate in designing the future state. Their answer was simple and direct. “We know and they do not know. Why would we ask them?” Not exactly the model of participation.

This was obviously not continuous improvement, but this was an implementation of  Toyota Production System. It was revolution not evolution. It was not gradual experimentation by those on-the-spot, it was a whole-system change.

For many years before anyone heard of the term lean, I was a practitioner of socio-technical system design, or what we called Whole-System Architecture. Simple idea: in every organization there is a technical system – the work flow, equipment, job definitions, etc.; and there is a social system – who knows, who cares, who decides, who is informed, how are people organized into teams, what is the job of managers, etc.? The theory is simple – change is optimized by designing both the social and the technical system together and creating alignment. This theory comes fromm Eric Trist and Fred Emery at the Tavistock Institute and its early proponents in the U.S. were Bill Walton at Harvard, William Passmore, Lou Davis at UCLA and others. All the early self-directed team plants were created through socio-technical system design. These included Gaines Topeka and all the Proctor and Gamble plants. Ironically, it was Norman Bodek, who brought Shingo and others to the U.S. and translated their work, who introduced me to socio-tech.

I just completed a whole-system redesign of a home health care delivery organization in Canada. They had previously created a central planning/scheduling center (think central hotel reservations) where they both standardized and centralized the scheduling process.  The nurses and managers out in the districts around the country had no control of the scheduling process because of this centralization. We formed a design team and in ten weeks redesigned the entire work flow from the time a customer calls needing a service provider to the time they get paid. Long story short: the time required to schedule a nurse declined from an average of five hours to an average of five minutes. A pre-survey of customers had indicated that 84% were either “very dissatisfied” or “somewhat dissatisfied” with the level of service. Two months after implementation ZERO
customers reported being either somewhat or very dissatisfied. Before the implementation nurse managers reported that they spent 80% of their time fighting fires, rework, etc. Now that has been eliminated. Now, every nurse is a member of a “primary care team” and the person doing the scheduling is part of their team. Now, the nurses do their own “load leveling” by adjusting their schedules to help each other, eliminate missed visits, etc.

This could not have been achieved through continuous improvement. It required a complete redefinition of the flow of the work, where people were located, the definition of jobs, the decision processes, etc., etc. It was a whole-system change and it eliminated a huge amount of waste. Now, they can and need to engage in continuous improvement. Now every team feels empowered to conduct experiments and find small improvements. They could not have done that in the old system.

Whole-System Architecture or socio-technical systems design is a high participation process of redesigning the system of the organization. It is not “lean.” It is a change methodology for achieving a lean end state. Just talking about lean or just implementing small improvement teams will never achieve the dramatic changes needed in many organizational systems. You must have a methodology for redesigning the whole-system.

The following, in very simple terms, describes the process of Whole-System Architecture. See the linked article in the Papers section for a more complete description of the process.

So, whether we call them Macro Kaizen events and micro Kaizen events, or continuous improvement and whole-system change, revolution vs. evolution, I don’t care. But, we should recognize the time and place for each. When people are not receiving the data, when they are not formed into teams, when their work is controlled by standard operating procedures defined by some distant person, and when the manager thinks it is his job to make all the decisions, continuous improvement is virtually impossible.



Five Leadership Lessons from Tahrir Square

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It is impossible to watch the dramatic events in Egypt without meditating on the lessons for leaders, whether of countries or companies. I would like to share five leadership lessons that stand out and should not be ignored by leaders.

1. The Greater the Control, The Greater the Tendency to Instability

It is a paradox. Mubarak maintained every form of control he could imagine over his opposition and his people. But the corollary to this absolute control is that this creates a closed system, one that failed to process feedback from its environment and this led to the ultimate instability.

This is a “whole-system” problem.  In my previous blog post I present a whole-system model that includes the internal environment, the extended environment and the external environment. Improvement comes from the feedback loops and the process of adaptation from these environments. Mubarak’s internal environment was comprised of his inner circle of trusted associates. His extended environment was the Interior Ministry and Army. The external environment was the mass of Egyptian people.

Companies expect to control, and therefore process feedback, within the internal environment. They see that as their job. In lean manufacturing, the walls between the internal and extended environment (suppliers, partners)  become extremely porous, almost non-existent.

