GA 357 | Revisiting The Toyota Way with Jeff Liker

And you'll keep on making the same mistake over and over again. And every time you swing wrong, you are strengthening your brain's neural pathways that say, this is how you should be doing it. So you're learning how to do it wrong, and you're getting better at doing it wrong.

Today I'm excited to welcome Jeff Leiker to the show. Now, if you've been involved in a lean movement for any amount of time, chances are very good that you know who Mr. Leiker is. He's obviously the author of one of the most famous, if not the most famous, lean book of all time, which is the Toyota Way. That was first published in the year 2004. And in 2020, Jeff essentially rewrote and completely updated this bestselling classic. And the new edition is called the Toyota Way 2nd Edition. Again, it's still. It's the 14 management principles. But as you'll see, a few of the principles have maybe streamlined, for lack of a better word. And there's actually two new principles that Jeff introduced in the. In the second edition of the book. But during the podcast, we spend a lot of time on the. The. The concept of scientific thinking and how that's been intertwined into the second edition. And so Jeff spends a lot of time talking about his relationship with Mike Rother. Mike actually was one of Jeff's students, Jeff, back at the University of Michigan. And so a lot of discussion on the whole idea of scientific thinking. We even get into, you know, when we think about lean tools like kanban standard work 5s, different things like that. How do those play, if you will, alongside scientific thinking? How do they work with. In harmony with one another? And so I think Jeff did a really good job of explaining that. And then Jeff, this touches on these 14 principles and how he actually reworked some of them a little bit, streamlined them, perhaps, you could say, and then how he added Hoshin Kanri and strategy towards the end of the principle. So really, really packed episode. It's a little longer than normal, so listen to this one in chunks if you need to, but I would definitely encourage you to listen to this all the way front to back. This might even be one you get out a notepad and take some notes because, you know, Jeff really shares a lot of good information. Now, everything that we talk about will be linked over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 357. Again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 357. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Jeff Leiker welcome to the show. How are you?

Great, Ron. Good to be with you.

Oh, well, it's an honor to have you on. You know, there's been a lot of folks that have influenced the Lean movement for sure, but my goodness, if there's anyone higher than you, Mr. Leiker, I'd like to know who they are. Because your books and your work and your research, well, they've changed my life. You know, I can tell you that because your work, some of your work was the, some of the first things that I've ever read as it related to Lean. And so I wanted to first say thank you for, for everything that you've done for our, our movement and really for the world, because I think you've for sure made a huge impact and you continue to make a huge impact. So anyhow, it's my honor to have you on and thank you for everything that you've done.

Thank you. Yeah, I've been part of the movement for over 35 years, so it's important to me.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So listen, most folks on this podcast are pretty experienced Lean thinkers, and so I would guess 99% of the world knows are Jeff. But just in case they're new to the movement, which is definitely a possibility, and they've never heard of Jeff Leiker. Maybe just give us a quick overview of your background and how you got involved in all this continuous improvement lean movement stuff.

