toyota learning organization case study

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A Look into Toyota's Learning Organization

In the Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker (2004), the book’s author identifies 14 management principles that make Toyota the world’s greatest manufacturer. One of these 14 principles is “Become a Learning Organization.” Many have tried to become learning organizations, but, according to Liker, no one has succeeded like Toyota. Toyota’s learning organization has three key elements according to Liker; I will touch on each of them:

Identify root causes and develop countermeasures. Toyota identifies root causes primarily using a very simple method called the “five why’s.” This simply entails asking the question “why?” as many times as possible to determine the root cause of a problem:

Figure A (Source: Peter R. Scholtes, The Leader’s Handbook, McGraw-Hill, 1998)

Use hansei : Responsibility, self-reflection, and organizational learning. In a nutshell, this concept is about reflecting on mistakes/weaknesses and devising ways to improve. Hanseiis a concept that Toyota uses as a practical improvement tool like kaizen . Toyota actually conducts hansei events (like kaizen events ) to improve products and processes. As hansei is utilized, the improvements are fed back into the organization and disseminated.

Utilize policy deployment (hoshin kanri). This is Toyota’s process of cascading objectives from the top of the company down to the work group level. Aggressive goals start at the top level and each level develops objectives to support these goals. Many systems like this are being used at companies across the United States, but often they are failures because the objectives rarely support important company goals; they usually are put in place to ensure that an individual gets his/her incentive! At Toyota, objectives are always measurable and concrete, and they always support executive-level/company goals. The process as it permeates the organization follows the simple PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) process. This ensures that the success is being measured and monitored on a regular basis. 

The last point that Liker makes regarding Toyota’s learning organization is the number of years it has taken for Toyota to achieve its success. For example, it took Toyota more than a decade to build an organization that even comes close to the learning organization it has in Japan. Toyota succeeds as a learning organization ultimately because it has relentlessly pursued success rather than pursued several “flavors of the month” over years with little results.

About the author: Darren Dolcemascolo is an internationally recognized lecturer, author and consultant. As senior partner and co-founder of EMS Consulting Group, he specializes in productivity and quality improvement through lean manufacturing . Dolcemascolo has written the book Improving the Extended Value Stream: Lean for the Entire Supply Chain , published by Productivity Press in 2006. He has also been published in several manufacturing publications and has spoken at such venues as the Lean Management Solutions Conference, Outsourcing World Summit, Biophex, APICS and ASQ. He has a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering from Columbia University and an MBA with graduate honors from San Diego State University. To learn more, visit www.emsstrategies.com or call 866-559-5598.

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Unearthing the Mystery of Toyota’s Success

I f you’re involved in lean work in any capacity, whether in management, as a coach, or as a participant in lean events, the book Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results (McGrawHill, 2009) by Mike Rother is a game changer. Rother unearths a deep mystery about Toyota’s success—the secret of what makes it a real-life example of a learning organization, not just at the senior level, but all the way to team leaders and team members. In a research tour de force, he succeeds in capturing the double-loop learning mechanism that Toyota has developed. To cap it off, Rother illustrates Toyota’s vaunted managerial practices simply and with great examples.

Beyond shedding light on lean, this book offers deep insight into how learning mechanisms can feed into business strategy to avoid the problem of creating grand visions that turn out to be grandly wrong. I suspect (or at least hope) that Rother’s insights will open the door to another form of strategy formulation for organizations of all kinds.

Toyota As a Learning Organization

As a student of organizational learning, I find it hard to resist the attraction of Toyota’s management model; over the years, the firm has developed a unique approach explicitly based on learning, both at the detail and strategic levels. In particular, it has developed practices and processes to:

Linking the quality of problem solving and learning to the presence of a coach sheds a new light on why Toyota is so much better than any other company at solving both detailed and strategic problems.

• Contextualize learning by constantly insisting on genchi genbutsu: going to the real place to see the facts at their source. Indeed, it’s well known that true information needs both context and data, just as knowledge needs both information and understanding. By making “go and see” the cornerstone of its managerial approach, Toyota has developed a process deeply imbedded in reality, in which decisions are based on the understanding of problems and their real-life impacts.
• Create learning labs in the day-to-day work environment. As with double-loop learning, the learning lab is a recurring feature in organizational learning approaches, but the many attempts have mostly been tried offline as simulations (either real-life or with computers). Toyota, on the other hand, has developed a practice of structuring any working environment as a “learning lab” through its knowhow of visual management. Any operator can see from her environment whether she is ahead or late, doing a good job or not, and how to call for help if the slightest thing seems strange. In this way, she can either learn her job in greater detail or make a suggestion for improvement.
• Use the systemic nature of supply chain environments as a key to learning rather than suffer from endemic Forrester effects (growing oscillation over time). By developing “pull systems,” Toyota has learned to link all steps of the chain in a smooth flow, along with the discipline to do so. Pull systems across the value stream act both as an architecture to improvement and as platforms for cross-functional problem solving.
• Share knowledge. The practical understanding of systemic interactions in the company has led it to focus explicitly on knowledge sharing both up and down the line and across functions. Most of this knowledge sharing occurs though joint problem-solving sessions in which people from different locations and backgrounds confront their perspectives and develop new ones.
• Constantly create knowledge, from detailed kaizen (continuous improvement) to radical innovation. To a large extent, it can be argued that kaizen in its many forms is Toyota’s management method; it is applied all the way from operators improving their workstations to top executives committing to develop the car of the future. This fundamental commitment to the scientific method of observation (genchi genbutsu), theory formulation (standards), focusing on anomalies (problems), experimenting (kaizen), measuring (check), and reformulating and generalizing (yokoten) is the engine of progress in the firm’s management approach.

