Steven Spear Talks about Competing with TPS and Problem Solving

This month The Management Brief will explore prominent lean theories that have been guiding organizations in their lean transformations. This week, Josh Howell, LEI President, and Mark Reich, LEI Chief Engineer Strategy, are joined by Dr. Steven Spear, renown lean expert and senior lecturer at MIT.  

Steven is co-author of Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification,1 which examines how some companies over the last 150 years have led markets by solving their most important problems better, faster, and easier than the competition. The trio discuss Steven’s work and his 30-plus years of lean learnings. 

Steven recalls his start at the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC), when Mark was one of his mentors and sensei along with the Hajime Obha. He was thrust into all things lean and trying to grasp the Toyota Production System (TPS), without much clear instruction of principles and tools, instead just guidance to go and see and find things that were broken. “What I realized was going on is that they were teaching me to look for broken things, and the reason why they weren’t telling me how is they wanted to first see what was broken in my approach,” says Steven. “So there was this layer of see a problem, solve a problem. That becomes sort of a mantra in my work about how we organize our behavior, how we architect our processes, how we architect our processes so that we can immediately see where we’re wrong and use that as an immediate trigger to swarm onto the situation, figure out why it’s wrong, and how to make it right.” 

Steven grasped that TPS is a system built around the ability to see problems and respond to them quickly. “It’s a simple thing to say, but the hard work is to keep pushing and pushing and pushing so you can see problems in greater detail, with greater accuracy, at smaller scale, sooner before they have a chance to become big problems. And everything else I think I’ve done since that moment ... has been elaboration on those points.” 

The trio go on to discuss: 

• Steven’s immersion in Toyota led to the groundbreaking article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,”2 which puts forward rules for how to design systems that establish standards, capture understanding, enable individuals to see when things go wrong, and then fix the problems they find.  

• High-Velocity Edge,3 Steven’s first book, was built on the insights that the way for companies to compete is on solving increasingly more problems at greater depth and breadth and faster (velocity). He eventually wrote Wiring the Winning Organization, which states more explicitly that “winner’s win because they’re just much better at seeing and solving problems than anybody else.” 

• Steven describes three layers behind the slowification, simplification, and amplification framework: 1) compete on ability to see and solve problems, 2) understand the instrumentation and ingenuity through which individuals work, and 3) architect the social circuitry in all processes, procedures, and routines by which the work of individuals is integrated into collective action toward common purpose. 

• A problem-solving danger zone for companies is when iteration and experimentation are inhibited. To get into a winning zone requires slowification (committed time and space to solve problems), simplification (simplify problems at the operating level rather than moving them up and down silos), and amplification (see problems earlier and more often when they are small). 

• Leaders need to liberate people’s ingenuity rather than maximize efficiency, according to Steven. “There’s too much in society where leaders think their job is to somehow collect data, do analysis, and then tell other people what to do.” While a fan of AI, Steven fears that leaders who are predisposed to data collection, analytics, and command and control management will turn AI into “an unholy devil for the rest of us” and dismiss creativity, dismiss ingenuity, and commitment to mission. 

• Steven and his co-author Gene Kim have tried to harmonize problem-solving ideas across different communities of thought. “We’ve all had the experience where someone says, ‘This must be a lean problem vs. a Six Sigma problem vs. a DevOps problem vs. an agile problem.’ Folks, it’s a people problem. That’s it. It’s people who are in a relationship and either relationships aren’t working because they can’t see problems, they can’t solve problems, or they can’t systematize what they learned. And so we thought we were doing some kind of service here to simplify the language so people could speak and collaborate across domains.”

• Optimism about organizations’ abilities to transform: “Outside in a personal life, [people are] striving so hard to be valued by others. This is not in sort of any kind narcissistic, weak way. It’s just this is what people try to do. This gets back to like our creative origins in that we want to do things useful and valuable to others. And then we bring them into the workplace, and we tell them none of that: we’re going to be demeaning of you, of your potential, your opportunity, your chance for appreciation. So all we’re saying is, what we've naturally been created or evolved to do, just extend that into the workplace. Mark, that’s my source of optimism because when you start having conversations with people that way and get them to talk about all the joy they have as coach of this, as head of that, as volunteer here, it’s like, don’t leave that at the door. Bring it in. And people, when you say, ‘Oh, that’s what you want me to do, yeah,’ they’re happy to do that.”