Problem Solving By Design
By Michael S. Hopkins
July 1, 2009
In his book Managing to Learn, John Shook deconstructs the problem-solving journey of one manager and his mentor, and the management mechanism that guided them. The backstory? Shook knows the journey firsthand.
In 1983, a young American named John Shook went to Japan to work for Toyota. He’d been to Japan before, was a student of lean management principles, and was already attracted to Japanese ideas about process improvement, quality and distributed responsibility. But (he admits this now) he still didn’t know what he was getting into. He was about to encounter The Way.
The leading question
At Toyota, John Shook learned the A3 problem-solving process from the inside. What surprised him?
Findings
- Almost always, the problem you face is different from the one you thought you were facing.
- Most of us are so eager to find (and deliver) the solution to a problem that we jump to conclusions instead of truly investigating to the problem’s root.
- The A3 process provides a framework for learning in the “place where the work occurs.”
Shook was the only Westerner in Toyota City then, and he was initiated and trained like any other fresh arrival — hammered into shape on the forge of something called the A3 report. “Every newly hired college-graduate employee began learning his job by being coached through the A3 process,” Shook recalls. “The employee would arrive at his new desk to find waiting for him a problem, a mentor and a process for learning how to...
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