Well, it started with an industrial engineering degree at Northeastern university, graduated in 1976 and was expecting to go into a company and be an industrial engineer. But the more I learned about sociology and I got particularly interested in socio technical systems where they were developing self directed work teams in companies and I worked for a company that was doing that. I started to shift my interest from the hard part of the hard science of industrial engineering to people and social science and social psychology and sociology and got a PhD, which I don't know anybody else that did that coming out of industrial engineering, but I got a PhD in Sociology and thought I had left industrial engineering completely behind. Then went in a tough job market, saw an ad for an industrial engineer who had a PhD in social science from the industrial engineering department at University of Michigan, one of the top three schools for industrial engineering in the country and top school for sociology. So I was very impressed by the idea of getting a job at U of M. And I did. And they were also excited because they hadn't been able to find anybody like me trying for two years. So in 1982 I joined the faculty of University of Michigan and I spent my whole career as an assistant associate, then full professor. Retired about five years ago after 35 years as a professor at Michigan. In my first year there where I was confused about what I was going to do in an industrial engineering department and was just trying to find my way, I got approached about joining a US Japan auto study. They were excited that there was an engineering professor who knew about social science and could study things like how like companies management systems. And that really started me to for the first time learn about the Japanese management system in auto and then also kind of discover that Toyota was the leader of the pack and there were some unique things about Toyota and also discover that they actually had developed a true socio technical system that was more than just self directed work teams. It was a, it was actually a real technical system supporting the social system. The social system supported the technical system. So that got me very excited academically. And then also I had been studying American auto companies and I was like repeatedly disappointed that I would hear about this great program for employee involvement. I'd go and visit and all the employees would complain about how it was really just talk and no action. And when I went to Toyota, the things they talked about were the things they were actually doing. It was a correspondence between talk and reality. And that excited me. And also it made me more optimistic. It was a lot more pleasant to write a positive feel good story than negative stories about how companies were mishandling their technology and mishandling their people and their barriers to productivity. I've stuck with. I then got deeper and deeper into studying Toyota. I ran a program called the Japan Technology Management Program. And in that part of that program I hired John Shook who was working for Toyota at the time, first American manager to learn Japanese and become a manager for Toyota in Japan. And we were working on outreach and started to create conferences to teach. And what we're really emphasizing was the Toyota production system as a system rather than as individual tools that you could pick and choose from. And learned a lot from John. We got a consulting job and then I had then Mike Rother was one of my students and he left. I found him a job in a not for profit and after a couple years he wanted to leave. He wasn't real happy there and he wanted to be part of Michigan but also be consulting. So I hired him Halftime and the three of us, John and Mike and I worked together for a few years and then they both got much more involved with Lean Enterprise Institute and Jim Womack. And that led to learning to see the book about value stream mapping. So anyway, all that was happening and I was getting deeper and deeper into studying, writing about Toyota and developing relationships. And the big thing with, I think any Japanese company, but true with Toyota, is that you have to establish trust. And the trust comes from them seeing the results, seeing what I published. And they were not so concerned that I was going to badmouth them, but they were concerned that I would write something superficial that didn't really reflect the culture and the deep thinking underlying the Toyota production system in the Toyota way. But after they saw some of the things I wrote, and then I would find that articles I wrote, for example, would get circulated around the company and people were learning from it, saying, oh, that's what we do. It was useful to hear from an outsider. So my relationship just got closer and closer with leaders in Toyota and it got to the point where they just trusted me. And if I asked to see something, I could see it. If I wanted to write something, I didn't have to work hard to get permission. They just trusted I would be writing. It would be well crafted, it would be thoughtful, and I would accurately reflect what I was learning. So, and then when I wrote the Tread Away, I was sort of cavalier. I was a young Michigan professor in a top department, so I kind of assumed it wouldn't be a problem and asked for permission. It went all the way up to the board of directors. It went through all sorts of committees of public relations people in America. And it was a huge deal for them to have someone from the outside write about the Tidal Way, which for them was very personal. And their general tendency is to believe unless you've lived it, you can't really understand it. And I hadn't lived it, but they finally decided at the board of directors level the company to support me, to give me permission, but also to support me and make an effort to educate me so what I wrote would be accurate. And I guess they say the rest is history from there.

Now when. So the book came out was in 2004, correct? Is that right? So when was this board of director meeting time? Year wise?

It was probably 2003.

Okay.

So I spent the second half of 2003 doing lots of interviews in Toyota and seeing things and sort of collecting my story and information. And then I went on sabbatical, something in academics, like every seven years you get a one year sabbatical. And I went on sabbatical to Arizona State University where I had a former student. And it was me and my family and we're in beautiful Weather in Phoenix, Arizona. And I would go into the office in the morning and I'd write for two hours. Then I'd go home and go touring with my family or play golf or something else, forget about it. And then in the evening, I would edit what I wrote in the morning. And then between January and May, I wrote the whole book. Wow.

January to May. Okay. And it's not, you know, light reading book. It's some heavy, you know, it's readable for sure, but it's. There's some meat on the bone there.

Right? Yeah. Well, I guess my academic background, I feel uncomfortable if I write sort of superficial generalities and there's not much meat behind it.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So you've recently released a new edition. So I guess my first question is, why did you feel moved to write a second edition to an already extremely successful book?

