Genba vs Yeti Management: Appreciating The Toyota Way

Despite working in a heavily Toyota-oriented environment for many years now, I still take in my breath at how profound (yet deceptively simple) the Toyota Way philosophy is. It keeps revealing its timeless wisdom when stress-tested against both predictable cycles as well as black-swan convulsions.

I am usually quite cynical about grand narratives and pristine ideologies in management. Often, in spite of their germinal beauty, “branded management systems” gradually get contaminated in organizations, amplifying pernicious cult-pathologies of power and politics. Wily players are often on the look-out to abuse sacrosanct corporate symbols and tools to their advantage. Seeing its imperfections, jaded and indifferent leaders pay lip-service to the movement or transformation du jour, to register stay-out-of-trouble compliance. The Toyota Way philosophy is immune to such abuse as it stands out for its humility. Its very essence is the democratization of influence, and is antithetical to toxic concentrations of power.

Mastering the Toyota Way does not require rite-of-passage indoctrination trainings heavily laden with elaborate content. Such trainings as are to be found are light on content and focus much more on inculcating discipline in applying common-sense logical steps to derive outcomes using Cartesian inferential processes. Trainings are focused on making people think for themselves (e.g. the famous “ask why 5 times” to get to the root cause), rather than use decision tools and heuristics.

Many managers conditioned to earning stripes through intense training programs, may even find the kind of content covered in Toyota Way related trainings quite underwhelming. It has the feel of folk-cures, homespun values, and old-fashioned virtues with no flash, pretention or ostentation. This is precisely its “hand-that-rocks-the-cradle” strength. It is so secure in its wisdom that it does not labor under the need to force itself, or prove itself. And yet, it is nothing short of nuclear in its potential to transform cultures when implemented correctly. It has the accessibility of a hand held-out. Its vitality is derived from universal humanistic principles of nurture, growth, respect, and inclusion – deeply moral in content. Its credibility is derived from an aversion to elaborate words and explanations in favor of felt experiences and visible outcomes.

At the heart of the Toyota Way culture lies a clear and deeply-held philosophy governing the employment relationship, often referred to as “mutual trust and mutual responsibility” – more on this further along. Its most galvanizing principle is making employees use their creativity and resourcefulness on an infinite scale of improvement, never declaring victory or feeling complacent – always taking the initiative to progress through trial-and-error. This is often explained in the now widely popularized ideas of Kaizen and Continuous Improvement, especially as associated with the quality movement. But these renditions are unfortunately often stunted, ritualized and simplified so that it might take many years and missteps before an organization can truly bring them to life. As Margaret Wheatley writes in Finding Our Way, “Deming, the great voice of quality in organizations….concluded his long years of work by stating simply that quality was about the human spirit. As we grew to understand that spirit, we would create organizations of quality.” The Toyota Way is basically focused on evoking, invoking and provoking that “human spirit”.

What makes employees achieve results they never thought possible, through endless accretive improvements? A lot has to do with their being accorded a deep level of respect for their inherent potential. This is manifested through supervisors setting challenging goals, just beyond the employee’s comfort zone, giving the employee immense autonomy to achieve them, and providing coaching that is not prescriptive. Supervisory coaching must guide through self-discovery, and stop short of giving-up the answer in the heat of the pressure and urgency to get an outcome. The supervisor must do all of this with patience, grace, wisdom, and, critically, with care – for the mental, emotional, physical and even spiritual well-being of the employee. If I were to distill all of this in one word, the only one expansive enough would probably be “love”. The Toyota Way takes the role of the supervisor or boss into territory not charted by orthodox management approaches.

If the employee fails to achieve the targeted result – the focus is on what we learned, and how we could spread that learning, so that the rest of the team does not repeat that mistake. A failure that leads to diffusable learning is better than a success that might hide blind-spots which might do us in later, possibly at a much bigger scale.

The outcome is a culture of what Toyota calls “mutual trust and mutual responsibility” – referred to earlier. This phrase sounds somewhat clichéd and inert, unless understood for what it stands for: utter and selfless devotion and even sacrifice of each party (employer and employee) for the other. This dynamic is normally associated with higher, non-contractual relationships that define identity and survival, like with one’s country or tribe. It gains strength over time as the benefits of this devotion visibly accrue to both parties, especially in moments of truth, such as a severe downturn, when the herd is moving one way, and pundits and bean-counters are gushing with doomsday speculations, sardonic commentary, smug criticism, and “let’s-see-you-tackle-this” schadenfreude.

The origin of this philosophy in post-war Japan is a poignant story worth hearing as it is deeply human and highly emotional – involving loss, revival and resolve – giving birth to a principle captured in the words of an ex-Toyota Chairman, Taizo Ishida (1888 -1979): “Defend your own castle”. This spirit of independence and self-reliance inexorably drives the company to make the most of every grain of talent, resource and potential it possesses as a principle of survival, with an insatiable appetite to improve – to be the best at getting better.

