A3 Dojo: Share and Discuss A3s with Other Lean Thinkers

We’ve been teaching A3 problem solving to all our managers, but so far I fail to see any clear improvement of our problem solving ability. Is there a right way to teach A3?

LEI CEO and former Toyota Manager John Shook talks to Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University, about the application of lean concepts beyond manufacturing, common mistakes companies make in implementing lean management, and recent trends in continuous improvement applications. While at Toyota, Shook helped the automaker transfer its management system to the NUMMI joint venture with GM in Fremont, CA.

The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review have given LEI CEO John Shook the 2011 Beckhard Memorial Award for the best article on organizational development for a story he wrote on what he learned while at NUMMI.

In this article from Toyota Georgetown website Toyota executive Teruyuki Minoura, then-managing director of global purchasing, Toyota MotorCorporation, shares the nuts and bolts of Toyota practice that go into it's "thinking production system."

Full article access requires membership in the Society for Organizational Learning.

This Q&A with John Shook explains why he came to write Managing to Learn, why it exists in the format it is in, and deals with many frequently asked question from readers.

John Shook discusses lean thinking in baseball

During a visit to former colleagues at a Toyota engine plant, Art Smalley met no change agents or black belts, nor saw value-stream maps, or U-shaped cells. The reason, explains Smalley, a Toyota veteran and author of the Creating Level Pull workbook, is that Toyota's production system is not about tools but about reflecting long and hard on identifying the greatest need for improvement before reaching for a tool. It also devotes much more time to problem solving and developing people than most people realize.

A Financial Times review of Managing to Learn provides smart insights into the way that the A3 process is tied to a bigger system and method of doing business.

“The most fundamental use of the A3 is as a simple problem-solving tool. But the underlying principles and practices can be applied in any organizational settings. Given that the first use of the A3 as a tool is to standardize a methodology to understand and respond to problems, A3s encourage root cause analysis, reveal processes, and represent goals and action plans in a format that triggers conversation and learning." - John Shook, Lean Management column, Oct. 2008.

This post from the Gemba Panta Rei blog refers to a Nikkei Business interview with Nanpachi Hayashi of Toyota. Blogger Jon Miller provides context, and translates large sections, as a way to reveal details on Toyota’s methods of developing thinkers. What’s nice is the way even Hayashi acknowledges how challenging this is for everyone involved.

This e-letter by Dan Jones, founder of the Lean Enterprise Academy in the UK, explains precisely why, and how, A3 thinking can be a useful countermeasure to what is all too often conventional practice.

This Shingo Research Award Winner reveals the power between focusing on managing by means rather than managing by numbers, and how proper use of A3 thinking converts a well-designed business system into what is essentially a living system in nature.

In an op-ed opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, James P. Womack, founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, explains that Toyota "won" not because of car models but because of its business model. (Subscription needed to read the entire story.)

This quote from the article applies to the ideas in Managing to Learn: “What sets the non-health care leaders apart is that as they do their work, they are constantly learning how to do it better. Work is designed to reveal even little problems as they occur—well before they cause errors or near misses worthy of being reported. Managers responds to these problems immediately, with rapid experiments aimed at generating sustainable fixes, rather than with workarounds that are constantly repeated. The knowledge that results from this process is then shared through collaborative experimentation in which all employees take part.”

Companies often fail to implement Toyota's vaunted lean system successfully because they implement its elements piecemeal instead of as an integrated system and because they fail to train managers in how to make the system run. This Harvard Business Review story offers four basic lessons in training distilled from how Toyota prepared a rising American manager. (Follow the link for how to obtain the full article from HBR.)

Gary Convis, president, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, explains that the critical role of management in a lean company is to motivate and engage large numbers of people to work together toward a common goal. Defining and explaining the goal, how to achieve it, and helping people achieve it by removing obstacles "are management's reason for being," he tells SAE International.

Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen explain in the Harvard Business Review how the Toyota Production System can be tightly choreographed and supple. The key is that Toyota's operations are a series of controlled experiments based on the scientific method. (Follow the link for how to obtain the full article from HBR.)