Ramblemuse Touch Points

Chet Richards, a protégé of the late military strategist John Boyd, recently wrote the book Certain to Win applying Boyd’s concepts to business competition. It’s a book well worth the reading. In a blog post titled “Can Boyd be implemented?“, Richards makes some profound comments on environment; comments that any institution dedicated to accomplishment, and particularly to innovation, should consider carefully. The comments come in the context of why attempts to emulate the Toyota Productions System (TPS) have met limited success.

The reason, as Jeffrey Liker points out in The Toyota Way, is that Toyota has evolved an organizational climate that supports the physical procedures. Perhaps its most important element is its emphasis on keeping employees engaged in the system. As one of the system’s originators, Taiichi Ohno, insisted, the TPS is fragile. It works only because people have to engage their gray matter and use their initiative and creativity. The company describes the kanban “pull” system, for example, this way:

The paperwork is minimal. The efficiency is maximal. And the employees themselves [as opposed to a centralized production control system] are completely in charge.

That is, if the employees didn’t commit to making the system work, it wouldn’t move at all. The Toyota Way is why they do it for Toyota and don’t for most other manufacturing companies. The other important point about the Toyota Way is that the system is always getting better at whatever it does. As one Toyota exec put it, whatever we do this year is baseline for next year. A lot of companies talk continuous improvement (kaizen), but few achieve it. Their organizational climates are why.

You can lock-down a research institution with numerous rules and procedures. But ultimately, you won’t end up with a research institution, merely a tightly controlled business. If there isn’t buy-in and a sense of control from those actually creating ideas and innovation, the entire system will be leak-free as much from the lack of anything worth containing as from impermeability. There’s another pertinent quote from John Sterman, that I’ve had on my home page for a while.

“Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenge managers and policy makers to learn at increasing rates, while at the same time the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing. Many of the problems we now face arise as unanticipated side effects of our own past actions. All too often the policies we implement to solve important problems fail, make the problem worse, or create new problems. Effective decision making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems thinkers—to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior.” — John D. Sterman, Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World.

Sterman also notes that often the full effects of a policy implementation are several years down the road. Once the hand is dealt, however, sooner or later the consequences get paid.