Managing work to see problems when and where they occur is a necessary precondition–one too often overlooked–if an organization is going to achieve bona fide continuous improvement in pursuit of operational excellence.

Here’s why.

Absent an ability to design perfect systems for design, production, and delivery on the first try, operational excellence depends on continuous improvement and relentless innovation.  As important as it is to have rigor in solving problems, the necessary pre condition is managing work so problems-flaws in the current design of systems and the current approaches to doing work–are seen when and where they occur.

Deming, for example, was a passionate advocate of the ‘Shewhart Cycle’ of Plan, Do, Check, Act–in effect bringing the scientific method from the laboratory into the workplace.

However, for all the discipline he encouraged in solving problems, Deming was exceptionally committed to clarifying when a problem was actually occurring.

Doing nothing was preferable to ‘tweaking,’ –an irrigorous application of change in response to normal variation, not bona fide departures.  At least doing nothing left the process mean and variance unchanged.  Tweaking makes both worse.  Hence, while most famous for statistical process control, Deming had many other examples to show how tweaking made things worse, not better.

Toyota too built a management system on the criticality of seeing problems as precursors to solving them.  Pillars of the Toyota temple are Just In Time, on the one side, and Jidoka, on the other.  As I point out in The High Velocity Edge, Just In Time, widely credited to Ohno, encompasses a number of approaches to integrating disparate process-component pieces into a well-balanced, synchronized whole.

Mostly overlooked, in practice outside of Toyota, is jidoka, a concept with roots back to Toyota founder, Sakichi Toyoda.  While jidoka has acquired a whole host of screw ball interpretations–automation with a human touch, for instance–the key concept is that work stop the moment a problem develops both so the effects can be contained and also so the problem can be investigated immediately.

Toyoda was inspired to develop this approach from seeing women fruitlessly weave defective fabric, in his hometown, because they did not know a thread had broken on the loom. The first jidoka was in looms that would stop, indicating which strand needed to be rethreaded.  The concept was generalized so that all types of work call at problems.

As I mentioned above, jidoka is an unfortunately overlooked element of effective process design.

When first researching Toyota and lean in the ‘95-’96 time frame, I found some 28 hundred articles when searching on the key words of lean, pull, JIT, kaizen, etc.  When searching on jidoka, autonomation, and the like?  Less than a handful.

In practice, there seems to be an equally unbalanced approach to process design and the inclusion of ‘built in tests’ to indicate where the process design is flawed.

Related posts:

1. Standardization the prerequisite for any meaningful improvement…
2. The True North “Ideal”: A source of tension for continuous improvement
3. Designing, Operating, and Improving Complex Systems: Common Challenges–>Common Responses
4. Why to Learn from Toyota for Those Who Haven’t Already…Improvement and Innovation Needed Now More than Ever
5. Continuous Improvement versus Innovation…