Toyota executive Teruyuki Minoura says that the “T”in TPS stands for “thinking,”and the greatest strength of Toyota’s “Thinking Production System”is the way it develops people.
“Under a ‘push’system, there is little opportunity for workers to gain wisdom because they just produce according to the instructions they are given,”he says. “In contrast, a ‘pull’system asks the worker to use his or her head to come up with a manufacturing process where he or she alone must decide what needs to be made and how quickly it needs to be made.”
Most improvement programs put far too much emphasis on documentation and not nearly enough emphasis on encouraging every person to think every minute about how her or his work situation might be improved. Of course, most companies believe that they encourage workers to think about improvements. For years we have had suggestion systems that encourage workers to write down their good ideas and submit them to the s
For years we have had suggestion systems that encourage workers to write down their good ideas and submit them to the. suggestion system, and for years suggestion programs have turned in a dismal track record of improvements.
In software development, we use retrospectives to generate lists of things that should change, but too often the same list seems to get generated time and again. The problem is, most of the ideas from our suggestion programs and brainstorming sessions are turned over to someone else for evaluation and occasionally for implementation. This is a mistake. The people with ideas, working with their teams, should be the implementers of their ideas. They should not be asked to drop their ideas into a suggestion system to be implemented by others. They should not just add their ideas to a long list of good ideas. When good improvement ideas become someone else’s problem, the originators have less personal investment in pursuing the idea, and tacit knowledge about the problem is left behind as well
All workers, all the time, should be expected to question how their current process works and actively encouraged to use effective problem-solving techniques to try out new ideas and implement those that work. Documentation should exist as a basis for this problem-solving process. It should be developed by work teams, used by work teams, maintained by work teams, and readily changed by work teams. If we value engaged, thinking people, we have to take a hard look at assessment programs that are based on documentation. Typically these programs measure the maturity of an organization by its conformance to documented procedures. While the objective seems innocuous enough on the surface, in practice the assessment process usually places pressure on an organization to freeze its documentation and therefore not change its processes. The result is a disturbing tendency to remove the “right to think”from front-line workers. Quite often workers are encouraged to do exactly what is documented, while the proper emphasis would be to encourage workers to constantly question what is documented. Documentation-focused assessment programs tend to value the stability of the documentation. In fact, they should view frequently changing documentation as a sign of an organization that has learned how to think. Measurement.
Taken from: implementating lean software development. Mary Popendieck