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Sunday, May 17, 2020

Newsletter #47: Toyota Production System: An emergent system


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Interesting Articles
 
Toyota Production System: An emergent system

Recently, a short post on LinkedIn about Toyota Production System attracted netizens attention. Here is the actual post

During the earlier days, neither Taiichi Ohno or Shigeo Shingo or for that matter, anyone in Toyota had a vision of Toyota Production System.

As and when they came across challenges, they addressed by applying a set of rules and principles to create a flow and continuously improve.

More importantly, Taaichi Ohno focused on changing the underlying thinking of employees rather than purely building the product. This aspect of building employee's thinking seems to be the key differentiator between Ohno and Honda.

When you look around in organisations, there is more focus on processes, frameworks rather than actually uplifting employees ability to think.



Thought would elaborate this a bit more for the readers of this newsletter.   Fundamentally, the Toyota Production System (TPS) was not a designed system. It was an emergent system.  Neither Ohno nor other leaders at Toyota sat in an Air-conditioned room and drew it on the whiteboard.  Various tools and techniques emerged while trying to solve the problem. It is not the tools that are important, but the thinking that leads to the creation of the tools.

Even though the lean house distils into 2 pillars, respect for people and the continuous improvement, I still believe this is in retrospect.  Personally, I believe that Ohno and others were keenly focused on being at the "Gemba", ensuring that the value is delivered to the customers, teaching the employees to think rather than a specialist knowing everything, respecting the people by helping them on the ground rather than reviewing the reports.

Toyota faced several challenges both good and bad. The second world war pretty much gutted them. The survival made them to come up with practices to find a way to be productive with limited resources. The Korean war, created a good problem as they had more orders. They decided to be productive without hiring more people. The constraints of the war and economies of scale enabled the leaders in the organisation to be innovative.

I don't know if people know this, Toyota in-fact used to have a month-long batch cycle. Leaders called out the in-efficiency associated with the accumulated inventories and the variable queues. So, during each stage and in every different factory, the ideas emerged. It is the culture and the thinking that encouraged the people to think independently lead to the birth of the TPS. This was an emergent idea rather than a designed idea.

The introduction of the ideas was incremental rather than big-bang. The kanban system started only in a small group and within one assembly line. When it worked well, then it was introduced to others as they had dependencies as part of the manufacturing. 

Coming back to the modern world, in the 21st century, most of the western world has no dearth for money nor any constraints. This is not giving enough challenge for the organisations to make employees think.  If they want something, they buy a tool or a process or a framework in the market. As long as the organisations don't enable people to think, there will never be another Toyota Production System.


Further reading: The dagger and gift: Impact of Korean war on Japan

The origin of Lean Production
 

 
Interesting article: Why Managers Holding People Accountable Is A Waste Of Time, And What To Do Instead 

Link to the original article

Key snippets from the above article

How often do you hear yourself or someone else complain that this person or that person isn’t “being held accountable?” Or find yourself mustering up the gumption to “hold that person accountable?” It’s really a fool’s errand. At the end of the day, personal accountability is the only real accountability. So that means you can’t really hold other people accountable.

Own your role as a manager. When you take on the role and responsibility of being a manager of others, you have to own what happens on your watch. When a manager points the finger at their employees, they instantly lose credibility with their leadership and their team.

Help people face the reality of the outcomes they are producing. Instead of trying to hold employees accountable, focus on helping them deal with the reality that they are creating. Avoid the lectures that start with a list of “shoulds.” You should do this and you should do that only makes the person feel nagged or lectured. It rarely leads to higher levels of accountability.

Make it safe to surface issues early and often. As a manager, it’s critical to make sure people feel safe to discuss and learn from mistakes. Most issues get blown way out of proportion or are allowed to fester for so long the damage is irrevocable.

 

 
Interesting article: Transforming from Projects to Products

Link to the original article

Key snippets from the above article
 

Agile Transformation is about moving from Management to Leadership

Peter Drucker is an inspiration here, traditionally we put so much effort into getting things right, to be more efficient, or to do this, by that deadline, that we forgot to ask if what we are  doing is bringing value. We put all our emphasis on measuring and monitoring effort, or efficiency, rather than assessing if we are achieving our goal.
If you are considering an Agile Transformation it is likely that you have discovered that efforts to 'manage' projects are leading to the wrong results and the focus needs to move from a focus on effort to a focus on value. To set a direction and 'lead' the way in product development.  Try to stop measuring output and to start measuring outcomes.
 

Upcoming Events
 
Look forward to public courses in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and India in 2020.  Possibly expanding to other countries.


I have started online training for Certified LeSS Basics.   If you or your friends are keen, feel free to reach out to me or check this link


Many might not know that I also offer Certified LeSS Executive trainingThis is specifically for senior leaders who might be interested in learning the intricacies of management and structure to influence the culture. 


Please reach out:  venky at agileworld.com.au for further details.
 


About Empirical Coach

If you are interested in Agile coaching, mentoring and training services, please reach out to me (venky@agileworld.com.au). We have a team of passionate coaches collaboratively working together and could help.


Our team has deep expertise in Agile, Lean, Systems Thinking and Complexity science. We look at challenges from different angles and apply tools from various schools of thoughts. This is different from the cookie-cutter approaches you see around.  We are proud to be different.