Some time ago I was at the Honda Marysville plant and we then went to visit the Stanley plant that supplies headlight and taillight assemblies to Honda. Deliveries were made every two hours. There were “two hour piles” or inventory. Honda engineers were in the Stanley plant every day! The feedback from one to another was measured in minutes. Although a different legal entity, they acted as one organism. The more rapid the inventory turnover cycle, the more rapid must be the feedback loop, or the more “open” must be the system.

What often sinks companies (and countries!) is the failure to create “porous” walls, high rates of feedback and response to the external environment. The leaders are not reading Facebook!

There is a social law: The more successful, secure or dominant the organism (person, company or country) the higher the wall grows between it and it’s environment. The more dominant a leader like Mubarak, the less he felt a need to listen, respond, or respect those outside of his dominant circle. He wasn’t reading Facebook and didn’t take seriously the calls for reform. It is the illness of arrogance. Arrogance is the greatest enemy of learning and quality. The more arrogant, the less responsive to the external environment. History has proven this over and over again with the downfall of once great companies and countries.

2. Don’t Underestimate the Power Of Self-Organization

Those in power tend to believe that their followers will be lost without their guidance and control. Tahrir Square over the past weeks has been an incredible demonstration of the power of “self-organization.” The protesters entered Tahrir Square with no apparent leader, no organization, and no assigned responsibilities. But, given a common purpose, they organized themselves. They formed organization and took responsibility for checking those who entered the square to assure they weren’t carrying weapons. They organized sanitation. They organized medical services. They organized security and protection within the square. The developed a complex and highly effective system of communication. They were highly self-organized and this organization, done with dignity and restraint, set an example that could not be ignored. They did not elect formal leaders and no one sought to assume the role of leader. They acted with incredible maturity. And, most important, their organization was focused on clear goals and achieved those goals.

The power of self-organization is present in every organization. It is too often dismissed as a chaotic disruption to the formal lines of authority. Those who are “on-the-spot,” whether in a factory, a school, or on the streets, when empowered to solve problems most often have the capacity to self-organize. Social media, or networked intelligence, is an enabler of self-organization. Within companies we need to encourage the power of self-organization rather than fear its disruption.

3. The Worst Speech in the History of the World!

As a student and practitioner of public speaking I have attempted to learn from effective political speeches. No leader should underestimate the potential influence of an effective public presentation. There is much to be learned from Mubarak’s disastrous speech to the nation the night before his final resignation.

The demonstrators had been joyously celebrating what they believed would be his final resignation. They were horribly disappointed. Not only did he not resign, but his speech talked down to his “children” in the most condescending tone. He appeared not to understand that it was families, doctors, lawyers, workers, as well as students who had taken to Tahrir Square to protest his rule. They were tired of being treated and spoken to as if they were his children.

Mubarak’s speech was about his own dignity, his own self-importance. His speech displayed no recognition or empathy for the concerns of his followers. This is when followers cease to follow. Leaders lead by creating a sense of shared purpose, shared values and common vision that can inspire their followers. Leader’s never motivate followers by talking down to them, by expressing their own self-importance. Leaders lead by expressing empathy and creating bonds of unity with their followers. To the degree that you fail at this task, you fail as a leader.

4. Tipping Points Emerge at the Speed of the Internet

The current revolutions in the Middle East are perfect examples of tipping points. Sentiments and habits change at first as small minority views, dismissed and rejected. They slowly gain adherents. And suddenly, they have sufficient momentum to tip over the old order and create a new one.

The Egyptian revolution was in the making for thirty years. But, the power of Facebook, as Google executive Wael Ghonim has explained, enabled fifty to a hundred thousand Egyptians to collaborate instantaneously and form a consensus to action. The power of the Internet has never been demonstrated more clearly.

Every organization survives by its ability to adapt to change in the external environment. The ability to hear, to sense, to respond and adapt to changes taking place, only to be seen on the Internet, will determine your ability to survive the next tipping point in your marketplace.

5. In Purpose there is Unity; In Unity there is Power

For me, the most moving picture of all pictures coming from Tahrir Square was the picture of the mass of Muslims bowed down in daily prayer. But, it wasn’t those in prayer that moved me. Surrounding those bowed in prayer was a circle of men holding arms and facing outward, protecting the worshipers from attack. Who were these defenders? They were Christians! What more can one say?

Never underestimate the power of purpose to unite people in a common pursuit. No single group could have succeeded in this revolution. It was the power to unite diverse people in common purpose that tore down the walls of dictatorial authority. That power is latent in every organization if leaders would only call upon it.