There’s an excellent article about the Toyota process on fastcompany.com. Most of the behaviours described are also desirable or necessary in teams or organisations trying to be[come] agile, but the key point is in the conclusion:
So you can buy the books, you can hire the consultants, you can implement the program, you can preach business transformation—and you can eventually run out of energy, lose enthusiasm, be puzzled over why the program failed to catch fire and transform your business, put the fat binders on a conference-room shelf, and go back to business as usual.
What happens every day at Georgetown, and throughout Toyota, is teachable and learnable. But it’s not a set of goals, because goals mean there’s a finish line, and there is no finish line. It’s not something you can implement, because it’s not a checklist of improvements. It’s a way of looking at the world. You simply can’t lose interest in it, shrug, and give up—any more than you can lose interest in your own future.
“People who join Toyota from other companies, it’s a big shift for them,” says John Shook, a faculty member at the University of Michigan, a former Toyota manufacturing employee and a widely regarded consultant on how to use Toyota’s ideas at other companies. “They kind of don’t get it for a while.” They do what all American managers do—they keep trying to make their management objectives. “They’re moving forward, they’re improving, and they’re looking for a plateau. As long as you’re looking for that plateau,it seems like a constant struggle. It’s difficult. If you’re looking for a plateau, you’re going to be frustrated. There is no ‘solution.'”
Even working at Toyota, you need that moment of Zen.
“Once you realize that it’s the process itself—that you’re not seeking a plateau—you can relax. Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing,” Shook says. “This is what it means to come to work.”
Another lesson for people using something like XP for the first time is that you should start by following the process first to understand how it works, and only then try to adjust it for your own circumstances:
And then there is the most basic rule, the reason “continuous improvement” is not a matter of character or national culture or willpower, but is itself a kind of assembly line. “The rule here is that improving something starts after understanding the standard—understanding how we do it now,” Gritton says. “If you don’t understand what you’re trying to improve, how do you know that your suggestion is an improvement?”
There’s also a note about concentrating on problems as opportunities for improvement, which is something we should all remember at stand-ups and retrospectives:
In Wiseman’s early days, Georgetown was run by Fujio Cho, now the chairman of Toyota worldwide. Every Friday, there was a senior staff meeting. “I started out going in there and reporting some of my little successes,” says Wiseman. “One Friday, I gave a report of an activity we’d been doing”—planning the announcement of a plant expansion—”and I spoke very positively about it, I bragged a little. After two or three minutes, I sat down.
“And Mr. Cho kind of looked at me. I could see he was puzzled. He said, ‘Jim-san. We all know you are a good manager, otherwise we would not have hired you. But please talk to us about your problems so we can all work on them together.'”
Wiseman says it was like a lightning bolt. “Even with projects that had been a general success, we would ask, ‘What didn’t go well so we can make it better?'” At Toyota, Wiseman says, “I have come to understand what they mean when I hear the phrase, ‘Problems first.'”
(Via Not waving but…).
[tags]agile, lean, Toyota[/tags]