When I first wrote the Trade Away, I was really focused on Toyota. I had done an earlier book called Becoming Lean, and it was an edited book of stories of US manufacturers that were early pioneers in Lean and their change story. And I had been working with John Shook at Mike Rother at Ford and helping them develop the Ford production system. So I had some experience with other companies introducing Lean, but mainly I was focused on Toyota. And most of the examples in the early Toyota way were from Toyota. After that, I worked with a lot of other companies through a consulting practice. And Lean also started to spread beyond auto and even beyond manufacturing to other business sectors, other countries. So I had a broad set of experiences in different kinds of companies, manufacturing and service. So one thing I felt like I had a lot more stories to illustrate the principles. So it's not just Toyota. I would often get asked, how does this apply to services? The book is about manufacturing. I'm in a hospital, I'm in a financial services company. Does this apply to us? That was something that I wanted to address. The other thing was that I continued to learn from Toyota and things that I sort of thought I understood at the time where somebody would say it and I might quote him in the book. I would deepen my understanding. I'd think back like five years, and a manager in a plant in Indonesia told me this, and suddenly it would occur to me that's what he meant, that's what was going on. So there were these, aha, moments where what I had been writing about made sense to me in a deeper way. And then in addition to that, I had lost touch with Mike Rother, even though he lives in the same town I live in. And he contacts me one day, wants to meet for coffee, and he gives me a signed copy of his book to Atticata. And I at that time didn't know he's writing a book and didn't know anything about what, what this was, what this was. And that led to having many meetings and coffee shops with Mike. And he was really investing a lot of time into trying to educate me and convinced that I would find a lot of insight and it would be useful for me to understand to Cotta. And over time, as I learned more about it, I could relate it to my experiences in Toyota. And what Mike was trying to do with Toyota Kata was to extract from what Toyota does a model of improvement. Because everybody talks about continuous improvement and they talk about pdca and what does that really mean? What are the essential features that became the improvement Kata model? And then he wanted to develop practice routines that you could practice repeatedly to master each step of the process. And his argument, what he had also learned from Toyota and he had learned from it from other sources about how people develop talent and skills. The only way you really change your way of behaving or your way of thinking is through practice, through deliberate practice. And often it's often was the case that I would learn something at Toyota. They would tell me their version, their folk version, this is what we do and this is what works for us. And then I would be able to relate that to some academic theory for management about how people learn, how people make decisions, what size group is the optimal group for decision making. What they had learned through experience would match the academic research. And the academic research would kind of enlighten me to what, what they're doing in Toyota. And that was the case with, with Mike. So he was relating this to lots of different bodies of cognitive psychology research and neuroscience research and how people learn. And it just started all to connect that what really was at the core of Toyota problem solving, for example, was scientific thinking. And people don't naturally think scientifically. We tell them to think scientifically and we do workshops with exercises, and then they go back and think exactly the way they thought before the courses, and it doesn't change them. So all this together, these other examples outside Toyota, deepening my learning in general of the toto way, and then learning about scientific thinking and putting a lot what I learned in the perspective of systems thinking, scientific thinking, I just thought there was enough new that I should go back and revisit the book.

So it's interesting you've mentioned scientific thinking and that kind of really Leads me into my first official question. So in the original Toyota way book from 2004, you introduced the so called P's philosophy, process, people, problem solving. And the four P's are back obviously in the second edition. But what's interesting is you frame them around like a puzzle model with scientific thinking in a center. So why did you do that?

