Josh Howell and Mark Reich, LEI President and Chief Engineer Strategy, respectively, talk with Sal Sanchez, a Toyota veteran and TPS coach with LEI. Sal’s Toyota career began at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), the GM/Toyota joint venture and Toyota’s first automotive footprint in the United States, and continued with roles at Toyota North American headquarters and TSSC (Toyota Supplier Support Center, where he worked with Mark in the late-1990s) as well as Dana Corp. Across his career he’s learned from Toyota leaders and other notable lean mentors, including Gary Convis, which has, in turn, enabled him to help many organizations apply the Toyota Production System (TPS) and TPS fundamentals such as problem-solving and daily management.

Sal describes his pursuit of all things problem-solving while rising up through Toyota, including his role as a team leader supporting others with problem-solving issues that surfaced throughout the day, especially when an andon cord was pulled and solutions needed to be developed and applied quickly. Sal counters some misconceptions regarding andon pulls, noting that it does not necessarily stop a line; it does, however, create urgency for team leaders to quickly assist and, in many instances, gives team members a brief window of opportunity to solve the problem on their own. Sal says the andon was frequently pulled where he worked, which was a good thing, and reminds Mark that most companies don’t focus on problems until they get big while at Toyota many little problems are being addressed “minute to minute and day to day so that they don’t become big problems.”

While a team leader, Sal also sought to more deeply understand the problems team members were going through and learned this by doing the jobs they did and experiencing what they went through, earning respect of team members along the way. He carried that approach beyond Toyota and has supplemented it with additional ideas to engage and empower team members, including basic problem-solving skills for frontline associates and giving team members trend charts and templates to support their problem-solving. As Sal works today with companies trying to apply TPS, he continues to encourage a focus on culture and developing people and frontline leaders — “invest in your people.”

Learn more about lean thinking and practice and lean.org.

Josh Howell, LEI President, talks about the relationship of problem-solving and daily management with Jill Miller, Manager for Global Learning and Development at MillerKnoll, a maker of office furniture, equipment, and home furnishings. Jill supports the development, use, and expansion of the MillerKnoll Performance System (MKPS), which she says is designed to meet customers’ needs by engaging and developing people to daily surface and solve problems. “At its heart, it’s really about building capability across the organization.”

Josh and Jill describe their experiences with how an effective daily management system makes it easy and straightforward for organizations to know what problems they should be solving. “One of the most powerful things about MKPS is that it helps make problems visible every day, right where the work is happening,” says Jill. “So when people ask, ‘What problem do we need to solve?’ the system actually helps answer that by revealing the problems that might otherwise go unnoticed. I think at that point, the problems are plentiful. There’s no shortage of problems.”

MKPS intentionally sets up both the system and culture to support daily problem-solving by:

• Designing work to clearly show abnormalities and make them visible in real time,
• Making it easy and safe for individuals to quickly highlight problems (people are not blamed or ignored),
• Providing a prompt, supportive reaction to an associate’s call for help (an “andon call”), and
• Ensuring the problems that are surfaced actually get solved; team leaders (called “facilitators” at MillerKnoll) are developed to be skilled in practical problem-solving, identifying root causes, and eliminating problems in ways that keep them from recurring.

The two also discuss the development of ongoing MKPS expertise within MillerKnoll: building capability in a way that is standardized so that MKPS is effectively executed in a consistent manner. This involves a partnership between the MKPS leadership team, operations leaders, and the human resources group that supports operations for selecting individuals to train (“students”), creating alignment based on behaviors and characteristics, and reflecting on the learning process and its effectiveness. Jill says students have called the development program “life changing” — who they are as a person, how they think, how they see their roles, how they interact with people, and how they approach their careers within the company.

Josh Howell, LEI President, Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, and Art Smalley discuss the four basic types of problem-solving. Art is a well-known expert in leadership, management, and the Toyota Way. He worked at Toyota Motor Corp. in Japan; helped to transform Donnelly Corp. in Michigan; was a consultant with McKinsey & Co.; and has authored several award-winning books, including Four Types of Problems.

The trio set out to discuss how the framework of the four types of problems maps onto the lean management system explained in Mark’s recent book about hoshin kanri, Managing on Purpose, as well as daily management in Toyota, leadership, culture, and other related topics. The systematic intersection of these topics is a complex subject beyond just the simpler notion of “tools.” Art and Mark share respective viewpoints from their time at Toyota in Japan and what made the system so unique while trying to connect the dots of four types of problems, hoshin kanri, and other areas.

Josh kicks off the podcast by asking Art and Mark to examine in detail troubleshooting — the most frequent and possibly most misunderstood type of problem-solving. A good troubleshooting environment involves quickly attacking known problems with known solutions to get operations back to normal (i.e., how to mitigate issues that prevent achievement of near-term goals). They also review troubleshooting’s relationship with the other types of problem-solving and the “flavors” of the types — gap from standard (how to prevent a problem from recurring by eliminating its underlying root causes), target condition (kaizen to elevate the standard), and open-ended (innovations and breakthrough thinking) — as well as the complex interaction of the four types with daily management and hoshin kanri.

Learn more about a lean management system and the connection between problem-solving, daily management, and hoshin kanri: lean.org/LMP