What have we learned from lean?

Thirty years ago, we learned from Jim Womack and Dan Jones’ study of worldwide automotive companies that Toyota had figured out a radically more efficient way to run a car company based on involving every employee in the systematic recognition and elimination of waste, in the groundbreaking book?The Machine That Changed The World?– that coined the word “lean.”

I was in business school then, and read the book just as it came out, which was a bit of a personal shock. My father, Freddy Ballé a French automotive senior executive, had been visiting Toyota plants since 1975 and kept going on and on how Toyota had found a way to produce superior cars with superior work systems. No one ever listens to their dad, right? But reading about in Jim and Dan’s book pricked my interest, and a few years later when doing research for my doctoral thesis, I went and studied my father’s copycat efforts at creating a Toyota-like system in Valeo plants.

For those of you who remember the 1990s, you’ll recall that the driving obsessions was productivity. Western plants were fighting for their life against the industrial opening of Eastern Europe and Asia – a fight they largely lost in the end. Everyone was looking for a better mousetrap to capture higher productivity. Our background was Taylorist process improvement on the one hand (redesign the process so that employees produce more parts per hour) and Drucker’s management by objectives on the other (do what you need to do to hit your budget target).?

It's hard to realize the glasses you’ve wearing slant your perspective. The one thing we struggled with at the time was Toyota’s emphasis on safety and quality as the path to productivity – but these were terms everyone understood. The big argument was mostly a matter of priorities.

As hard-nosed as he was in driving quality and productivity throughout the company he ran, my dad however kept going back to a different perspective that he stressed in shop floor conversations. “I hear what you’re trying to do,” he’d say. “But what is the problem you’re trying to solve? What are the hypotheses you are testing?” He never had much time for theory, and problem-based learning theory hadn’t emerged yet in any case, but I’d hear him repeat endlessly “they still don’t understand the problem. What they’re trying to do – it’s not going to work.”

It's so easy to look at the finger rather than the moon it is pointing at. We looked at our industrial processes and understood that to make them competitive with low-cost country cost basis we needed to radically improve quality (and lower rework costs) and flexibility, both in volume and mix (to improve cash), and somehow to do so by involving people in kaizen – which remained quite mysterious for people convinced that engineers design processes and operators operate.

Problem-solving was then seen as a way to take away all glitches of the process until it ran perfectly, as you would clear grains of sand from your shoes to walk comfortably. It was a means to an end: efficient processes.?

It took us years of research to realize how big a thinking shift the focus on problem-solving really was. What my father was fighting against was the business culture of doing stuff to achieve objectives. We invest here to have more production. We create standards to improve productivity. We carry out SMED to improve flexibility.

Activity—>?Objective

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. What he’d understood in Toyota plants that frugal, smart technical solutions where not born of activities (the sledgehammer that misses the proverbial fly) but from a deeper understanding of the technical problems. The different logic of?

Problem?—>?Countermeasure

Was aimed at understanding better the problem and deepening one’s knowledge. All the various visualization s techniques we saw from 5S to andon to kanban were all about making problems appear starkly, just as “5 whys?” was about deepening thinking, not jumping to more activities.

Poorly thought-out activities, my father saw, resulted in untold waste, as they often required significant investment and delivered questionable results. He fought against it, and lost this battle every time as he built lean systems – people would turn them into activity control systems (have you done your planned kaizen events) rather than investigating systems (what are your three biggest problems he would ask at the beginning of every plant visit).

Although we now understand that deep learning occurs when one person tackles a “troublesome problem” through a period of trial and error and reflection. Although we also understand that global performance is driven by people understanding better their work, not applying better procedures, these insights have not touched management as a whole. Wherever you look, people are saying “we’re going to do this to achieve that.” What makes them think it will? Oh, vague numbers, a simplistic explanation of the situation, some ideology thrown in the mix. Look around you, you’ll see it everywhere.?

Consultants have held us back considerably from drawing the right lessons of lean because they keep selling the same snake oil: do this, you’ll get these results. It’s never true (beyond low hanging fruits) and programs fail in 2 or 3 years, but the management-by-objectives mindset is so deeply ingrained that no one sees past it. People keep repeating investment in activities and then arguing about elusive results, being disappointed and trying a new activity. It's all so wasteful.

We have enough history now to look back and learn to search for the moon rather than just look at the finger. Certainly, Drucker’s “what activities should you implement to achieve your objectives?” question was a step forward from the traditional “just do as you’re told” of old-style management. And yes, known activities solve known problems in stable situations – it allows you to exploit more thoroughly whatever you have in your hands. But in a VUCA world, this mental rigidity keeps piling up fails efforts – and doing it all over again.

The deep lesson of lean is not about more “improvement” activities to achieve process performance, it is deeper thinking from everyone every day. I know it’s hard. My first instinct is still to think “we should do that to gain that.” But changing one’s mental habits to “what is the problem here, let’s try countermeasures, see if they work or not and understand the problem better” leads to a deeper understanding of how things really work and more mental flexibility to look for yet undiscovered solutions – true innovations.?

Understanding a situation in terms of typical problems and then looking into how these typical problems express themselves in the specific case frees your mind from cookie-cutter, ready-made solutions. It deepens your outlook so you learn to see outcomes beyond narrow outputs and make new connections all the time. And this works whether you are a janitor facing typical building maintenance problems or a CEO of a multi-billion concern with strategic issues. Looking into problems makes you show up, as a person, and say “okay, how do I really understand this thing?” You engage rather than submit. You communicate rather than defend. If we want to face the large challenges looming today and reverse the “no future” negativity that is becoming the norm, we must abandon our self-defeating addiction to activities and adopt deep thinking problem-solving by concrete trial and error. As my father would repeat endlessly: I can see what you’re doing but which hypotheses are you testing?