Interview: David Meier

As Enterprise Minnesota’s Practical Problem Solving training grant draws to a close, training recipient Sam Wagner of Donnelly Custom Manufacturing Company discusses the training’s wide-reaching benefits with one of the curriculum’s developers, Toyota Production System expert David Meier.

David Meier, President, Lean Associates Inc.

As co-author of The Toyota Way Fieldbook and Toyota Talent, David Meier is an expert on the much-heralded Toyota Production System. Though the Toyota Production System was designed for Toyota’s massive corporate structure, Meier believes all companies can benefit from the attitude and method behind the efficient problem solving that serves as the basis for Toyota’s lean philosophy. Enterprise Minnesota partnered with Meier to develop a curriculum for Practical Problem Solving. Read on as Sam Wagner, director of advanced manufacturing at Donnelly, gets Meier’s insights on the training process.

Sam Wagner: What is unique about Toyota’s problem solving strategy?
David Meier: After 24 years of really contemplating what’s so unique about Toyota, I think I’ve finally come around to how they do problem solving, how they think about situations, and the process they use to work through solutions diligently, carefully, and sometimes slowly. Other organizations tend to jump into problems and jump into solutions. To find waste in lean is relatively easy to do because there is waste everywhere. As a result, people are doing a lot of activities related to waste elimination and so forth, but they’re actually not eliminating waste. Instead, they are just moving it around within their organizations.

SW: How does Practical Problem Solving fit into the larger framework of the Toyota Way?
DM: Practical Problem Solving is the starting point to learn about the larger thinking process. It’s more than just problem solving. It’s a way of thinking about things and studying the situation, and digging deep to find the root cause or causes.

If you look at lean in general, it’s really just a process of identifying the challenges of an organization and what it needs to do in order to compete and be successful. You can use this thinking process to work through those issues and find effective countermeasures—things that companies can do to actually improve their performance and operations, and from Toyota’s view, have long-term prosperity.

SW: Why is Practical Problem Solving a better way to tackle the challenges within a business? Why not go in a different direction?
DM: I think the reality is, most everybody does problem solving on a daily basis. There are challenges and issues in every organization. I think what Toyota has done with Practical Problem Solving is put a bit of discipline in the process, to really keep it focused so that they can identify the true root causes of problems. As a company gets into the situation and starts to uncover some things, there are often different things happening than what was anticipated. I think that’s the real point: it’s about really digging in, formulating some hypotheses and then validating or disproving those as the case may be.

SW: Have you had to adapt the training from the way you learned it at Toyota to fit the needs of the smaller companies?
DM: With help from Bill Martinson at Enterprise Minnesota, we took the Practical Problem Solving model and made it a four-step process similar to the Training Within Industry four-step model of Job Instruction, Job Methods, Job Relations and Job Safety. We wanted it to be practical, because whether we’re working with smaller or larger organizations, practicality is important.

A frequent challenge for smaller organizations, is that tools to measure performance are often absent, whereas in larger organizations they typically have that kind of information available. In the smaller organizations, sometimes we spend a little extra time obtaining information that is relevant to the problem.

SW: What other barriers do you experience when helping companies implement Practical Problem Solving?
DM: Well I don’t think there are any barriers; I think there are challenges. One of the mindsets we try to teach is that there are a lot of things we can’t do, but we have to identify the things we can do. We really try to orient people’s thinking around the possibilities.

A particular challenge with small companies is that they’re not doing repetitive production work, so we find a problem, but they’re not doing that work at that time so we have to simulate a little bit more. The evidence around the problem isn’t always easy to find when it’s not currently in production. That is one of the more common challenges in the smaller organizations.

SW: Is Practical Problem Solving adaptable to any manufacturer or any business?
DM: Yes, I think any business is the answer, and also in personal life. I always tell people there are problems wherever work is done, so if there’s work done where you work, then this applies. I’m currently applying the problem solving process in health care, in a grocery store chain, in manufacturing, and in other types of businesses. This is one element of lean that I think everyone can agree is applicable pretty much everywhere.

SW: How were you trained to use this process?
DM: The method of training at Toyota is kind of like the old craft apprentice/master-type thing. I always flash back to The Karate Kid movie. My sensei would often give some request and say, ‘Make this change happen,’ without giving much instruction about how to do so.

SW: He would just ask you to ‘make it so’?
DM: Yes, and so I would ask a lot of questions like, ‘Why am I trying to make it so?’ and he would only say, ‘Because we want to make it so.’ The hard thing about it is there are no right or wrong answers in this process. We’re brought up and educated and trained that every question has a right answer and a wrong answer. But in problem solving, we discover that every situation has alternatives and options and choices, and there is no ideal solution to any problem, and there is no solution that doesn’t have some negative consequence.