In Toyota Kata, Rother touches on these various aspects of organizational learning. He argues that the way Toyota implements this framework is by having standardized its problem-solving approach and teaching its employees how to use it again and again, under various conditions, in the pursuit of an ideal or “true north.”

This is quite a profound take on the learning process, one that has already been illustrated in various ways by other Toyota observers (and Rother himself in other writings). To my mind, Rother’s deepest contribution is in highlighting the importance of coaching in problem solving (turning single loop learning into double-loop learning). Toyota’s problem solving does not occur in a vacuum, but under the guidance and control of a coach who makes sure the problem-solving process itself progresses with every cycle.

This insight explains many enigmatic aspects of Toyota’s organization, such as its use of senseis or “coordinators.” It also illuminates a share of its current difficulties, as it has grown much faster than its capacity to grow a stock of such coaches. Linking the quality of problem solving and learning to the presence of a coach sheds a new light on why Toyota is so much better than any other company at solving both detailed and strategic problems.

In many ways, this book can be seen either as the result of 20 years of research on Toyota and the Toyota Production System or as one of the breakthrough stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking. Thumbs up!

Michael Ballé is associate researcher at Telecom ParisTech and managing partner of ESG Consultants. For the past 15 years, he has focused on how companies use lean techniques to develop a lean culture as part of his research on knowledge-based performance and organizational learning. He has 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 two business novels, The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager. Michael is co-founder of the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France.

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• Toyota Problems and Solutions Words: 3923
• Toyota Motor Company: Marketing Plan Words: 2914
• The Importance of Organizational Learning Words: 549
• Toyota Company’s Total Quality Management Words: 2008
• Toyota Company’s Lean Leadership Principles Words: 1201
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• Toyota Corporation: Organizational Assessment Words: 1201
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Toyota Company: Organizational Learning and Solving Problems

Introduction, genchi genbutsu, deeply understanding and reporting correctly, trust and leaders’ involvement, decision making, a learning organization, the lisa jones case and pdca cycle.

Leadership requires detailed information to make favorable decisions. The Toyota Company recognized this and came up with strategies to provide the organization with a blueprint for leadership. The Toyota Way is a policy initiative for developing and sustaining leadership in organizations.

Section IV of the Toyota Way rules deals with the continuous solving of root problems that drive organizational learning. It involves several chapters and principles that help in decision making. Leaders should perform the Genchi Genbutsu (Liker & Convis, 2011). A leader should visit the shop floor and all the lower levels of production, processing, and management. During such physical supervision, the leader should thoroughly study what the subordinates are doing. The personal visits enable the manager to learn and have first-hand information. It is easier for the leader to have background information even before he or she sets the strategy of the entire organization.

The employees and managers must work towards understanding the processes and flows within the organization. The managers can spend half an hour just observing the activities on the shop floor. The surface version requires the managers to learn the general technicalities of the organization. The much deeper version takes many years to learn. It involves learning the minor details of every aspect of production processes to completions and management processes. Once an employee goes to see the situations, he or she must analyze them, understand the principles involved, and then make decisions from the factual information. It is critical to grasp the actual situation before raising any concerns or solving any problem.

The company actively engages with people to provoke creative thinking skills. Innovation must originate from thoroughly analyzed situations from actual circumstances. There is more value when facts and numbers are present as a basis for evaluation and decision-making. Yamashina developed ten management principles for the company. They illustrate the demand for the observance of genchi genbutsu. Whether data is available is not as important as when facts are available.

Due to the stringent measures on management techniques, the company has managed to develop a range of vehicle models that have become the leaders in the world. For instance, the 2004 Sienna was a redesigned van from its highly ranked minivan. It resulted from a trip adventure throughout America, Canada, and Mexico (Liker & Convis, 2011). The study required Yokoya to find out how to re-engineer the car into the market in a hybrid form to increase its sales.

Every leader in Toyota Company must know that the principle of getting their hands dirty is to ensure that they are practical about their ideas. In case there is a fault in any part of the company, they must be ready to assist physicians. They should also see for themselves what the workers are doing. They also need to surround themselves with people they can trust. They need to win the workers’ trust. At Toyota, it is not about individualism. Teamwork helps bring the desired change. The company had not invested in computers very much, but due to building trust, they are learning to use emails. The daily reports are crucial to the functioning and success of the company. The reports must be readable by others. Constant reporting, checking tools, and analyzing data help to stimulate thinking within the enterprise. It is the way of enhancing the organization.

