Further Concepts From Spear on the Toyota Production System
In presentations and discussions, Steven Spear elaborates further on the four points summarized in the review above. He makes it clear for instance that the tools and practices are merely responses to site-specific challenges and are not fundamental to the Toyota Production System (TPS). Rather, the unstated, implicit, yet pervasive guidelines governing the design, operation and improvement of activities, flow-paths and connections are fundamental. An analogy is that reading a drivers-ed guide will not truly help us understand the ways that drivers act on the road.
TPS' core set of "rules in use" promote and are driven by a modular organization and command structure, frequent self-diagnostics by people and systems and frequent, structured, directed problem-solving as the primary means of training and improvement. TPS has grown organically over decades and directly creates and nurtures a "community of scientists". While it never has been written down, it clearly is not a result of "being Japanese" (Toyota's American plants are fully successful and many Japanese plants belonging to other companies are far from stellar) but is a result of making people capable and responsible and standardizing connections between people, teams and outside organizations.
Continuous improvement under TPS is carried out using the scientific method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible level in the organization. This thinking is completely opposite to observed behavior at many organizations and allows Toyota to insist that the needs of the person lowest in their organization determine the work of those higher, not the reverse.
Spear uses many other examples of this perverse (to traditional organizational eyes) behavioral system. He shows how it focuses on relentlessly monitoring for minor errors before they escalate into catastrophes. He shows how the organizational structure follows the needs of the lowest person. He shows how TPS manages to engage more people towards common goals more frequently than traditional systems: everyone understands and agrees on the organization's goals and everyone understands and agrees on the way things are done.
Spear's observations are coherent and powerful. They are also humbling: there is no magic bullet, but a long road of hard attention to detail. As their marketing people say: "The relentless pursuit of perfection".
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