Better Thinking Faster: Toyota Problem-Solving Secrets 

In the first half of their podcast Better Thinking Faster, Josh Howell, Mark Reich, and Art Smalley discussed solving problems just in time and how the speed of quality problem solving depends on the level of the organization and the types of problems to be found there. In this second half of the podcast, they examine unique traits of problem solving at Toyota that help employees — frontline to senior executives — solve problems better and faster, characteristics that many companies attempting to be lean fail to grasp. 

Create Experiential Learning 

Many leaders attempt to apply lean based on reading about it and the management processes and tools involved, says Art, Toyota veteran and author of Four Types of Problems. That’s helpful, but it lacks lean problem-solving experiences. For example, working on a line and solving many small problems daily provides formative learning within Toyota that’s carried forward as a team member advances into management and executive ranks.  

“Many of us who encounter these ideas later in life, when we’re at higher levels in our career and in our organizations, don’t always get that opportunity,” says Josh, LEI President. He admires Toyota for onboarding individuals, even white-collar executives, by throwing them onto the line “to work at that level of detail and all the opportunity that could be found therein, to just set a mindset that can be very useful to you even as you get into higher level, longer cycle time, more ambitious, more complex work.” 

So what is an executive, without Toyota-like onboarding and problem-solving experiences, supposed to do? Mark, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy and author of Managing on Purpose, says they can at least go to line, to where the work is done, and experience it by observing. He’s seen executives who, when going to the frontline, are astounded by “the amount of difficult, unnecessary, frustrating work that happens minute to minute, day to day.” That helps them to experience the precise nature of work and problems there, but they also must care “that people shouldn’t have to work that way, and people are working like that in many organizations. I think Toyota leaders cared, and not just about the shopfloor … but about everybody in the organization and that everybody in the organization had value-creating work.” 

Art sees it as LEI’s purpose to close the learning gap among leaders not coming out of Toyota and somehow help executives gain the experiences he and Mark encountered when working there: “Mark and I got it through line work, working in Toyota, and in our careers of seeing it at various levels. Other people need to kind of come to that awareness, have the fish scales removed from their eyes in different ways.” 

Examine the Process behind Outcomes 

Toyota’s unique approach to problem solving includes an obsession with going well beyond the cause of a problem to determine how a process or processes contributed to the outcome and cause. Art cites the example of a failed launch at one of Toyota’s overseas plants. Equipment vendor problems contributed to poor outcomes. Instead of citing “failed vendor, not our problem” and moving on, every aspect of the business pertaining to precision equipment that went to overseas operations was thoroughly analyzed to ensure the next overseas launch would be better than the last. It turns out a variety of documentation, support materials, and training that accompanied equipment going overseas was poor, and Toyota worked for a year or more to make it right. 

“Toyota is very good about thinking about the process that led to the end result,” says Art. “Most people want to be critical and criticize the end result. Toyota will go back, back, back, back, back. What were our initial assumptions and thought processes and conditions that led us down this path?” 

Mark and Art say this approach is not for Toyota to find blame, but to ensure it does not happen again: 5 Whys not the 5 Whos. 

Solve All Problems, Big and Small 

The trio discussed how Toyota veterans on the frontline are capable of repeatedly finding and solving hundreds of small problems in the work they have been doing for years. That extent of problem solving on the frontlines is much less common outside of Toyota, where there is likely to be an overemphasis on bigger leadership problems and decisions. 

“A lot of organizations look at the decisions and the problems that leaders are solving as key,” says Mark. “Toyota sees that the team member finding those 120 issues in their job is as important to the company as the CEO and the decisions they’re making.” 

Toyota wants to be solving small problems fast before they can become big problems. “A lot of organizations tend to wait [and] only have a system to solve problems once they’re big,” adds Mark. “But, in fact, if we can solve a hundred problems fast, like at lower levels in the organization, those are things that won’t become big problems.” 

In bringing the conversation back to its beginning, the trio discussed the differences of solving problems better and faster at the line and doing so in executive suites. “When you’re closer to the frontline, it’s much more explicit about what you need to do, but only if you frame the top well and cascaded things down, and a lot of organizations just don’t do that well,” says Art.  

One challenge outside of Toyota is honing problem-solving capabilities among those at the top, where there are longer, slower cycles of learning for executives compared to short cycles at the frontline, according to Art. For example, when working on an annual plan, the leader may only experience the cycle two or three times before moving on, without having had enough of a learning experience to reflect and improve the process. At the frontline, the cycle is measured in seconds and experienced countless times daily. “We’re not good, I fear, at the slower learning cycles because people just move around, and we don’t have the standards mechanism to capture it and think about.” 

“I can’t tell you the number of companies I’ve had the chance to interact with where the idea that, as an executive in particular, if you’re a successful, high-performing, rising-in-the-organization leader and executive, if you’re in the same job you’re in now three years later, it’s almost viewed as if you’re a defect,” says Josh. “Something must have been wrong with you that you didn’t get promoted or deployed to another lateral move more quickly.” 

Without consistency of leadership and the experiences that affords, any lean transformation will be more difficult.