Lean as an abnormality management system
Takehiko Harada, in his great Management Lessons from Taiichi Ohno, tells us that another way of looking at the Toyota Production System is as “abnormality management.”
Abnormality management means that:
- Abnormalities are visible and intuitive and management encourages revealing them rather than hiding them;
- Problems are formulated as a gap between what is (abnormal) and what should be the standard (normal)
- Root causes are sought out in order develop recurrence prevention, which, again, requires management leadership and support
- Countermeasures are studied to see 1) whether they worked and 2) what opportunities they reveal
Each of these steps require courage, creativity and persistence, such as these engineers building up “measles charts” to reveal all the problems customers experience with their new products, so as to fix them Just-in-time.
Abnormality management means saying “thank you” every time someone reveals a problem, rather than shooting the messenger. Abnormality management means asking “why?” when someone explains a problem rather than jump to a solution.
Our brains are hardwired to emphasize our successes and minimize our failures. Problems are instinctively dismissed by, first, justification (I didn’t have any other choice at the time) and then rationalization (in the end, this will turn out to be a good thing). Learning to see problems as friends to help us improve is not natural and, well, learned. To really progress on the gemba, we need to learn to see lean as an “abnormality management system”