Genchi Genbutsu is also part of the Japanese culture. But it is misunderstood in other cultures like America, Europe, and even in Canada. And yet, the company sees it as a means that it has used to succeed. It then tries to inculcate this culture in every country it operates in to ensure uniformity. The Japanese culture allows the workers to become creative and innovative in their specialty.

The Toyota Way model requires a lot of planning. Other companies in the US would typically spend about three months strategizing. Then they spend the rest of the years developing, repairing, and making necessary adjustments. Toyota Company would rather spend ten months carrying out intensive studies and testing until they develop a perfect product. The company would launch a product that has undergone intensive checking to remove any defects that would be identifiable. Teamwork must be the way of making the company and its products grow. Valuing others is also critical to the business. Varying options help to develop concrete ideas (Liker & Convis, 2011). All information contributes to building the bigger idea. The way of making the decision is as important as the quality of that decision. Decision making involves finding out the situation, understanding the causes, and considering alternative solutions. Then one needs to build consensus and using efficient communications. The company also uses the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) principle to access information and uses it for the development of strategies and products.

It is critical for an organization to have a mechanism for making its workers learn. The Toyota Way principle of becoming a learning organization through relentless reflection is central to the company’s success. It is the mistakes in the organization that acts as a guide to finding solutions. Rather than becoming agitated over a failure, the management uses the faults as a lesson for future developments (Liker & Convis, 2011). The management needs to identify the root causes of problems that arise and develop countermeasures. There is the need to ascertain all the mistakes and develop the solution to each one. Every individual must also be accountable for their portfolios and mistakes as a lesson and not as a reason for punishing the person. The lessons must act as a motivation for the staff to work hard and achieve better results. Creating a learning organization is also not easy. It requires time, resources, and cooperation at all levels. But in the long run, it helps the team to grow.

The unsatisfactory results that Lisa Jones got during her first set of examinations as a medical student have affected her badly. But she needs to sit down and plan on her next step of action. First, Lisa needs to go back and check what she did not do to prepare well for the exams. Then she should check her study habits and improve her methods of reading culture.

After determining the surfacing problems, Lisa will have to plan how to study the learning materials. She will need to have a timetable for all the subjects and topics she needs to cover at specific times of the day and specific days. Lisa will also include her agenda for the classroom sessions and library studies. The next step is doing what she has planned. Those are the countermeasures she develops for passing her exams over a given period. She must also have an appointed time for checking and evaluating the results. They will involve self-evaluation tests, group discussions, and homework. Once the three steps are in good shape, Lisa will have to create and maintain the flow until she sits for the next exam.

Liker, J. & Convis, G. (2011). The toyota way to lean leadership . New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

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Evaluating the Importance of Knowledge Management in Organisations: A Case of Toyota

2022, Evaluating the Importance of Knowledge Management in Organisations: A Case of Toyota

Knowledge management can lead to organisations gaining a sustained competitive advantage. Knowledge creation and sharing should be part of an organisations culture as this can lead to organisations gaining a competitive edge over competitors. Toyota motor corporation in Japan realised that through knowledge creation and sharing the organisation can gain a competitive edge over its competitors. The culture at Toyota is deeply rooted in the Japanese culture. The Japanese culture encourages constant improvement (Kaizen), attention to detail, teamwork and respect for people. Toyota has been able to gain a competitive edge over its competitors due to its global knowledge sharing culture. The culture at Toyota is to ensure that Knowledge is shared amongst its global assembly plants and suppliers. This has led to the production of reliable cars regardless of the assembly plant because the local knowledge is shared with the global subsidiaries.

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Learning to Lead at Toyota

by Steven Spear

Summary .   

• There’s no substitute for direct observation. Toyota employees are encouraged to observe failures as they occur—for example, by sitting next to a machine on the assembly line and waiting and watching for any problems.
• Proposed changes should always be structured as experiments. Employees embed explicit and testable assumptions in the analysis of their work. That allows them to examine the gaps between predicted and actual results.
• Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible. The company teaches employees at all levels to achieve continuous improvement through quick, simple experiments rather than through lengthy, complex ones.
• Managers should coach, not fix. Toyota managers act as enablers, directing employees but not telling them where to find opportunities for improvements.

Toyota is one of the world’s most storied companies, drawing the attention of journalists, researchers, and executives seeking to benchmark its famous production system. For good reason: Toyota has repeatedly outperformed its competitors in quality, reliability, productivity, cost reduction, sales and market share growth, and market capitalization. By the end of last year it was on the verge of replacing DaimlerChrysler as the third-largest North American car company in terms of production, not just sales. In terms of global market share, it has recently overtaken Ford to become the second-largest carmaker. Its net income and market capitalization by the end of 2003 exceeded those of all its competitors. But those very achievements beg a question: If Toyota has been so widely studied and copied, why have so few companies been able to match its performance?

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