Raising the Floor and the Ceiling: How Toyota Turned Practical Wisdom into Curriculum 

Nampachi Hayashi was what many at Toyota would call a master of the Toyota Production System, someone who could walk onto a floor, see what was happening, and know immediately what to do. His offer to Hiro Yoshiki, who co-authored Courage, Humility, Kaizen: The Three Disciplines of Toyota Leadership with me, was generous: “Hiro-san, come to me and ask any question. I will give you the answer.”  

Hiro responded, “Hayashi-san, if there are hundreds of you, maybe your approach is good, but you are only one person, and we have 40 or 50 operations all over the world. We can’t afford for just you, one person, to handle every problem in the world. So you have to be able to explain it so we can teach it.”  

For decades, Toyota developed people hip to hip at the genba. There was some formal training inside Toyota in Japan, but much of the deepest know-how passed from sensei to learner while they worked on real problems. When Toyota opened its first North American plants in the 1980s, very little of that know-how had been written down. This apprenticeship produced people with remarkable skill, but it could not produce enough of them, fast enough, once Toyota began expanding quickly around the world in the 1990s.  

Toyota’s answer was to take the practical wisdom its most experienced people had built up over generations and turn it into curriculum. If the basics could be written down, taught, and practiced, everyone could become more skilled. Learning would no longer depend on who you happened to work beside. 

Kentucky Plant Reveals the Flaw 

Toyota learned this at its own flagship. When Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK) started production in 1988, Toyota gave it the best equipment and a large team of Japanese coordinators and trainers. Early results were strong, and the plant won several J.D. Power quality awards. Then it grew fast. Through the mid- to late-1990s, people were promoted before they were ready, and the management ranks were stretched thin. The people running the plant were still proud of those early awards, and they stopped pushing to improve. By the end of the decade, the plant was in serious trouble.  

Each time things went wrong, Toyota sent help from Japan, even after the first and second generations of coordinators had gone home. At times, more than 200 people came back to support the plant. Hiro, who had served at TMMK as a coordinator from 1989 to 1995, describes what happened: “They observed, they tried to retrain people, but what usually happened was they jumped into the situation themselves and fixed things directly. Quality came back to a good level. After they left, the knowledge and the problem-solving capability had not been transferred. The operation started eroding again. This repeated two, three times.” 

His conclusion: “There had been too much dependency on the Japanese coordinators and trainers. The transfer of Toyota’s methods and philosophy to local management had not gone deep enough.” 

You could call it a failure. Toyota sent its most experienced people to Kentucky more than once, and the deep capability didn’t stay when they left. But Toyota looked at the results, saw that the approach wasn’t working, and changed it. That’s PDCA, applied to the way a company teaches. Hiro returned to TMMK in 2000, and he and Gary Convis, who became the plant’s first American president in 2001, led the work of rebuilding its management system and making it self-reliant. Self-reliance was the explicitly goal. Under Toyota’s Global Vision 2010, the North American operations were expected to run without depending on coordinators from Japan. By 2003, support from Toyota trainers in Japan had fallen by more than 80% from its peak. Putting the special knowledge of people like Hayashi into a global curriculum was part of how Toyota meant to make that last. 

Getting Knowledge Out of People’s Heads 

Changing the approach meant writing down what had always been passed along by example, and the veterans often pushed back. Many had learned through years of apprenticeship and believed that was the only real way to learn. Hayashi was also busy, and Hiro’s requests for his time went unanswered. Finally, Hiro asked Fujio Cho, then president of Toyota, to write Hayashi a letter. Once a letter came from Cho, Hiro says, Hayashi couldn’t say no. Koki Konishi, a manager in International HR in Japan working under Hiro’s direction, then met with Hayashi on Saturdays, interviewed him for hours, and got his stories and thinking down on paper. The goal was to capture how he thought: what he looked for first at the genba, how he separated fact from assumption, and the sequence of questions he used to find a root cause.  

One early result was a course called Practical Problem Solving, a forerunner of Toyota Business Practices (TBP). It was an attempt to put the thinking of Hayashi and others like him into a curriculum that could give thousands of people some degree of his skill. Not all of it, but enough to lift the whole organization.  

The Hayashi story is one example of how Toyota did this. Practical Problem Solving was one of the first of these efforts. In North America, it was in use early on at NUMMI, at Toyota’s plant in Canada, and in Kentucky. In the early to mid-2000s, it was followed by a set of global programs built on the same idea: The Toyota Way 2001, TBP, the Floor Management Development System, and fundamental skills training. I was involved in two of them: Hiro and I designed the local rollout of The Toyota Way 2001 at TMMK, and I was part of the team that designed and piloted TBP. Over time, those programs gave managers in places like Kentucky a shared language and a structured way to see problems, track daily performance, and coach their own teams instead of waiting for advisors from Japan to rescue them.  

Skills on the Shop Floor 

The same thinking applied to physical skills on the production line. Toyota’s Global Production Center (GPC) set up fundamental skills dojos — simulation training — for manufacturing areas like assembly, paint, and body. Each dojo taught the best way to do the most basic skills in that area, based on what generations of Toyota people had learned, and team members practiced those skills off the line before they were released to production. That shortened the time it took a new team member to become fully trained, though by how much varied with the complexity of the work in each department. The GPC supported regional production centers around the world, and the regions supported each plant’s training. 

Raising the Floor and the Ceiling 

Hip-to-hip coaching still had a place, and curriculum made it better. When the basics can be taught and practiced offline, the sensei doesn’t have to spend years on them. The learner shows up already knowing the fundamentals, so the coaching at the genba starts at a higher level and can go further. Curriculum raises the floor for the front line. The sensei, with more time for what only a sensei can teach, raises the ceiling. 

Raising the floor and the ceiling requires leadership to apply three lessons: 

• Judge the support you get by what it leaves behind: The teams Toyota sent to Kentucky fixed the problems in front of them. It looked like success until they went home. If your most skilled people solve problems faster than they build capability in others, the gains leave with them. 

• Draw out and codify what people know: The most skilled people are usually the busiest, and many believe their skill can only be learned the way they learned it. It took a letter from Cho to move Hayashi from fixing to communicating, and someone skilled in HR to draw out what he knew. In most organizations, that knowledge stays in people’s heads unless senior leaders make capturing it a priority.  

• Teach the basics offline, then prove them at the genba: Look at how your best coaches spend their time. Whatever goes to fundamentals can be written down, taught, and practiced away from the work before people step into the live process. Classroom and dojo practice never replace the genba, where real capability is tested, but they prepare people to learn much faster once they get there. 

A Question to Ask Yourself 

Many organizations with a few years of lean experience have a Hayashi, the one or two people everyone calls when something goes wrong. What would happen if that person left tomorrow? If you don’t like the answer, you’re in the same spot Toyota was in. For Toyota, getting out of that trap took the humility to admit that its best people couldn’t carry the system alone, the courage to insist that they help teach it, and the discipline of kaizen to turn personal wisdom into a standard everyone could learn and repeatedly improve.