More Force or Less Friction?

I want to share an excerpt from a book I’ve been reading recently. The book is called ‘The Great Mental Models — Volume 2’. It was a pleasant surprise for me when I read the story about Toyota and how they invented a new assembly process; one that was based in improving the efficiency of the system not by adding more ‘Force’, but by simply reducing the ‘Friction’.

It goes like this…

In the 1940s, Toyota, the Japanese car company, was struggling to survive after the war. Japanese government expectations were that financial support and success meant exports, which meant being internationally competitive. Studying the mass production system of the North American car manufacturers, Toyota knew it wouldn’t work for them. They didn’t have the initial capacity to get a machine of that size functioning. But they noticed something else. Mass production produced a lot of waste, was inefficient because it deferred the addressing of mistakes to the end of the line where they were most costly to fix, and took an exceptionally long time to change when a new production model of car came out. Toyota development guru Taiichi Ohno thought there was room for improvement. One of his insights was to focus on the environment of the frontline worker.

He saw that output could be significantly affected by reducing the friction happening at that level. “If workers failed to anticipate problems before they occurred, and didn’t take the initiative to devise solutions, the work of the whole factory could easily come to a halt.” Therefore, getting more effective output from the shop floor worker was not about speeding up performance or setting higher quotas. It was about creating a smoother environment that empowered workers to engage with their work.

One of the things that Ohno noticed in the mass production system was that “none of the specialists beyond the assembly worker was actually adding value to the car. What’s more, Ohno thought that assembly workers could probably do most of the functions of the specialist and do them much better because of their direct acquaintance with conditions on the line”. A first step was to change the behavior on the line by including responsibilities like minor repairs and qualify checking. Every worker was given the ability to stop the line “if a problem emerged that they couldn't fix.”

As James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos explain in The Machine That Changed the World, “In striking contrast to the mass production plant, where stopping the line was the responsibility of the senior line manager, Ohno placed a cord above every workstation and instructed workers to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that they couldn't fix. Then the whole team would come over to work on the problem.” Pulling this “Andon cord” created a lot of immediate friction — like going from water to cement in a second — but allowed for mistakes on the line to be addressed immediately. Furthermore, the day was arranged so that time was set aside for workers to share ideas on how to improve processes. All of these changes were about reducing the friction of the worker environment in the long term.

The result of the changes to the assembly line was a system that produced cars that needed less rework at the end. So even though “every worker can stop the line… the line is almost never stopped, because problems are solved in advance and the same problem never occurs twice.”

This system resulted in a process called “Lean”. It is immensely popular and is followed by almost every organization dealing in software technology today; as well as other industries.

But I want to highlight some important points from this excerpt that I take away with me.

• Make every person on the floor responsible, by allowing them to take actions for defining the plan towards achieving the final goal.
• Pay attention to the challenges of the worker at the frontline. It helps reduce the Friction, which in the long term would provide higher output when you’re ready to exert more Force.
• Always stop to figure out the challenge as-and-when-it-comes. It will always be cheaper to fix it then and there instead of doing it towards the end.