“If you look at the Toyota Production System simplistically, it’s about making problems and improvement opportunities visible to workers and management, and addressing them as close to the source as possible. Consequently, there was enormous transparency, and we all were taught the specific thinking for solving problems as they arose during our daily production.” 

The Toyota Engagement Equation by Tracy & Ernie Richardson (McGraw Hill, 2017) p. 4.

Note from Ray: Unfortunately, the “specific thinking” for good problem-solving doesn’t come naturally for most of us. We must “train our brains” to avoid assumptions, carefully examine all the evidence, and conduct experiments to confirm our ideas and problem-solutions. One major step of becoming lean is to develop our people into an “Army of Problem-Solvers.” Another major step is to create a system to bring problems to the surface and select the most important ones to work on.

I plan to continue the “Problem-Solving” theme in this week’s blog posts.