Eduardo, great famous quote from Ohno. However, even though he says “first, you must change the way you think”. It’s possible that he was one of those rare individuals that was able, just by thinking about it, to create a new mental model of how to produce cars. Even if that were true, that’s not how most people change the way that they think about anything. So, the question is, do you think yourself into a new way of acting, or do you act your way into a new way of thinking?

How an organization thinks about anything (called beliefs) drives how the people behave regarding that subject. This is what we call culture. And when they get the results that they expect from their behavior, that reinforces those beliefs in their minds.

The premise of kaizen is to learn by doing. You identify a problem and then experiment with different solutions that yield better results than your current method of doing things. This iterative learning process of experimentation and creating better results is what changes culture…what is called Kaizen.

Morris Massey teaches us that people change their behavior in response to a “significant emotional event”. When a setup operator is part of a kaizen that, in the course of five days, reduces the amount of time to do that setup by 90% (the typical result at Wiremold) that is a “significant emotional event” for that individual. The typical initial response of the setup operator before the kaizen is “it can’t be done”. The typical response at the end of the successful kaizen is “WOW”. That occurs on virtually every kaizen and is why Art stresses having many kaizens every month…it’s a form of shock therapy that helps the organization to learn that there is a better way by acting themselves into a new way of thinking…and therefore changing the culture of the company.

“If you are going to do TPS (or Lean/Kaizen), FIRST, you must change the way you think. You need to change how you look at things.”
— Taiichi Ohno

“Preparing the soil is necessary before seeding Lean. Otherwise, no change will ever happen”
–Hitoshi Yamada (Taiichi Ohno’s Protégé). They both knew what it took to implement TPS right in sustainable way within Toyota

Thank you for sharing