Toyota Way Fieldbook : A Practical Guide for Implementing Toyota's 4Ps

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 outsidethe 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.

Chapter 13. Problem Solving the Toyota Way 309

Figure 13-1. Typical quantities of opportunities available

Very few large

issues

Few medium-

sized issues

Many small-

sized issues