Problems are Treasures

The story is told of how back in the 1980’s, when American cars were notorious for shabby construction but Japanese cars just ran and ran, Taiichi Ohno, head of production at Toyota invited American car executives to Japan to tour his factories.

They arrived and began taking detailed notes on everything – how far apart the work stations and parts bins were, how the workers exercised every morning, how inventory was handled, etc.

After they left, the workers besieged Ohno-san. “Ohno-san! Ohno-san! Are you crazy?! You let them see everything! They will steal all our secrets! Ohno-san just smiled and said, “they see the configuration, they see the calisthenics, the see the Kanban, but they do not have kaizen in their hearts. By the time their plane lands in Detroit this will all be different!”

Kaizen In Your Heart

What did Ohno-san mean by “Kaizen in the heart”? Kaizen is usually translated as “continuous improvement”. Continuous improvement is on everyone’s agenda. Retrospectives, for example, are considered “kaizen events” where the team is expected to continuously improve. But there is more to kaizen than practices, ceremonies, templates or artifacts. Kaizen, beyond just “continuous improvement” has additional cultural – almost spiritual – implications.

Someone with kaizen in their heart has a relentless drive to improve. They look to improve in everything they deliver, every action they take, every team they are a part of. They expect to improve. They know improvement is possible and look for ways to accomplish it. They are, quite frankly, annoyed when they can’t deliver the value they know is possible. Annoyed by waste, for example, whenever the see it, because they have eyes for waste. They constantly look to better understand the customer and what would be of real value to them.

This spirit comes from the top: a pervasive cultural attitude demonstrated and personified by organizational leadership – a fundamental belief that Problems are Treasures.

Where does this idea come from?

Every agile team has the notion of a “block”. Teams are told to “raise a block” if they get stuck or run into something outside their control. Scrum teams make it part of their daily standup – “any blockers?” they ask.

In practice people only “raise blocks” that affect their current situation. Even then technical people, who have spent a career solving technical problems, are reluctant to say they’ve run into something they can’t handle. Rarely is a block raised due to anything not specifically technical, such as wasteful practices, how the team is working together, team culture, or management behaviors. Rarer still is someone raising a block when things are mostly working “fine”, but could be better.

In Lean we talk about “stop and fix” and “stop the line”, based on the idea of the Andon. The andon (meaning “lamp” in Japanese) cord can be pulled by any worker, any time, for any reason. When it was pulled, a light would come on, the line would stop, and everyone would gather to address the issue immediately. They had learned it was better to halt production (even delay production) and fix the problem right now rather than allow the situation to deteriorate or let defects reach the customer. The concept was built into automated and semi-automated systems as a capability to automatically stop when something was wrong. This idea, to “automatically stop and fix the problem”, became a cultural expectation for every person. It became a key element of Lean management known as “Jidoka”.

Leadership realized that if the end goal was to deliver “perfect value using a perfect process with zero waste” they were going to have problems getting there. They knew they would get it wrong before they figured out what was right. They knew they had things to learn, and they would make mistakes as they learned. And the sooner they made those mistakes, the sooner they could learn from them. They needed to instill an eagerness to look for problems, those “mistakes”, because fixing them is when learning could happen.

How can you tell if your organization has Kaizen in the Heart?

You can already guess some of the enablers and conditions that allow and encourage this spirit. Do people feel safe? Would a new hire feel comfortable calling out an issue? Are work processes, standard practices and value streams well enough known that any team member can tell if something is “off”?

What happens in a crisis, or major screw-up? How does the organization react during and after? What is the response to a mistake or a complaint? Do you engage in blamestorming? Or do you consider it a learning opportunity? What is the tone of the reaction? What is the attitude toward the issue and those who “caused it”?

What if things are going (seemingly) smoothly? Can anyone raise a concern? Do they raise it immediately or wait for the retrospective (hoping they will remember)?

Do you consider something “going wrong” as an opportunity to get better?

How do you bring this spirit to your organization?

What would happen if someone on your team arbitrarily demanded the entire team stop all work and huddle around to solve a problem?

If someone “pulls the cord”, what is the first thing you (the team, leadership) should do? Say “thank-you” to whomever stopped production. Thank-you for caring about the customer and wanting them to have the quality they expect. Thank-you for caring enough about your teammates and our organization to prevent a problem from spreading. Thank-you for caring enough about our professional craft, our agreed processes and way of working to hold us accountable to our standards as professionals. Thank-you for giving us all an opportunity to learn, to think about our work systems that led to this halt, and to improve all of those processes, flows, systems, behaviors, learning and culture.

Could you start this with your team? It will take time, repeated practice and demonstrated safety to make it a habit.

Could you say it – and mean it – if it is a false alarm? “Thank-you” for mistakenly interrupting everyone’s work? Yes, even a false alarm is an opportunity to learn, to train, to practice, to problem solve, and to improve.

This attitude, by the team, by supervisors, by managers and by executives, is the “Jidoka mindset”: Problems are Treasures, an essential part of having kaizen in your heart.