Pull is the architecture for continuous improvement

21 January 2015 / article

Seventeen years ago, when I first saw a Toyota sensei come to a supplier, he went to a workstation in front of the assembled executive group, and watched the operator work for about ten minutes, before moving a box of components closer the operator’s hand. Then the sensei went to the meeting room and drew a simple diagram of the river and the rocks (translated by his interpreter) and… left. At the time, the execs where furious – they had been asked to come to the plant for this?
That was the most powerful message we ever got about lean, and Toyota worked for several years with this supplier to teach it how to improve the cells (kaizen) and how to pull (just-in-time). It took us many years to understand ‘the river and the rocks”: the pull system shows you where your problems are so that you can do kaizen effectively – in a way that pays at budget level. Furthermore, with pull, everyone can see the problems, so when local supervisors have the right attitude, they will, by themselves, focus on the right kaizen opportunities and solve the problem…
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Tags: gemba coach, lean, lean management, michael ballé

Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.