I WAS SHOCKED! I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT 5S WAS.

Something happened just yesterday at my workplace. My workplace is a multi-industry group, and I was in the sheet metal manufacturing division, on the shop floor. A colleague asked me, do you know what 5S is? I searched my entire brain archive: NOTHING.

I knew he was referring to a management methodology, but I had NEVER heard of 5S. In my skepticism, I did a Google search and boom! Lots of results on 5S.

I learnt that 5S is the foundation of the Lean methodology and was a predominantly Japanese ideology.

But after my new learning, a bigger question came to mind.

Why hadn’t I heard of 5S before now? I mean, I read on things like this periodically. I know of the lean methodology. I know of KAIZEN, DMARC, KANBAN, Agile and the many other popular methodologies/processes designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of work and production.

5S means Sort, Set, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain; it is an approach used in manufacturing industries (also other areas of life) in order to set the premise for improvement and growth. You can do more research. It is an interesting approach. But that’s not the focus of this piece.

For me, the real question was:

How did I have such a knowledge gap?

A few reasons came to mind:

1. It’s not a mainstream idea in the US and Europe. Hence the internet will less likely show me ideas on it, except I’m DIRECTLY looking for it. The internet is not as global as we may think. It is lopsided to promote US culture and content, and then may be Europe, primarily because they create far more content. 5S is of Japanese origin is more popular in Asia region.

2. The algorithms are skewed to show me what I want to see. So most often, I keep seeing a particular set of results on each search based on the kind of other searches I do. This is not a figment of my imagination. Our results on Google searches are not generic. They are customized to reflect your previous behaviours. Scholars get a different result when searching, from regular users.

3. My eyes may have seen it, but my mind never saw it. Yes, it is not all what our eye sees that we have actually seen. Actual seeing is from the mind.

I learnt a few lessons:

1. I’ll always have gaps.

2. I’ll need to be more critical to research things across different continents to be truly global.

3. I can be in an industry and still not be aware of some of the most obvious things, not because I’m lazy or unexposed, but by chance, I keep missing out that information. The odds are low, but not impossible.

Embrace growth.

#Productivity #Growth