Toyota taught me to gather the facts, then to weigh and decide. You have to try to understand the situation completely and list the options and understand the implications of your choices. Then, you have to choose and there is no optimal choice. Learning this was a bit frustrating for me because I was looking for the “right” answer, trying to find the ideal solution. But I discovered that just as soon as we implemented something, I could stand back and see the opportunity for more Kaizen. This process is quite different from how we typically think about things.

SW: What part of the training is typically the most difficult for companies to understand or implement?
DM: I think the first two steps are the most difficult. The first step is to clarify the problem. Oftentimes, we get confused about it. We can understand the situation, but we have to clarify the problem, which is some discrepancy from a desired state or standard. Because everyone has a different view or perception of the situation, they often disagree on what the real problem actually is, so defining that takes a little bit of effort. But I think the biggest challenge is in the analysis and getting to the root cause. I think most people struggle with staying on track to get to meaningful root causes.

SW: What is the key to finding those root causes?
DM: There are really two parts to the solution. One is to really stay on a path. If you imagine a tree and its root system, you’ve got to stay on a root path. You can’t jump from one root to another or one cause to another. Toyota calls it a causal chain. You’ve got to stay on the same track.

The other challenge is to dig deep enough. Most people are too close to a problem, and so they have some preconceived expectation about what is going on and even how to fix it. Sometimes in the problem statement, people will describe the solution because they know what they perceive to be the problem. The tendency to jump to some preconceived conclusions is very strong. So helping people back up and be thorough is really the difference. By the way, that doesn’t mean it has to take a long time. People assume that problem solving takes a lot of time, but you can go quickly and still be thorough.

SW: What levels within an organization are typically taking this training?
DM: We have trained all levels, and I think that’s one advantage for some of the smaller organizations, that you can really reach everybody. Practical Problem Solving is a great foundation for all employees. At Toyota, it is certainly taught to all employees. I think everybody in an organization needs to have this ability. Then, the expectation is that leaders are able to help coach people and ask effective questions and provide guidance as their folks work through the challenges of problem solving.

SW: So would you characterize Practical Problem Solving as more of a change in process for an organization, or a change in culture?
DM: For me, the jury is still out on this whole culture issue. Culture is really just a collection of behaviors and attitudes that we exhibit. To me, culture follows process. If we change the process, the culture is going to have to adapt and the behaviors will change as well.

For example, in problem solving, we know that people aren’t going to be willing to talk about problems, particularly if they had some element of responsibility. So you have to have a no-fault, no-blame environment in order for problem solving to really take hold.

That is the part of the culture that has to change. We have to recognize that all of us make mistakes and all of us contribute in some way to the problems that exist in an organization. Within Toyota, employees recognize that while there is a human element to problems and mistakes, there is not a human at fault. In Practical Problem Solving we ask, what do we need to do in our process to help solve this problem? We talk about the Five Whys and the root cause, versus the Five Whos and the root blame.

SW: Once an organization establishes that change in thinking, how can it sustain it?
DM: I think follow-up is a key part of the process. I’m still practicing and learning some of those Practical Problem Solving behaviors after 24 years of effort. Some elements of problem solving are a bit counter to our nature as human beings, and practicing behaviors that go counter to what we want to do is difficult. We all tend to want to jump into the problem and jump into solutions, and learning to go through the process methodically and diligently takes lots of practice.

SW: Has your thinking changed about this training since you first began to roll it out?
DM: Actually, I’m here in the Enterprise Minnesota office this morning for a review session. We have done 10 revisions on the program over time, and incorporated many ideas for improvement and efficiency. I think in the spirit of Kaizen, you’re never really done with that, but at some point, you’ve got to put it out there and give it a go, then each of the trainers brings their own talents and abilities to the program.

Anything I ever develop and create, I’m never really quite satisfied with, but at some point, you have to start doing. As I look at the material today, I still think about things I could change. But that’s what you can do in the moment, when you’re training or teaching, because the problems, companies and people are all different.

SW: You’ve done this training with companies all over the world. What makes a training experience memorable for you?
DM: When I first joined Toyota, I expected that because Toyota was a very well-known Japanese company, its operations would be very sophisticated. But I got there and their thinking was really very basic. Initially, I was kind of disappointed. But as I worked at Toyota, I realized the real beauty in simple, yet effective thinking.

The problem solving process is not about coming up with the most sophisticated answer. For me, the memorable training sessions are when we work through a problem and folks come up with clever countermeasures to a problem and I look at it and I think, I don’t know if I would have come up with that. When people engage in this process and start to come up with their own solutions, they’re really proud of that and they have a right to be proud, and I think that’s the best part.