by Drew Dillon, Author and Teacher of Management Improvement

“You know my methods. Apply them!”

—Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle. 1902. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter. 1.

Pretty much the first thing I ever heard Shigeo Shingo say was that we in the West were getting some fundamental things disastrously wrong. Shingo had been invited to speak at the Yale School of Management and, by a quirk of fate, his words in Japanese were coming out of my mouth in English. This was in the early 1980s, when Toyota’s and Sony’s irruption into North American and European markets had provoked both fear of, and intense curiosity about, the secrets of “Japanese management,” the New Thing. Shingo’s words were blunt and, for a time, business leaders in the West seemed disposed to listen to them.

But how many really listened? You probably know the story. Shingo talked and demonstrated. Masaaki Imai came and demonstrated. Retired Toyota-Group managers came and demonstrated. But the New Thing was hard and, before long, the desire to master it devolved into a traffic of tools and methods, with each new wave of converts powering through buzzwords and taking rough edges off the unfamiliar.

This wasn’t uniformly the case. In the early days, pioneering students of what came to be called “Lean” were typically CEOs, board chairs, or company owners. They were leaders unafraid to take personal charge and chances, to call their own basic assumptions into question, and to commit to the long term. Notable successes emerged from their efforts, but in proportion to the popular reach of Lean clichés, those successes were few and sparse. 

Time went by and Business as Usual returned. Many managers learned that squeezing suppliers and workers was easier than teaching employees to extirpate waste every day. Splashy initiatives notwithstanding, they found it was easier to outsource work to low-wage countries than to give domestic workers a meaningful role and stake in constant improvement. Learning became “training” and radical creativity turned into “implementation.” The responsibility for reshaping organizations came to be delegated to actors—“Lean experts” and “internal coaches” and the like—who had less and less real authority to make fundamental changes.

So the Japanese management craze became the Just-in-Time craze and then the Lean craze and so on, each one begetting senseis fluent in certitudes, tools, and formulas. Meanwhile, by pushing waste out of sight, globalization and scalable digital technologies seemed to lessen the need to minimize lead times or to make serious investments in employees. By the time the Covid pandemic hit—and global warming and Amazon warehouses and the Great Resignation and the Metaverse—pundits were explaining on the front page of The Wall Street Journal that Just-in-Time’s day was over.

Shingo observed the beginning of this devolution with a clear and critical eye. In the years before his death in 1990, he was already warning against “fake” improvement and the seductions, for example, of ill-conceived technological “solutions.”

 “What good is an automated warehouse,” he would ask, “when you can eliminate the need for a warehouse in the first place?”

The peril we face, Shingo insisted, is almost never a want of solutions. It is our inability to see problems.

The way Shingo told it, he himself had learned to recognize problems through an arduous personal journey of trial and error, of throwing himself into one sort of worship—statistical quality control was a favorite example—only to realize that its promises were hollow. By implication, his defense against false doctrines was unflagging self-awareness.

 But Shingo was by no means entirely self-taught. He was explicit, for example, in considering himself a lifelong student of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, proponents for him of a kind of “scientific” management in which workers benefit from the fruits of improvement. Shingo was no communist and he certainly had no objections to capitalism or to making money. Still, he evinced a deep aversion to using improvement as a tool for exploiting the many for the benefit of the few. For one thing, it was wrong. For another, it didn’t work very well.

Shingo’s insistence that improvement benefit both labor and management illustrates an aspect of his teaching that both implicates one of the Shingo Institute’s Guiding Principles and touches some of the roots of our current crises.

Like Toyota’s leaders, Shingo was explicitly committed to improvement as a means to securing community prosperity, to making the pie bigger for everybody. As we consider what the principle Respect Every Individual means to us in our own age of widening inequality and widespread dissatisfaction with work life, those of us who aspire to leadership would surely do well to follow Shingo’s example and examine our fundamental ambitions. Is it our fantasy to extract from the labor of others the highest possible profits for ourselves and our shareholders? Or is it our dream to build enduring prosperity for our communities? The truth may lie somewhere in between, but a moment’s reflection will reveal that the meaning of “respect” varies quite a bit depending on the answer.

Let’s consider the relevance of Shigeo Shingo’s teaching to another of the Shingo Guiding Principles.

At this particular point in history, it is easy to see that we face a confluence of dangers unconstrained by institutional, geographical, or political boundaries. Catastrophic climate change, broken supply chains, rampant disease, proliferating technologies of information control, and the fragmenting of values—none is exclusively a local problem. At the same time, all have roots in privileging the part over the whole, in failing, as the Shingo Guiding Principle has it, to “think systemically.”

What does thinking systemically mean in practical terms? The answer may not be as simple as it seems. When Shingo insists that we understand tasks and processes to be fundamentally different things, for example, he is not merely warning us away from the assumption that the latter consist of sequences of the former. He is not just reminding us that the fact that something is good or efficient for a particular task doesn’t mean that it is good or efficient for the process as a whole.

He is telling us something of deeper import—that the process inevitably comes first. He is telling us that tasks don’t constitute the process, they serve the process. He is telling us that value emerges, not in subjective human or machine work, but in the experience of the object of that work: the patient, the material, the human being.

Many of our current woes can be traced to our neglect of this insight. Whether in manufacturing, medicine, or the mining of data or diamonds, the pursuit of local or operational efficiencies time and time again undercuts our global ambitions. Even on the scale of an individual organization, the implications are profound. When we fail to realign measurements and jobs in accordance with processes, we work against our own interests.

So what would Shingo do?

Although we have mentioned the Shingo Guiding Principles, it is bracing to realize that Shingo hardly ever uses the word principle. When pressed to distill his experience and his thinking in the form of advice, he urges us to do something he considers even more difficult and liberating than adhering to principles.

He asks us to think.

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