Well, first of all, as far as the pyramid goes, I had made the argument that there's some sort of logical order, like philosophy is the foundation. Problem solving is the end result of having people and processes developed. But problem solving was the engine that kind of drove continuous improvement. So I had sort of a rationale for why it's a pyramid and I would explain to people the rationale, but I'm not sure I believed it myself. I sort of felt I was faking it. And it was clear that this was a system and that all the parts were interrelated. The philosophy was related to people development, it was related to problem solving, problem solving was related to processes. So they're all interconnected. And then originally when I, Mike Rather and I did a presentation at a KATA conference and we talked about how the Torah Way and Toda Kata played well together and they could go hand in hand and we had like two people holding hands. And then I started thinking more about it and I started thinking that each of the four P's really depends upon scientific thinking. And it's really more like the central way of thinking that ties the four P's together rather than a separate thing that goes hand in hand with the chowed away. So I put scientific thinking in the center. And I argue in the introduction that, for example, the philosophy carrying out the philosophy and the philosophy itself, which is really systems thinking, thinking long term and thinking in terms of systems doesn't really make sense to somebody who's not thinking scientifically. We tend to think, for example, in simple cause and effect relationships. I implement this, I get this result. And that's not how systems work. Where there's complicated interactions and feedback loops and processes we tend to think of almost like they're physical things. We introduce Kanban to the process and the process changes in this predictable way and we get this predictable result. And again, that's not the way processes work in the real world. Processes are people and machines and suppliers and doing stuff. And it's messy and there's a lot of variation in it. And usually implementing a process means we implement a procedure in writing or conceptually that we would like to act in a certain way, but we have to deal with the reality of how the process actually works. So it's more. I thought of processes more as target conditions, something you're trying to achieve, like one piece flow rather than a tool to implement. And then people thinking scientifically is obvious. And then problem solving is really what? Mike didn't like the term problem solving, and we had a lot of debate about it because he said problem solving makes it seem like you're trying to fix something broken, whereas he preferred improvement because then you're striving towards something you want to achieve in the future. And, you know, we had a lot of discussions about that. I kept problem solving, but I defined problem solving as the quest for achieving a goal through iterative learning. So anyway, it all sort of made sense to me. And then as I was going back to the original Toto way to rewrite it, I would make notes every time I saw something that looked a little bit too mechanistic, like, do this and you get this result and made it more loose and dynamic.

I was going to ask this at the end, but I want to ask it now. I actually was recently speaking with someone and they were actually reading at that time, they're newer to the Lean Movement, and they were reading the original Toyota Way, and they were excited and they were enjoying it. And I said, well, do you have the newest version, the second edition? And they said, no, no. I said, well, go ahead. Obviously finish the book that you're reading, you know, and then buy the second edition and read that one as well. So if you had advice for folks, would you encourage them to read the first one, the 2004, or should, if they've not read either one, just go straight to the second edition.

I would. I guess my inclination would be if they read the first one already, that's good. Then I would encourage them to read the second one. I don't think there's inconsistencies between the two. And I think if they read the first one some time ago and they've been using and they've been implementing Lean and they've had direct experience, that background would make the new one more meaningful to them. But I still think there would be a lot of aha moments where they would say, oh, wow, this is interesting, this is new. I hadn't thought about it this way. If somebody had not read the original Toyota Way, I would say, go right to the second edition. Yeah, I'm not sure that there's something they missed because they didn't read the original. I think there's so much more Richness in the second edition.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. So I know you spent a lot of time immersed in the Japanese culture, and you've met a lot of folks from all different Toyota facilities. What do you think about the idea that some might say that Japanese naturally think scientifically? Do you think that's true because of their culture, or is that not true?

I think in certain senses it's true. For example, the Japanese version of Buddhism, the idea of trying to clear your mind and be able to see reality for what it is, however we perceive it as humans, but to take in reality, live in the moment, experience the moment with a clear mind, with a clear head, without assumptions, that's the basis for meditation. That's the sort of dream of a Buddhist, is to be able to clear their mind of all the noise. So that's about getting information from the world and trying to develop some sort of harmony between you and the natural world. And I think that's a strong foundation for scientific thinking. And then as the Japanese. The Japanese became more Westernized, they were. They were. I think. Well, one thing they kind of looked up to the west. They looked up to the United States. They wanted to learn from these big successful countries. I think what appealed to them was a rational approach to business, using reasoning, logic, trying to achieve business objectives, measuring things and trying to achieve goals that are measured. Deming came over and taught them about statistics and management by facts, and that seemed to click with them and connect with them and make a lot of sense. So they seem to be very open to being taught about scientific thinking and quality. For example, I think they naturally thought in terms of systems, and I think part of that. And I have this table that shows all the different influences, from rice farming to the samurai to the Western experts who were sent over after World War II to teach them. And they all sort of fit together into a systems way of thinking. You don't have to tell them that the world is complex and unpredictable because every time they turn around, there's a tsunami or an earthquake or something threatening to destroy the island. So in those senses, I think it made sense to them, and they adopted the Western view of science, but combined with this more holistic Buddhist view.

