Jidoka to learn to work better

11 September 2016 / article

If you want to learn to be better at your job, Jidoka is the right approach: when you have a doubt, stop, call, think and fix. Now.

In everything we do, we create some value and generate some waste – both for us, and for others downstream. Essentially, we make mistakes that then have to be corrected. The difficulty is that although we can see the effects of the mistake, it’s hard to see what we’re actually doing wrong (and our stone age brains tend to blame others for mistakes rather than see clearly our own part in this).

The principle of “don’t accept a bad part, don’t make a bad part, don’t pass on a bad part” is key to focusing on what we’re doing wrong as we do it.

This teaches us to recognize mistakes as they happen and has two effects:

Output: first, obviously, it improves output as it reduces the overall number of mistakes and so generates less waste
Outcome: second, more importantly, it improves outcomes in allowing us to look more deeply into what we do and understand what works and what doesn’t work.

Practicing Jidoka is the key to discovering the hidden rules to the work and finding a deeper understanding of the job in a variety of circumstances.

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Don’t face problems alone. When in doubt, don’t push on or work around the problem. Stop, call someone, observe and discuss, think deeply and fix the issue right away. This is how you teach yourself to becoming better at what you do, better at working with colleagues and better at doing your job as a whole.

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.