Page 194 - Toyota Under Fire

RESPONSE AND THE ROAD TO RECOVER Y

Diagnosing the Root Causes

There’s an old phrase in corporate governance that emphasizes
the importance of clear roles and responsibilities: “When ev-
eryone is responsible, no one is accountable.” In other words,
diffused responsibility means that you can’t hold anyone account-
able for a failure because you have to hold everyone accountable.
Making everyone responsible provides an opportunity for each
person to pass the buck.
To avoid this tendency, “accepting responsibility” at Toyota
means something quite personal. When someone at Toyota ac-
cepts responsibility, it is not as part of a vague collective responsi-
bility; it is personal and team-level responsibility. Therefore, there
wasn’t only one corporate-level problem-solving taskforce. Every
part of the company launched its own problem-solving process
based on Toyota Business Practices (TBP) to examine what the
problems were, what role that team or organization had played in
causing or failing to address the problem, and what that team or
organization could do to contribute to a solution to the problem
that would move the company forward. Each part of the com-
pany asked itself, “What can we learn from the crisis, and what
can we do better?”
These efforts were remarkably similar in their determination
of root causes. One root cause identified was that the company
was not listening carefully enough to its customers, their con-
cerns and perspectives, and even lacked a sufficient level of un-
derstanding of how they used their vehicles. A second commonly
identified root cause was that the company’s attempts at main-
taining close control and efficiency had had the unintended ef-
fect of causing too many delays in responding to stakeholders,

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