Look left and right before crossing

Tom Breur

2 February 2014

This morning as I left the subway station at a busy junction of Broadway, I carefully looked left and right before crossing. And that is a good habit to maintain, deeply ingrained from early childhood on. Or else there would be may more traffic casualties. It reminded me of one of Toyota’s practices from A3 thinking.

There are many parts, or slants one might take at Lean Manufacturing, and one of the aspects that continues to fascinate me is how the Japanese sometimes seem to do things slowly, but they turn out finishing quicker. A little like the tale of the hare and the tortoise.

Implementing change can appear forceful; yet turn out deceptively slow, or vice versa. The Western approach is to “manage” change, whereas the Japanese seem to proceed in small slow steps (often referred to as Nemawashi) Judging from their success in following market trends, again, the Japanese must be something right there.

An important lesson in the A3 approach, as pointed out by Sobek & Smalley (2008, p. 25), is that before you propose an experiment, one should assess the impact in three dimensions. How will this impact my superiors? How will it impact my subordinates, and how will it impact the peers I work with?

So if we teach little kids to look left and right every single time they cross the road, regardless of whether it is busy or not, shouldn’t we be looking in three directions as well when we venture something as risky as implementing business change?