So for the rest of us that didn't grow up in that culture, do you think scientific thinking is something that we can learn?

Well, we all grew up learning science in school, at Bath, in school. And basically, the way American education, Western education is structured, particularly in engineering or science or math, it's structured as being very logical and Scientific and. But I think the version of science that we learned is more deterministic. And the way we learn through problem sets. And here's a formula, here's a problem set, apply the formula to the problem set. There's a right and wrong answer, I think teaches us that there's usually a right answer. And if we get the wrong answer, it's because we're dumb.

Yeah.

And made a mistake and we have some deficiency, personal deficiency. Whereas in Japan they, from an early age back to kindergarten, they run experiments, they discover principles by doing something. So I think they learn to think in a bit more open ended way. And the fundamental idea behind Kaizen is try it and when you try it, see what happens, then reflect on what happened and then learn and try again to get closer and closer to the goal. And you never give up until you reach the goal. But it takes a lot of trial and error. So they're much more used to the idea of trial and error and learning at the gamble, learning through direct experimentation. We're more used to the idea that if you had the right mathematical equation or the right scientific knowledge, you should know. And then the reason that you run the experiment is to verify that what you think you know, you really do know. Whereas they're more likely to take the attitude we don't really know much of anything. We have a starting point, but let's try it. Let's learn from doing, from experimenting. So that was the reason for the kata was because like Mike is part, has a German background, speaks German. His father and I think his parents were both from Germany and he grew up in the United States. And he would do a lot of work in Germany, transformational work in German companies and in American companies and around the world. But he was faced over and over again with people making assumptions that they know things that they really don't. And he was trying to teach them by doing projects in their plants. And he would successfully teach some people. But he thought there's got to be a better way to teach this way of thinking that we call lean thinking. And that's when he came up with the idea of the improvement kata model and practice routines. And he had studied neuroscience and cognitive psychology and how he learned complex skills and the idea of, of deliberate practice and that you have a model for how you should hold your fingers when you play guitar and how you should hit the strings and what kind of sound quality should be and what it should sound like so you have an idea of what you'd want to do when you play the guitar, I play classical guitar. And then you try something and you look for deviations. I'm not getting the sound I want, I'm not hitting the right notes, I'm making mistakes here. And then you take corrective action. And when you practice, you keep on practicing over and over again until say, an area you're weak at becomes natural and you're strong at it. And you, you might take a musical piece and just start with one measure where you're having trouble, and then just play that over and over and over again until you get it right. So that led to the idea of practice, particularly deliberate practice is the way to develop a skill, including a skill of a mindset like scientific thinking. So that was sort of the foundation for all that. Now in Toyota, they didn't have deep theoretical discussions about cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It was just like Ono saying, stand in the circle and look, tell me what you see and then come back, tell me what you see. But what he was trying to teach was a way of thinking like, don't make assumptions, look and tell me what you see. And when you have superficial impressions, then he would make you go back to again, but look some more, look some more. Because he knew that you hadn't really, you haven't seen the variations in the process. You hadn't seen the way the process breaks down. You hadn't seen the handoffs between people. You didn't see the details enough to understand the current condition.

You know, I want to circle back to deliberate practice because I think it's such an important concept when we're trying to think scientifically. And it's something that sadly I've seen lots of confusion. And some of it leads back to the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell where he sort of introduced that 10,000 hour rule. Right, from the Florida State professor, always forget his name. Right, but, but obviously Gladwell didn't really clearly specify that this so called 10,000 hour rules must be deliberate practice. So some folks thought they could just go pick up a guitar and just randomly play it for 10,000 hours and they're going to be a master. Well, obviously that's not the case. So why do you think deliberate practice is so difficult for folks to wrap their mind around? And how would you concentrate contrast deliberate practice from, you know, non deliberate practice?

