Continuing my review of Wakamatsu’s book on Taiichi Ohno, today we’ll explore his views on Urgency and how to prevent acting spoiled or how to prevent spoiling your workers. In other words, how to instill a continuous improvement mindset in your workforce.
To read my reviews of Wakamatsu’s book on Taiichi Ohno, please visit the links below.
- Taiichi Ohno on Standard Work
- Taiichi Ohno on Genchi Genbutsu
- Do Not Act Spoiled
- Learn from Previous Masters
- Wastes Hide, Disclose All Mistakes
- Truth and Understanding
- Innovation and Craftiness
- Teach Others to Think
- Intelligent Automation
- Taiichi Ohno on Leadership
Taiichi Ohno is known to have said the following:
You have such a spoiled way of thinking. Execute your duties with a sense of urgency.
In context, he would say the above to companies that had too much work in process. Why? In his mind, Ohno believed that having too much work-in-process makes defects and delays tolerable, and creates an organization accustomed to delays, defects, and problems on the line. In his words,
Zero work-in-progress items is the ideal. We must acknowledge the true purpose of reducing them, though. We are not competing for who has the least number of work-in-progress items. If we have too much of it, we will fail to identify problems, that’s why we must strive to reduce it.
Continuing,
Reduction of work-in-progress items causes the production line to stop. This does not mean that the reduction was teh cause, it means that there was a serious problem with the shop floor to begin with and that the problem has been hidden due to the abundant amount of work-in-progress items. If we start seeing a problem as a result of reducing such items we must fix it immediately by continuous improvement. Repeating such an effort will enable us to reduce it to zero.
So, in Ohno’s mind, work in process “hides” problems and is an enabler of continued mediocrity. His goal in reducing WIP was to expose the problems and shine a light on them, which fosters a continuous improvement culture.
His approach to expose problems and to help workers visualize the problems was simple:
- Limit work in progress
- Limit the number of workers
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Richard Karpinski says
Wonderful treasures here, but lacking in salient links sometimes. I went to see Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything! and found that I had asked some fine questions in November 4 years ago. I would like to read her answers but I can’t find a link to them. This is so frustrating I hesitate to dig into the other wonderful treasures.
HELP.
Jason says
I think a related concept here is the concept of Margin, which is always leaving some extra time, extra resources, extra effort, etc. in reserve.
I think the basic principle here is, that if you have so much going on all the time, if you are always working at 100% of capacity (or forcing others too), all of that noise and activity is going to hide the problems (until it’s too late).
You might think you are getting somewhere, while all along you or your company may be dying, or barreling along in the completely wrong direction – and you won’t even know it because you are all caught up in the tyranny of the urgent and forcing everyone else to do the same.
Taking time and making time to stop, rest, reflect, think, and re-tool is vital not only for the business world, but for your personal life as well.
A good book on the concept of Margin is Dr. Richard Swenson’s book, “Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives”
Also, I see a problem with this idea that “placing workers in challenging situations will force them to improve their processes and thereby create a culture of continuous improvement.”
This can work if the workers are in control of, or have real and direct impact on the way that work is performed.
However, it has been my experience that sometimes the most important processes (such as software systems, policies, etc.) are kept completely outside of reach or influence of those doing the work. In fact, in my company the culture is such that the workers are completely locked out of the design of systems and policies.
When your company is arranged this way, and you put the stress and pressure on those doing the work instead of on those in control of how the work is done, all that happens is that good people leave, and the work just gets done more and more poorly.** Those least responsible for the inefficiencies are the ones who pay the highest price and the ones responsible just move on to other high paying jobs once the company collapses.
The ideal arrangement, one I’m sure Ohno would probably agree with, is to have those arranging the work in in direct and constant dialogue with frontline workers, who can then play a vital role in shaping how the work is done.
** For an extreme example, see the sad case of MiniScribe, whose CEO put so much pressure on his employees that they eventually began shipping bricks in place of hard drives in a desperate attempt to keep making his sales quotas.