ADAPT #30 - From Samurai Swords to Lean Processes

Hey!!!!

In Japan right now with the fam exploring and inevitably my newsletter will be highly influenced!

So don’t grab a coffee or a tea or anything, don’t even sit down or stand up, do nothing but read on because it will take you less than 5 min and hopefully you will be provoked enough to explore further - remember I am not meant to be right, just make you think!

Let's go! 

Edwards Deming arrives in Japan post WWII and his outside-the-box leadership models and systems thinking (for the time) combine with the diligent cultural traits of Japan and create the perfect context for Lean to emerge (click here to read up if you’ve never heard of Lean).

Effectively, what is now famously known as the Toyota Production System and all its derivatives and permutations, were born from this perfect match and timing. 

But I always wondered how much Japan specifically had to do with it?

Deming was American and had been preaching his model for a while, so why didn’t it take off in the US beforehand?

It took a beautiful tea ceremony, something the Japanese have been doing for centuries, to understand why.

The level of precision, diligence, systems thinking, and continuous improvement that goes into the simple act of making and serving tea is unbelievable. 

For Deming’s thinking to work, you needed a group of humans that could live their lives through Bushido (the Samurai way).

I think I would argue that the Lean methodology wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Samurai developing their ways a few centuries earlier. 

It reminds me of Sapolsky’s book “Behave”, in which he explains how a behaviour, any behaviour, is not necessarily spontaneous and linked to free will but a result of the sum of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries that preceded the specific act. 

The reason why it worked in Japan and how it worked and evolved, was the result of centuries of prior behaviour that shaped the Japanese way of doing and acting.

In a business the same occurs, specific decisions are the result of a series of elements that add up to that point, to that specific decision.

The better we understand all these elements, the better we understand the system.

The better we can set them in motion for future decisions, the more successful we are.

Sapolsky calls this T- (Time minus) Decision minus 1 minute, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, 1 century! 

How did all the pieces come together for the specific behaviour or decision to take place?

This is an amazing line of enquiry worth getting your head around. 

This is the “concrete” I so often speak about, that, once it sets, it owns you and predetermines all your behaviours and decisions - your free will disappears.

You are not in control, the sum of all the parts you have put in place owns you and decides on your behalf instead.
(This often happens to us as individuals in our careers!!! That’s why my team and I designed the Career Ownership Workshop… check below for more info about this)

I know this concept can seem a bit philosophical but it isn’t.

It’s incredibly practical.

How Toyota applied it and evolved it resulted in a revered approach to manufacturing and it flowed all the way into lean startup and agile methodologies. 

I’ll leave you with 3 concepts developed to interrogate the timeline and the system as a whole:

Genchi Genbutsu: means basically “go and see for yourself”.
Go back in time and find the source. Ask 100 times why and go all the way back to hunter-gathering times (which in Sapolskys book he argues there is a lot of genetic manifestation that you cannot escape when it comes to the source of a behaviour). Have a look here.

Kaizen: means “good change” or as it’s now known “continuous improvement”.
Deming explained it to them as “plan, do, check, act” and they turned it into a single-word concept with a far better level of refinement. Have a look here.

Kaikaku: is “radical change”.
It’s when Kaizen is not enough and you need to do a little more. You may be forced into Kaikaku, eg: during COVID lots of businesses were forced into deploying radical change fast. Kaisen was not enough. Sometimes deregulation or regulation forces a market to dramatically shift, or a new piece of tech forces you into Kaikaku, etc. Have a look here.

Side note: Communication plays a huge role in change.
I think the way the Japanese language works also helped with conferring into a single word a lot of meaning.
When you say Kaizen there is a common understanding of all the elements that make up this word - a whole concept - it’s like a page's worth of English writing summarised into a single powerful word. 

So, explore your own system, what decisions did you make this week that when you trace back you can find a source… days, months, years or even decades ago?
Where is your business or team at with this important skill of finding the source and taking a proper look?
What are you setting in motion now that in 5 years will become an inevitable decision?

Now you can go grab that cup of tea (or coffee is okay too) and take some time to reflect on these.

Love

G

My recommendations:

Psst… rumour has it, there might be a date soon revealed that might be set for our next Career Ownership Workshop —or maybe there isn’t………… 🙊

After the huge success of our first edition of the Career Ownership Workshop, my team and I might have already pencilled in a tentative date on our calendar (or perhaps it's just speculation?!?) 😱

Subscribe to our waiting list if you want to hear first about it!

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