Well, first of all, the difference between deliberate practice and non deliberate practice. And I'll give you an anecdote which was, my son is about, at that time was about 12 years old and he was obsessed with golf from the Time, he was about 4. And because of him, I took up golf because he wanted to play, and I had never touched a golf club, and he was taking lessons when I wasn't. And he somehow naturally was good at deliberate practice. So he is at a driving range with me, and I'm hitting the ball, and he's in front of me hitting the ball. And occasionally he's looking over his shoulder and finally stops, and he stands behind me, and I get nervous, and I started hitting the ball badly. And then he said, so, dad, what are you trying to do? And, you know, at that point, I'm a little flustered and stressed because I said, these bad balls. I said, well, until he started looking at me and getting me nervous. I was hitting the ball. Oh, how is that going for you? I said, well, I was hitting. I was doing pretty well. I was hitting some good shots. I was hitting a few bad shots, but I was making good contact with a lot of them. And he said, oh, well, why were you making bad shots? And I said, I guess I'm just not swinging right. He said, oh, well, what does swinging right mean? What are you trying to do? So anyway, the end result of that discussion was I realized I was just hitting the ball, and I didn't have a clear idea of what I was trying to learn, and therefore, I wasn't improving. I was just happy when I hit a good one and not happy when I hit a bad one. But I didn't really know why. So he said, why don't you try this? So what he noticed in my swing was that I was not hinging my wrist, which is hinging your wrist and then unhinging your wrist as you come down. Approach the ball is one way you get a lot of power. So I was not hinging my wrist. So he says, try this. And he gives me an exercise where you stand in one place and you just use your arms and you don't take the club all the way back up behind your back. You just partially swing just with your wrist. So the only way you can hit the ball is if you hinge your wrist and unhinge it. And it's just right. You're moving just right next to the ball. You're barely moving the club. So I did that a few times and would hit it three feet in one way or another, and found it kind of frustrating. And he says, just try that drill for a few minutes. He says, you'll get better at it as you try it. So I'm doing that and hitting the ball And I'm getting to the point where I could hit the ball a little bit, a few yards, but it wasn't fun. So then he goes back and he starts hitting the ball, and he's practicing something very specific. And he and I went back to just hitting the ball. And then he looked over his shoulder and said, dad, do the drill. And then I felt guilty, like, you know, like the teacher was punishing, was criticizing me. And so I started doing this drill. But that was a day that I first really understood deliberate practice. And the difference between playing at something and trying to get better at something. And what he had learned through experience was that unless you had a clear idea of what you're trying to do, then tried it and saw it happen when you tried it, and then had some immediate feedback, this is what I was trying to do. This is what happened. This is why then you can't take any corrective action, and you'll keep on making the same mistake over and over again. And every time you swing wrong, you are strengthening your brain's neural pathways that say, this is how you should be doing it. So you're learning how to do it wrong, and you're getting better at doing it wrong. And then my reaction, he turns around and I go back to hitting the ball. Is the reason why we're not good at it.

Right.

Because it's. It's not fun.

Right.

And the reason it's not fun is. Goes back to primitive days when we were out in caves and when we were trying to make a living. And the way you. You survived was by killing the animal before it kills you and reacting very quickly to situations you're in. And if you took too much time to deliberately practice, you're probably going to get killed.

Right.

So fast thinking became the way you survived. And then the people who were inclined toward fast thinking, their genes were passed on, and that included. And they could do scans of your brain and show you that when you're deliberately practicing, the pain centers light up, and when you're playing at something, the pleasure centers light up.

Yeah.

So the people who were punished for deliberate practice were the ones who survived. And it literally is not natural for us as human beings.

Yep, Yep. K. Anders Erickson. I always forget his name for some reason. The Florida State professor.

Yeah, right.

