Page 334 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

Chapter 13. Problem Solving the Toyota Way 309

Every Problem Is an Improvement Opportunity

The inverse of a problem is an opportunity. This has become a cliché and often
means we don’t want to deal with the fact that we have problems. It becomes
real only when the organizational culture focuses on continuous improvement.
Within all organizations, including Toyota, there is a virtually endless supply of
problems, and thus opportunities. We may also commonly refer to these prob-
lems as “issues,” and they fall into three broad categories: Large, Medium, and
Small (Figure 13-1).
Many organizations fail to develop an effective process for capturing opportu-
nity from all three categories. Quite often the Small category is overlooked entirely
because these opportunities are viewed as “insignificant” or offering “not enough
bang for the buck.” In addition, the Medium and Large categories are not fully
exploited due to the small number of people being trained or qualified to resolve
issues (Figure 13-2). In this structure, the primary impetus for improvement is
management-directed and management-controlled. In this case change occurs
from outside the process. This continues to foster the traditional we/they thinking,
which implies that only management or specific individuals are responsible for
improvement, and that the workers wait for “them” to correct issues. Individual
efforts are not encouraged for various reasons, but primarily because there is no
structure in place to support them and because managers fear a loss of control.

Very few large
issues

Few medium-
sized issues

Many small-
sized issues

Figure 13-1. Typical quantities of opportunities available