The philosophy embeds the belief with both the employee and employer that our long term welfare truly depends on taking care of each other, through thick and thin. Each other is all we’ve got, and is all we need. The employee summons every shred of creativity to make things better than anyone thought possible, and the company gives them security and identity for the long-term. The implicit quid pro quo of mutual trust and mutual responsibility sets-up an infinite regress of improvement that is startlingly immune to business cycles, and to faddish, pontificating management punditry.

Here’s a small selection of practices that consolidate this culture and bring it to life:

1. A talent system that ensures that only the most culturally aligned employees will grow through the ranks – values and culture transmission gets much higher weighting than performance for promotions.
2. An obsession with clarity of the vision and end-game (delivered in simple digestible terms that can play in Peoria – not ethereal, philosophical over-elegant, branded formulations). The vision is inexhaustibly repeated, leading to head-to-toe alignment, so that every employee can use their own ideas to achieve it in their way. Vision is the fundamental law of motion in the Toyota Way, and impels synchronized, aligned action at every level.
3. The unyielding focus on the role of the supervisor as primarily a learning coach and guide through the journey.
4. The gritty ethos of confronting reality at the place where the action happens – or the Genba as it is called in Japanese. For instance a workshop is a Genba in the case of an automotive business. There is a disdain for intellectual analyses and ivory tower assessments made by desk generals, that miss the illuminating insights derived from patiently “grasping” the situation at the coal face. This practice of validating and informing any opinion through visiting the Genba is called Genchi Gembutsu. It is marked with an intolerance for over-theorizing, using common sense and hard nosed pragmatism, going with all one’s sense to where the problem or opportunity lies, making quick decisions and course-correcting. Analogous military maxims include “seeing the front”, and “lose sight, lose the fight” – i.e. be obsessive about realistic bearings. The map is not necessarily the territory. A strong Genba orientation helps filter out the filterers – removing theoretical analyses (a la case studies shoe-horning theories), dispenses with experts using historical lenses, and makes space for new insights to emerge.
   
   In the title of this post I have counter-posed it to “Yeti Management” found in parochial companies, where managers and leaders are rarely seen, and only at high altitudes, and often with styles as abominable as the Yeti. MBWA in the traditional canon (Management by Walking Around) is loosely analogous (as are ideas like bias for action, skin in the game, walking the floors etc), but of course not woven into something as exponentially powerful as the Toyota Way philosophy.

The tragedy is that the Toyota Way is most widely seen only as a banal problem-solving methodology. Its dazzling beauty is its focus on shifting the underlying structures and existential algorithms of the company, empowering and enabling the system to constantly shift itself like a morphic field, where and when shifts are needed, while keeping the core immutable and as fixed as the North Star. Juxtaposed against traditional “transformation” projects which have a very high relapse rate, small-step Kaizen improvements bubbling-up across the system avert backsliding because ownership (and pride of creation) lies at the point at which the shift needs to be sustained. The change is fluid and organic, and the gains are maintained because the change agents believe in their contribution’s linkage to the bigger vision.

Any rudimentary understanding of the Toyota Way that I can claim to possess has come after many years of splashing in the shallows of its tip-of-the-iceberg practices (5S, Quality Circles, Hoshin Kanri, TBP, TPS, Value Stream, Lean Management, Kaizen Marathons, etc. etc.), until finally beginning to appreciate its magic through highly resonant stories told by a practicing adept – mainly emphasizing the need for end-to-end coherence. The realization that comes unfortunately too late for impetuous companies is that the Toyota Way as an “integrality” cannot be parsed into formulaic plug-and-play practices that roll easily off-the-tongue, but are hard-yards in practice. They must be built on committed and often painstaking culture-work to make them sustainable. It is a Gestalt (to give myself some semantic license) that only exists as an irreducible whole, and becomes lifeless ritual unless it colonizes hearts and mindsets first.

An example of disjointed ham-fisted implementation is to give autonomy to front-liners, and then feel surprised at their lack of initiative in utilizing it, not realizing that authority and autonomy is only exercised based on an employee’s historically conditioned feelings towards failure. If they fear the consequence of failure and accountability from previous experiences, no amount of sudden rallying cries of autonomy will make the system budge – not even smart HR campaigns on providing “psychological safety”. It will only happen when we deal with failure differently when it actually happens. That’s when it hurts. It takes a lot of courage to reframe failure as a building block of success for any company focused on results in the traditional performance management paradigm.

@Jeffrey Liker in his many books (the latest one being the 2nd edition of his classic The Toyota Way – 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer, which I am currently listening to on Audible) espouses the purist version of the Toyota Way – as a living system vs. a lifeless toolkit. His tone is reminiscent of the French Statesmen Charles Talleyrand: “Surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle” – above all, gentlemen, not the slightest zeal. Or more idiomatically: hold your horses, temper your zeal for quick fixes – don’t get carried away with a rush of blood to the head. If you want to unleash the magic of the Toyota Way, it must be done the right way – with deliberation, commitment, and belief in its core moral imperatives.