Yep. Yep. So, as we wrap things up, I do want to touch on a few other topics. Jeff. You know, obviously within Toyota, and there's lots of tools that many of us have learned over the years. Cells Kanban standardized work 5s7 waste all these things, these tools, some of them maybe artifacts, if you will. But where does scientific thinking come in? When we're implementing 5s as an example or practicing 5s in an area, is there any relationship between 5s and scientific thinking?

Well, okay, so let's just take Mike Rother's model, the improvement cut. It's only four steps. It's fairly easy to explain. You start with a goal, a challenge, a direction, and then you look at the current situation and with the eye toward understanding where we are in relationship to the destination, where we want to be the goal. And then, and you'll see, when you look at the current condition, you'll see lots of problems, lots of gaps, lots of weaknesses. And then you pick not, you don't try to solve all the problems at once. You pick an area, a theme, what you're going to call is a theme, and you decide, I'm going to start there. And then you set a short term target condition. Like, this is where I want to be in a year. That's my challenge. But here's where I want to be in two weeks. And that's my target for the next two weeks. That's what I'm going to focus on. Then you begin to experiment through PDCA and you run ideally one experiment at a time, in each case learning from the experiment, which then informs based on what you learned, what you're going to try next. So you're pca, PDCA and PCA until you reach the target condition. At that point you ask where am I now and what where I'm in relation to the challenge and where's my next stop, where I'm going to try to get next? So if you take something like 5s, where does that fit into this process that I just described?

Yeah, I would say maybe it helps us overcome obstacles potentially on our way to the target condition. Yeah.

Now, and I have a quote that I've often used from Hajime Oba, who was a student of Taichi Ono. He said that, he said that the Toyota production system was based on scientific thinking and how do I deal with this problem? And he emphasized the this. So I'm not interested in what could theoretically possibly influence a whole set of problems, but rather for this problem that I'm focused on right now, what am I going to do? So depending on the challenge and depending on the current condition, and depending on how I prioritize my target condition, I might move into 5s as a way to address the problem. Yeah, but I might not, right? It might not be the highest priority thing to do. So I might, for example, realize that I have too much inventory, that the processes are disconnected and that people are not improving the process because they're disconnected by inventory. And therefore they don't feel any pressure to improve and they're not communicating with each other. So I don't understand what you as a customer need from me. So I might set as a target condition to better connect these processes so there's direct feedback. And that might lead to, say, a Kanban system. It might lead to moving the processes closer together. It might lead to something like a simple Kanban system to visually show that this is what the customer needs, when the customer needs more and this is what I'll produce. And then when I have this better flow and inventory has been reduced and perhaps I've reduced defects so I've reached a target condition, then I might say to really standardize this, I need to make it very clear and visual. And then 5s might come into play.

Yeah.

At that point. But it would be to maybe stabilize and enhance the process improvements I made. I'm not going to do 5s for the sake of 5s.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's a means towards a target condition, right?

Exactly. And it's not a means toward every target condition.

Yes.

You know somebody, you know people who say we always start with 5s, don't do anything until you do 5s. Well, from my scientific point of view of learning about the trade production system, one thing I know is that when you start out with a company that's not lean and hasn't practiced this stuff, usually their processes are very unstable. They don't have standardized work. There's huge amounts of variability in how jobs are performed. It's almost random whether there's inventory or not, how much inventory there is. So one of the things you need for good 5s is to have some stability. Like if I don't know how much inventory I'm going to have of each product and how much I'm going to keep at the line, then how can I come up with some sort of visual 5s way of labeling where things should be?

Yep, exactly.

So I'd been in that situation where we've done 5s on an unstable process and they set it all up and you have parts A, B and C and you have a place for A, and you're going to keep two containers of A and two containers of B and two containers of C. And there'll be a color coded signaling process to send back a Kanban signal. And it Looks all cool, but suddenly you get five bins of one part and there's no place to put them.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Last question I have for you, Jeff. Circling back to the book. Sorry for getting us all into deliberate practice and everything, but it's a big part of the new book as well. Yeah. But you did add a couple principles in the second edition, namely Hoshin Kanri and strategy. What made you add these as principles?

