FEATURE - Nobody understands people as well as people do, and Jidoka is the key to getting to know your customers and creating ever better products and services.

Words: Michael Ballé

Why do you do lean? Is it to make better and better products? Or is it to improve flow to increase throughput?

Scratch through most lean programs and you will find Goldratt's The Goal thinking: if we improve flow (by removing bottlenecks), we increase throughput and reduce resources in order to make more money (which, he argues, is THE goal of any business).

Sakichi Toyoda looked at the human difficulties of producing cotton as he sought to reduce both defects (challenges in human use) and hardships (difficulties in performing the work). At that time, he mechanized the loom, invented an automatic shuttle change, and came up with his famous jidoka concept of thin metal strips that tested the tension of the cotton thread and stopped the machine if the thread broke. He solved human problems with automatic devices. His goal was to make better and better looms, just as later Kiichiro Toyoda's goal would be to make better and better cars.

Specifically, what does that mean?

Our society is built on creating lifestyle-altering mechanical devices that can replace human labor in activities ranging from transportation (trains) to textile production (sewing machines, as well as spinning machines) and agriculture (the tractor). The purpose of such products is to make you autonomous - you no longer have to do the work directly yourself or ask someone else to do it for you. Just think of those espresso machines that are now ubiquitous in offices around the world: whereas you used to have to go to a coffee shop to get an expresso, these machines and capsules allow you to make one yourself, without help. The same goes for washing machines, dishwashers, word processors, etc.

Yet with any device, there are two human dimensions:

• Product: the mechanical tool you can use autonomously to get what you want.‍
• Service: the person you want to talk to if you have problems with the machine.

Autonomy with any device requires a skill level proportional to the difficulty of what you are trying to do with the device. Most products, after the initial and always unpleasant "start-up" phase (most of us get by with reading the manual), can be used with minimal skills in simple cases, but require much more knowledge in more complex use cases. At this point, the customer has a choice between learning the work herself - perhaps not her favorite way to invest time - or getting someone to do it for her and show her how to do it.

OpEx-obsessed managers think the goal of automation is to eliminate personnel costs. They dream of automated systems that their customers can use without ever having to talk to anyone. They then fail to understand why customers disparage their offerings, look for alternatives and abandon their brand as quickly as possible. Customers are not necessarily looking for a product; they are looking for a cool solution to their problems. They don't just want an expresso - they want an expresso that is easy to make, that tastes good and comes out of a nice machine that is easy to use with their friends, and they want easy access to a solution if something goes wrong.

The deep understanding of jidoka is that mechanical devices are just mechanical. Because they have no human judgment, they will:

1. Produce defects - how can they know what level of quality a human expects (which is also contextual)?
2. Break down - how can they check and replace their own parts?
3. Never learning to make the next generation of machines better.

All manufactured equipment also has a service component. This requires someone to help the user:

• Using the machine appropriately to get the right results depending on the complexity of the use case.
• Repair the machine if it breaks down.
• Improve the machine and come up with a smarter, more user-friendly and more beautiful model.

Jidoka is about developing the human part of a product. We don't need people to pay attention to machines; we need them to pay attention to customer problems and solve them kindly and efficiently. Having automated cash registers for a department store is a smart idea, if you understand that someone still needs to be present and trained in service (first impression, availability, tone, problem solving, etiquette, etc.), but it's not a bad idea.

If this person is trained in jidoka, he will also be able to recognize any problems with the automated system and work with engineers to improve the next generation. This is the starting point for value analysis (fixing things in machines that are already in production) and value engineering (improving things in the next generation of products).

From Sakichi's perspective, the purpose of a business was not to make money, but to help society by helping people autonomously do things with ever better products. Striving to improve flow and throughput by reducing lead times is a great way to uncover problems with production planning and logistics, but it doesn't contribute to making better and better products. That's what we need jidoka for: the ability to detect defects or wear and tear, understand where the process deviates from normal operations, stop the line instead of letting the problem get worse, have management respond quickly to analyze and solve the problem, and incorporate the solution into the workflow and then into the next generation of machines.

Jidoka is more than a way to keep production lines running smoothly and reduce the cost of defects in the flow. It is a fundamental way to teach people about products and equipment so that they better understand the relationship between automation and human contact and problem solving. Jidoka is about understanding the proper place of people (never use a human to do machine-like work) and machines (give self-assessment to machines) and the interaction between them (teach people to solve problems and develop better machines).

In the age of Artificial Intelligence, when we automate intellectual tasks that we previously thought were specific to humans, we will desperately need jidoka skills to redefine the proper place for human work and machine work. Still, even if you use ChatGPT to write all your code (or your essay), you will still run into problems in terms of how your customers use the resulting system (or the teacher judges the paper), how AI generates nonsense or misses context, and how to improve judgment in the design of what you do.

In this age of division of labor, it is easy to reduce lean to "that production thing" and use lean techniques to improve flow to have more throughput and - perhaps - save some resources in the process. But the real goal of Lean Thinking is to make better and better products at an affordable price and lower production costs. Sure, just-in-time is part of that, but it focuses primarily on planning, organizing and moving things around - not on designing them. Jidoka, both the elements of problem recognition and the separation of human work from machine work, is the main pillar for learning about the interface between product and service and organically developing better and more complete offerings of better products and better services for greater customer satisfaction.

Without jidoka, lean is an extended form of Fordism - occasionally useful, but not transformative. Ask yourself again, "Why am I doing lean?" How will you help the company make better and better products? The answer lies as much in service as in manufacturing and design - machines will never understand the mixed feelings and complex trade-offs that people naturally deal with on a daily basis. Only humans can understand what people are really looking for, what problems people are experiencing and what cool solutions people are looking for.