next developmental assignment since they now have gotten their ‘ticket punched.’ Imagine if you will that we tried to train doctors, scientists, fine musicians, or professional athletes in this manner. Without a strong coach and deep practice, what skills could ever be truly mastered, even at a basic level? It should be obvious how the differences between machine thinking and systems thinking drive the very way we think about process improvements in particular and learning in general. The approach to process improvement at Toyota follows the model of Plan-Do-Check-Act as taught by Deming. Even this deep model of organizational learning gets distorted by machine thinking. With machine thinking, we seek above all else to control our environment by solving problems and implementing ‘solu- tions’ created by experts who use a vast array of statistical tools to confirm a hypothesis. With this confirmation complete, we then standardize the process and replicate the solution far and wide. The world is simply a complex machine and we need to be able to identify the right levers to pull to achieve our desired outcomes.
virtuall
water will cut including costs!
Western vs. Toyota thinking on PDCA. y anything... 90KSI!
With systems thinking, we are focused on learning by trying, with the goals of improving processes and concur- rently developing the people directly involved in the process. These teams are supported by experts when needed and develop and implement countermeasures after building a deep understanding of the problem and gaining consensus with the affected groups. Through the implementation of countermea- sures we can reflect on what happened to identify areas for further opportunity. The world we live in is dynamic and uncer- tain. Today’s countermeasures may become obsolete as soon as the environment around us changes—as it inevitably will. We will standardize what worked well and share the learning gained through the process. Without this focus on the PDCA cycle, continuous improvement and lean could not exist.
Barrier 4: Misunderstanding of the Purpose of Lean Tools Machine thinking brings us to the obvious conclusion that we can leverage lean as a collection of tools to allow us to achieve certain results depending on which tool we have