Well, I think the way I learned about the Toyota production system, I had done pretty broad interviews and sales and finance in different parts of Toyota. So I had a bit of an overview. But mostly I spent time in the factory and trying to understand the tools of Lean and the role of work groups and how Toyota developed people through challenges and through coaching in the shop floor. So I learned what happens inside the factory and I was paying less attention to how they got their goals from outside the factory and how they work to achieve those goals. So I was aware of Hosch and Connery, but I wasn't just paying that much attention to it. So I mentioned in the book, but it wasn't an important part of the book. And then I was even less focused on strategy and how that related to what happens in different parts of Toyota. And partly is because Toyota's strategy was pretty clear and they knew the products they're making and they're mostly coming up with the next model of Camry and the next model of Corolla. So it was very much an evolutionary process. So I started to again repeated visits to Toyota and I heard about Hoshin Connery enough times, and I'd hear people say none of this would be possible without Hoshin Kanri, which is basically aligned goals from top to bottom and everybody discussing these goals. And then I know what you need from me as my boss, and you know what your boss needs from you. And we have a plan for working toward it. And then every day we're doing Kaizen in the direction of the challenges that come out of Hochean Connery. So I started spending more time trying to understand it since the original book and realized how powerful it is because as Mike Rother's model says, the starting point is the direction, the challenge. If you don't know what your challenge is, you're just going to aimlessly try to fix things. So that that led to that. But then also with the huge shakeup in automotive toward the future of mobility and autonomous connected electric vehicles, it wasn't going to work at Toyota to just keep on coming out with the next version of the gas engine, Camry and Tacoma and Tundra, they started really shaking up the company. Akia Toyota has been leading this and really trying to rethink everything based on a strategy for what they want to be and need to be 30 years out, 20 years out, 10 years out. And I started and it started to become very apparent that if they don't adapt and if they don't have a strategy that guides them, they're going to do a really good job of making products nobody's going to buy. And I also would see that in the factories, that the factories were responding to these pretty significant strategic changes happening at the top of the company and preparing for the future. So I realized what really drives the whole machine is first of all, your strategy, really understanding the market, understanding forces in the world, environmental, technical, social, political, and then that guides you. And then you need to be able to execute well and develop the products that the market needs and develop the production processes needed to produce the products and then develop the people to continuously improve the processes. So the whole thing, the whole system is connected, starting with understanding the environment and having a strategy. So I have now a strategy principle. It's principle 14. And the Hoshin Kanri is once you have the strategy, how do you deploy the strategy? So everybody knows their role in working toward it. And that's through Hoshin Kanri, which is now Principle 13. And I condensed the problem solving principles into Principle 12, which focuses now much more on scientific thinking and how you develop people to think scientifically.

I love it. Wow, this has been a fun interview, Jeff. And again, it's my privilege to have you on again. I want to thank you for everything you've done over the years and I'm sure you're not done yet thinking and learning and teaching, so I look forward to continuing to learn from you. So if folks want to connect with you, Jeff, what's the best way?

Well, I'm active on LinkedIn, so that's one way I don't think. I think my email is out there. So I get either LinkedIn messages or sometimes direct emails, which is what I respond to most quickly. Most people are surprised that it's not unusual that I get an email and I get at least a short response within like 10 seconds of getting the email. So I have now this Apple Watch that alerts me, oh boy, can't really get away. I'll be on the golf course and. And somebody else is hitting and I'm responding to emails. So anyway, I tend to respond quickly and it doesn't take me a lot of time. And I appreciate hearing from people and, you know, connecting to, you know, because sometimes you kind of feel like you're writing these books on your computer and then the somehow the books appear at Amazon. But is there anybody really reading them and paying attention to them? So it's good to know people are, it's making a difference.

Oh, it sure is. And they, and they sure are being read and they sure are making a difference. So again, thank you. So we're going to link to to all of Jeff's books and whatnot on the show. Notes folks can go to GembaPodcast.com this is episode 357. So Jeff, thank you again.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Yeah, hopefully we can connect again down the road. And yeah, keep up the great work.

Thank you. And for what you're doing at Gemba Academy, thank you.

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