This also applies to the change process. Some potential improvements will remain
hidden until you take initial steps. Then suddenly opportunities appear that you
never saw before. So there is this paradox: If you do not take steps, the oppor-
tunities may not present themselves to you. It is a natural incremental process
of learning by doing. You start the journey and then adjust it as you go.
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy for people to try and risk failure. A
University of Michigan professor, Fiona Lee, and her colleagues have been study-
ing the phenomena of trying.^5 They have been doing psychological experiments
in which subjects need to try a lot of alternatives and learn from success and fail-
ure if they want to get through a type of maze. It is a rug on the floor full of
squares with some electronics hidden underneath in a pattern. If they step on the
wrong square, they trigger a loud “beep.” But by trying a lot of squares and get-
ting beeps, they learn the pattern and can get through the maze. They find that
often people just get stuck and refuse to keep moving forward because they’re
afraid to trigger the dreaded “beep.” This is to some degree cultural. Americans,
who have been raised to believe in rugged individualism, hate to fail. There is a
stigma of appearing incompetent, and American culture discourages experi-
menting, trying something new, reflecting on failures, and asking for help—even
when they desperately need help and help is available. These results are true of
American male and female professionals in Lee’s experiments—there is no
significant gender difference.
The piecemeal changes that David was learning, one step at a time, can be
quite threatening. Do something new each day. Take a risk each day. Risk a
beep. This may explain another phenomena we have observed. When we first
start to work with companies, they often ask: “Is there a company like ours that
has implemented lean that we can go visit?” This can be as specific as wanting
to see a low-volume, high-mix decorative toilet seat company, or a prototype
design shop for prosthetic devices, or a low-volume medical lab that does spe-
cialized blood tests, or a highly automated glass-making plant, or name your type
of company. Unfortunately, there is not one of everything in the world that is a
lean model—there are all too few lean models outside Toyota and its suppliers.
What we think they’re telling us is: “Paint me a detailed picture of exactly what
the destination will look like in my business before we start the journey.” The
other question asked is: “What exactly can we expect in terms of cost savings
and what will it cost to go lean?” In other words, put in numbers precisely what
we can expect so we don’t have to take a risk. Fear of taking this step by step
and figuring it out as we go is one reason there are so few good lean models,
and overcoming that fear requires a leap of faith.
464 THETOYOTAWAYFIELDBOOK
(^5) Fiona Lee, A. Edmondson, S.. Thomke, and M. Worline, “The mixed effects of inconsistency on
experimentation in organizations,” Organization Science, 15(3) (2004), 310-26.