I have been deeply involved in many of the initial experiments that lead to the birth of LeSS, one of the countable number of people globally.  

Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter 



Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Newsletter #46: Myth of Servant Leadership

Interesting Articles
 
Systems Thinking in the context of COVID
 
Everyone seems to be impacted due to COVID in someways or the other.  Whatever is happening around will have a deep and long-lasting impact on societies, technologies and the economy.

We could see many large companies struggling to survive and potentially could go bankrupt. At the same time, I am also hearing the government rescuing the economy in different ways. It is a piece of good news and a great gesture by the governments to jump in to save many drowning companies, it is also important to see if it is not "shifting the burden".

If you have read Senge's Fifth Discipline, you would have read about "Shifting the burden" Archetype. It usually begins with a problem symptom and someone attempts to rescue it.  This, in turn, gives an immediate relief however, it won't address the root cause of the problem. The problem stays hidden. The survivor is re-inforced with the belief that rescuer is always there to protect. This keeps weakening the system until it reaches point of no return.

Applicability in the typical product development scenario 

Here is a wonderful snippet from Senge

“Crisis heroism”: When a crisis (such as delays in a product launch) hits, the “crisis” manager is given enormous flexibility to “do whatever it takes” to get the product out. Ordinary roadblocks and formalities are swept aside. All this comprises the upper, symptom-correcting loop: the product is launched on time, and the crisis manager is touted as the hero of the day.

Meanwhile, several people have suggested the more fundamental solution of the bottom loop: redesigning the entire project management system, and rethinking the ordinary roadblocks and formalities. But this strategy would take longer, and less attention is given to it, so it has less effect on the problem symptom.”

“Most cases of “crisis heroism” include an addictive side effect: People see that if they want to be recognized for an accomplishment, they’ll have to be “heroes,” too. Gradually, the company becomes addicted to “heroically” creating crises at the expense of making fundamental long-term changes.”


Now coming back to the current COVID situation, if the government and the organisations jump into rescue everything without thinking through, they are just shifting the problem and creating an addictive behaviour which is harmful to the economy in the long run.


Further reading: https://blog.iseesystems.com/systems-thinking/shifting-the-burden/
 

 
Interesting article: Myth of Servant Leadership 

https://www.academia.edu/14264417/The_Myth_of_Servant_Leadership

Key snippets from the above article

Servant Leadership (S-L)

According to Larry Spears, a chief advocate of S-L who is responsible for marketing Greenleaf s ideas, the concept of S-L came to Greenleaf upon reading Hermann Hesse's short novel.  Journey to the East.

Hesse's story is an account of a mythical journey by a group of people on a spiritual quest where the recognition of the true leader of the group takes place as a result of his acts of service and self-sacrifice for the benefit of the whole group. As Spears tells it, upon reading this story, it seemed suddenly clear to Greenleaf that a great leader is first experienced as a servant to others, and this simple fact is central to his or her greatness . . . true leadership emerges from those whose primary motivation is a deep desire to help others(3).

Accordingly, for those who adopt its basic tenets, it means developing an overall attitude toward leadership that entails putting the needs of the company and employees first. It means seeing yourself foremost as a steward (Block) of the organization's mission and goals and then acting as a leader to help others coUaborativelyachieve those goals. Since its language explicitly promotes an approach to leadership that is essentially altruistic and idealistic, many proponents think it signals a turn toward the spiritual search in contemporary managerial practices 


The argument against S-L seems to be as follows:

The term servant connotes a subjugation of an existential subject that is dependent upon the presence of a master for his/her social location and organizational life. The term servant thus represents a state of submission, complete with various degrees of oppressive ramifications and power imbalances.

"To - serve" means to be self-sacrificing. The act of serving thus makes the organizational member subject to the whims and/or dictates of a higher order of discursive structures. To counteract this negative connotation of the term servant, Greenleaf paired it with the term leader, which entails and authorizes its opposite-the masterful position. The word servant thus inhibits whatever negative connotation leader evokes and conversely(Forward 145-165). From a semiotic point of view, the terms are mutually constraining, rhetorically. When organizational leaders attempt to implement this fluctuating logic within everyday organizational practices, it produces corresponding shifts in the discursive rules of the game 


Read rest of the newsletter here



If you like this newsletter, please share it with your friends. You can subscribe to the newsletter here
 

 
Upcoming Events
 
Look forward to public courses in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and India in 2020.  Possibly expanding to other countries.


I have started online training for Certified LeSS Basics.   If you or your friends are keen, feel free to reach out to me.


Many might not know that I also offer Certified LeSS Executive trainingThis is specifically for senior leaders who might be interested in learning the intricacies of management and structure to influence the culture. 


Please reach out:  venky at agileworld.com.au for further details.
 


A bit about Empirical Coach

If you are interested in Agile coaching, mentoring and training services, please reach out to me (venky@agileworld.com.au). We have a team of passionate coaches collaboratively working together and could help.


Our team has deep expertise in Agile, Lean, Systems Thinking and Complexity science. We look at challenges from different angles and apply tools from various schools of thoughts. This is different from the cookie-cutter approaches you see around.  We are proud to be different.


I have been deeply involved in many of the initial experiments that lead to the birth of LeSS, one of the countable number of people globally.  

Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter