Implementing TWI into Daily Work

Business901 Podcast Transcription

Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Implementing TWI Skills into Daily Routines Implementing TWI Skills into Daily Routines, Part 2

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Implementing TWI Skills into Daily Routines

Guest was Mark Warren

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Note: This is a transcription of an interview. It has not gone through a professional editing process and may contain grammatical errors or incorrect formatting.

Transcription of Interview

Joe: Welcome everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of the Business901 Podcast. With me

today is Mark Warren. He is the founder of Tesla Inc. and has decades of experience working

with Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers to improve their manufacturing, productivity, and quality. He

travels the world to learn and teach about Lean and most specifically, TWI. I’m amazed at

your breadth of Lean and the student of history that you are Mark, and to gather all these

Mark, you either had to read or listen an awful lot, and I want to start off by just saying

thanks for joining me.

Mark: Thanks for having me on the show. I can tell you a lot of my reading time has

happened when you travel, you can either do nothing on the plane or take a book or two

along and read and that’s how I spend most of my time on the airplanes.

Joe: Could you give me some background on what Tesla2 does and maybe even how the

company name originated?

Mark: I guess the short answer would be that we work with leaders to help them become








better problem-solvers. And the origin of my company is a bit longer story, dating back into

the 1980’s. When I was working with Cummins Engine Company in their product engineering

department, one of my co-workers gave me a nickname of Tesla. And to put this in context,

most of your readers or listeners probably think of a personal computer being fairly common.

Back then, all we had on our desk was a computer that we could send some inter-office

emails. So when you needed to get a simulation done, you had to make a business case for

a project, submit it, and then if it was approved, you waited six weeks or more to get the

results. Well, my co-worker was struggling with a problem, and I think we may have talked

about it over lunch and I offered to go look at the samples of the figures that he was having.

A few minutes later I mentioned, “Well, it looks like you’re having thermal problems as far

as an expansion that’s causing the fraction or fractures of the parts.” He’s like, “Well how in

the world do you know that?” I said, “Well, I just kind of put the piece on the engine and ran

it through the cycles and kind of watch it.” And so I told him I did it in my head, and this is

the story he told me that Tesla had designed all of the alternating current motors and

generators this way. So that’s how the nickname came.

Joe: And then you just stayed with it.

Mark: Before I started the company, I went and started doing what we now call blogging,

trying to get the Tesla domain name and somebody beat me to it and so I just did Tesla2.








Joe: I love to hear stories like that. Let’s jump into TWI because that’s what we came here

to talk about. Most companies when starting with TWI – Training Within Industry are trained

and implement Job Instruction first. Now, on your Website and in conversations with you,

you mentioned the integrated approach to TWI. Is that a different approach than most

consultants use or what is meant by integrated I guess?

Mark: I’d like to back up a little bit. The traditional implementation is usually JI or Job

Instruction, then the second skill which is called Job Relations, and then the third skill which

is called Job Methods. And there were other programs that they also had, but this is

traditional how people put them together. And also when you go look at the historical

records, JI is the most common program taught and that’s the one everybody knows the

most about. JR usually has about half the number of people as JI, and JM is usually less than

half the number of the JR groups.

In the 1950’s, we did have two different programs that did somewhat of an integrated

approach that taught all three of these programs. One was called the MTP program, and it

was taught exclusively from what I can tell in Japan and it was targeted at the middle

management. To some degree, it’s where the middle managers would understand what each

skill could do in their company, possibly to keep them from behaving that was kind of

productive to implementing the programs, but also maybe to get them to pressure the lower

level, managers and supervisors, to implement the programs. The second program, was also








introduced in Japan about 1956, either 55 or 56 and it was really more of an advanced TWI

program, and they intended to teach people who had already known all three programs and

what they found out is almost all of the people that took the program only knew one or two

of the programs, so the sessions went a little bit longer. The other piece is we found that

when you approach problem solving, we found that you can’t solve the problem generally or

fully resolve the problem with just one single skill, and that’s why we began to experiment

and try to put together a program where a person could learn all three of these

simultaneously.

Joe: In this complex environment, let’s say that we live in the day that complex problems

are what we’re solving, and we need that integration of all three to kind of make them simple

and straightforward to give simple solutions.

Mark: That’s correct. I think I like to use the example of like give a kid a hammer and

everything looks like a nail. If you teach a person just Job Instruction, they want to go out

and try to solve all their problems by just doing training. And that sounds okay, you can

make some improvements, but the real improvements, you’re not even beginning to reach

the potential of what could happen if you had more skills than just a single skill.

Joe: I’ve never heard it put that way and I agree with what you’re saying because it may

be the same problem, but you may have to approach it in a different way with different








groups, different individuals to solve the problem

Mark: Right. So what we are doing, we end up teaching people problem solving first

where you go out and you try to get the facts which the people doing Lean go on the shop

floor doing the observation, the questioning, getting the facts and validating them is second

nature. If you do this first, you may or may not want to apply the Job Instruction. It might

not be the right tool or the right thing to do. So this is what we’re trying to get people to

think through, go get the facts first, then decide which tool to apply.

Joe: Well we hear that TWI was Toyota or Ohno’s secret sauce, and you’ve studied that

quite a bit I think. What have you learned from their efforts? I mean is that helping you with

today’s efforts in modernizing TWI?

Mark: It is quite a bit, and it’s really kind of two questions here. On the TWI side, to some

degree we can attribute TWI as being the foundation for the program that Taiichi Ohno built

which later became known as the Toyota Production System. TWI actually teaches a lot of

the habits that are integral to any of the masters that you find of the Lean movement. Now

what’s less well-known is Taiichi Ohno was actually working to implement flow since the

1930’s, and TWI were really the catalyst that enabled them to implement the flow systems.

So that’s kind of the secret sauce behind Ohno.








Joe: I look at TWI, and it may seem a little weighty to do it in very incremental – I mean,

can we have dramatic improvements when we’re doing TWI and we’re using TWI within a

company?

Mark: You can have dramatic improvements but generally, what they are is just a series

of incremental improvements. That’s the thing that’s most often overlooked. Everybody

wants to try to go hit a home run and double production or save a million dollars. If you look

more closely at some of the ones where they have done this, rarely is it just a single solution

but it’s hundreds of little things that they have done to improve the system.

Joe: When I think of the Theory of Constraints in Goldratt’s book going way back to the

goal and when he found “The Herbie” within the organization and the constraint, it’s like that

‘aha’ moment we’re all looking for to break things wide open for flow to happen. But really

the whole book went on to describe incremental improvements, didn’t it?

Mark: It did, and if we back up just a little bit, with Ohno studying and trying to implement

flow, he mentions quite often in some of his interviews that he also studied Ford. And if you’ll

read some of the materials about Ford and specifically not the ones that are supposedly

attributed to him that are ghost-written but more accurate accounts, they did a lot of these

incremental improvements. And even his right-hand man Sorenson, writes about it wasn’t








just one thing; it was just thousands of little experiments. Every day, they tried things and

experimented and did things, and Ohno makes the same comments as well. They did all

sorts of experiments, and they kept what worked.

Joe: And I think that’s a good analogy because it is that one ‘aha’ moment is when we talk

about Edison and we talk about seeing all these different experiments. Everybody looks back

as that one great thing, but there are thousands of experiments to get there.

Mark: Right and there are a lot of similarities between what Ford did in the early days and

what Ohno did in his early days as well. We tend to attribute everything to either Ohno or

Ford and the reality is, there’s actually a team of people that understand kind of the vision

and the concept of doing the experiments and incremental improvements. An unwritten piece

is, yes they are trying to work on the constraint. I mean Ford did a lot of things that were

later codified in the Theory of Constraints.

Joe: I want to jump back to TWI and did a little deeper there, but you had mentioned to

me that Job Relations is really two program instead of just one. What are they and how is

Job Relations introduced in your thinking?

Mark: If you take the original Job Relations pocket card and they had pocket cards for

each one of the programs so you could follow them, it’s kind of an outline, on one side you








have basically problem solving. So what do you do when you have a major people problem?

Well, step one, you go get the facts. On the other side you have, what do you do -- it’s more

of a proactive side, what do you do to kind of minimize having people problems? And if we

put this into context, this program was actually created in Harvard University, so they used

case studies. The trap we have gotten into in following this traditional piece is we just

approach it and use all of our examples of management disasters, where somebody has

really overstepped their bounds and the supervisor has just been a terrible boss. And so we

go about well, we think about the steps that he went through, and what did he do, and why

did he do it, and maybe it’s not the right way to behave, but if you really look at it, this

problem solving is a very generic sort of tool and it’s almost the scientific method of just go

get the facts, wait in the side, think of multiple solutions, and you also try to think ahead

and maybe what will happen if I do this.

We’re trying to get people to think strategically as well and this is one of the things in the

integrated program that we begin to put together is originally the first two groups that we

worked with, we did the traditional Job Instruction, then Job Relations, then Job Methods.

So when we got to the Job Relations point, we asked the group to define a generic problem

and of course everybody tries to come up with the largest, most difficult problem they have

that’s kind of ‘save the world from world hunger’ kind of thing. But when we begin to peel it

back, we find there're lots of little details and as we use basically the 5 Whys and actually

validate the answers, we use a process called FOG- fact, opinion, or guess. We assume that








every first answer isn’t just a guess; at best, it’s an opinion, so we try to push people to go

get facts. Once we begin to get the facts, then we ask better questions for the next level and

almost everyone of the examples people brought is being added to you in people problems

turned out to either be Job Instruction where one, we hadn’t taught the people well or two,

we hadn’t communicated our expectations well - now, that’s sad. Or on the Job Methods or

process side, we had really lousy processes, and we were still expecting people to make daily

production. And that’s why the people have kind of an attitude. It’s more we’re the

management, we’re holding the steering wheel, and yet we’re not really doing our job well.

On the proactive side, what we find is it talks about respecting people. I mean this is where

the respect for people came from was from the proactive side of the Job Relations program.

What we began to found is we looked at it and also with an internal program that TWI had

– Follow-Through and later renamed Follow-Up, this was the critical coaching piece that the

manager needs to do and during the managing of the coaching session, you actually begin

to build a personal relationship, managers to supervisors, and if you can do this between

managers and supervisors, the supervisors have a pattern that they can do with their

behaviors between them and the workers. Part of it was we set up the expectations – it’s

kind of a joint coaching operation.

Joe: If you tie it back to original statements, making the best use of a person’s ability is

for that little manager to understand them and to be able to -- you’re connecting the work








and the improvements to the abilities of the worker.

Mark: Right. One of the experiments we did, we called it a Plus-Minus Exercise, and we

found that the biggest gap people had was really learning to see problems. So we gave them

an exercise to go out on the shop floor and list all the people that had a minus, that had a

weakness in say their skill to do a job. It doesn’t have to be the whole task; it’s usually just

an element inside that task. Then on the other side, these people who have more than

enough skill and now, that gets them to recognize people who have extra skills or extra

possibility, and so we began to coach the supervisors to get them to help you say write the

Job Instruction to begin to help the people who have the weaknesses, but also have them

do some of the experiments to improve the processes. So you begin to stretch the people

who have the extra skills.

Joe: I think that’s an excellent way and a very unforgotten way of extending the capabilities

within an organization, and I think that’s a great explanation of that. I have to ask you

though, Job Method always seems to be the forgotten child. You’re eluded to it, that it’s like

third in a row of how it’s normally introduced so we just kind of – you know, it’s not the

interest but it just kind of drops off in the implementation side and the people that are skilled

at training, but is it because it’s the same as PDCA or incremental improvement and people

have a program already for that, or is it because it’s just the third one introduced?








Mark: It’s the third one to be introduced; it’s also supposed to be or was designed to be

an industrial engineering program without any of the engineering nomenclature. Now,

another interesting little historical tidbit is we actually had an A3 format for the Job Methods

that was developed in 1945, right before it went to Japan. Your A3’s that you’re working on

today actually have an origin in the Job Methods program. The Kaizen events also have a

connection to the Job Methods Program, and so does 5S, unfortunately.

Joe: Why do you say that?

Mark: Well, if I go back and I look at some of the earlier interviews with Ohno, he had a

bit of disdain or disgust with how his supervisors were using the -- and he used 4S actually.

And he said they’re just using it as a lining up exercise. The fifth S is supposed to be basically

a measure of the supervisor to see how well they’re coaching the people to implement the

first three or four S’s and these S’s are part of the suggestions of the coaching that you need

to do to improve a process in the Job Methods program. Some of the Lean people are saying

that Ohno immediately got rid of JM, it wasn’t useful, but if we put this into context and you

look at the rapid expansion that Toyota was undergoing at the time and also connected with

I think it was 1951 or 52 is when the very first industrial engineering program started in

Japan, they had a very, very weak system of industrial engineering and this Job Methods

was not sufficient for Ohno’s needs. So he had to take it up a notch and to say that they did

not use Job Methods is pretty much showing a lack of historical understanding. Because if








you look at -- you go into anybody who’s doing a lot of it, “Oh yeah, we’re doing ECRS…”

Hmm. Okay, eliminate, combine. I mean, where does that come from? That comes from Job

Methods.

Joe: So what we’re saying there is Job Methods, Ohno stepped up a notch because I can

sometimes look at PDCA as the culture of Lean, so he really stepped it up a notch to become

the actual culture of the company.

Mark: If you’re an engineer, especially if you’re a process engineer, JM seems to be the

one that you first want to gravitate to. You think about JR as being, “Oh, that’s the people

stuff. That’s HR functions. That’s not very useful and by the way we’ve learned a whole lot

in the last 50 or 75 years. JI, oh that’s training department. That’s not that useful. I really

love JM, and I want to change everything.” So you write down, and you have a series of

questions you ask and you want to change the whole thing. And this is kind of also the trap

that we get into with the Kaizen events which to me is really an oxymoron. Kaizen is

supposed to be continuous improvement, and an event is a single event. So, what do you

mean? One or the other. But the engineers just love the JR. They come in, and they tear up

their whole program, like a whole department, or a whole process and try to reengineer

everything. If you use the scientific method, what we usually do is say, okay, pick an

element. What’s the one that’s the snag or the difficulty and let’s improve that piece and

then do an experiment and see what effect it has. PDCA if you apply it in the scientific method








does the same thing. Change a little bit, see what happens. Change a little bit more, see

what happens. Most of the time, we really don’t do a good job doing JM.

I can give you an example that we did with one of the companies we worked with earlier this

year, also does an integration of both JM and JI, and a bit of JR as well. The company is a

die-casting company, and the operation wanted to reduce the waste aluminum or spillage

that they’ve had, and when they spill it, it gets contaminated and they can’t put it back in

the furnace. It has to go back and be refined. And they measured the amount of recycled

material in tons per month. So the very first step we did is we tried to get them to do kind

of a ‘learning to see’ exercise and they observed in the pilot area the eight machines that

the operators, all of them had a different method. So the first thing they did is they did a

Job Instruction. They said, “Well, we’ll just standardize the method.” So, that’s the first

application – the Job Instruction. So the day after they had told everybody on all three shifts,

they recorded roughly a 30% reduction in spillage. They were really excited. And then when

they began to plot it out, they noticed on two of the eight machines, they still had a much

higher spillage than the others. And at first they just guessed and then we said, “No, let’s

use the Job Relations problem-solving piece and go out and get the facts.” So we had them

observe again and then they discovered that these two machines were slightly different in

design than the other machines, so they realized they needed to make a different job

breakdown on how to work around this more difficult to use machine.








Again they had a slight improvement, so we sent them back out to observe again where the

spillage was. And we also asked them another question, has anybody actually saw this on

other machines in your factory? So we sent them on kind of a ‘learning to see’ and see if

they could discover where somebody else had found a solution. And they came back and

they said, “Oh, yeah, there’s some fellow who put a little slide on his machine, between the

furnace and the machine and the other few of them, people had put in sort of funnel where

you pour the metal in.” “Okay, so can you do this?” And they did and of course they had an

improvement and so they kind of had gotten hooked into make an improvement, go out,

observe again. And when they went back and observed a second time, they started going

through, they noticed that one of the departments used a different coding on the ladle which

lasted twice as long as the pilot area and also it had less sticking on the bottom of the ladle

which was where a lot of the dripping came from. They standardized the coding; they reduced

it again. This is the kind of continuous improvement cycle that we’re trying to get people to

go into. Use all three programs – JI, JR, JM.

Joe: And I think it’s interesting because, in today’s world, prototyping and experimentation

have gotten cheap. I mean to speak of especially when we think of the digital world, it’s

much easier to do that now, to sit back and not bring stuff forward and little, incremental

improvements seems somewhat backward.

Mark: Well that’s the other thing that we pushed them to do is we’ve tried to say, when








you’re looking at -- especially in JM, force them to come up with multiple solutions; minimum

is three. We also say which ones can you test? Not roll out, but just test in the next 24 hours.

Cheap, quick, validate your guesses. If you really use like the PDCA correctly, you do an

experiment, you see what happens, and then if what happens follows what you guessed,

then you validated your learning. If it didn’t, you could say, well what did I guess wrong,

what were my assumptions, and you really improve your knowledge base at the same time.

Joe: Type of approach, this type of thinking is not new but it sounds I could change Job

Methods and kind of use Lean Startup and get the same idea out of it, right?

Mark: The Lean Startup, they’ve actually done some real helpful things to existing

businesses; that an existing business now has a nice, documented method to do very rapid

iterations of experiments and people have learned how to do that. And either beyond the

Lean Startup, Matthew May has one that he has developed. It’s a process where he tries to

walk people through at least one cycle every day, and he will coach a group for a whole week

like that.

Joe: At the TWI Summit, you’re going to introduce ‘Ohno’s Secrets.’ Can you share one or

two of them with us?

Mark: Ohno’s Secrets is a rough book outline I’ve been working on for about a decade,








and I think I need to put some of this in context. On the Lean side, most of what is accepted

is what was observed by anthropologists, industrial anthropologists. You observe, you ask

questions, we guess and we fill in to try to explain what we think we have observed. Mistakes

are always made by anthropologists and then when we repeat them long enough; they

become accepted as facts. Now, there are quite a few things that we’ve accepted as facts in

our Lean literature that just don’t hold up to scrutiny when you go back and look at the

historical facts. Well, the first one would be that Ohno, his primary objective of Lean is to

eliminate waste, and that’s not exactly correct. His primary objective was to create flow, and

the waste that he wanted to get rid off were disruptions to flow. And so the waste list is

really a way of listing a series of symptoms that are disruptors to the flow.

Let’s just take like the Andon Cord. For years, I always thought that the Andon Cord was an

invention of the Japanese until John Shook told me about a book that he said I needed to

find. And I said why and he says, “Well, there just happens to be a copy of this at Toyota

City. Go get your copy and read and find out.” And so it took me a couple of years to find a

copy and when I did, they have a whole chapter on an Andon Cord system and the book was

printed in 1931, which is before Toyota Motor Company existed. Very nice description of a

cord on the land that the operators were instructed to pull every time they found a problem.

They had a board with lights on it, an operator that watched it, who timed it. If the light was

on more than two cycles, they would send a manager to that situation and make that person

find out what went wrong, and this was at Ford’s motor company.








Joe: Did you give me a secret there?

Mark: One of the secrets is like the flow piece. I mean if you start with your objective is

creating flow and to create flow, you have to actually use Theory of Constraints to start with,

which is exactly what Ford also did as well. So you try to improve where the pain point or

the heat in the system is. And this is the big problem with Lean is we go in, we do 5S, we

clean up everything, we paint lines around stuff, we do some Kaizen events, but it’s isolated.

It’s almost silos of improvement. And you may or may not see any sort of financial

improvement on the bottom line. You may see a single improvement say if you reduce a

little bit of inventory but overall, you haven’t improved the efficiency of the system that

much. If we use the Theory of Constraints in the way Ford would use it, we go in and we

look at where the most difficult place is, where is the pain point, let’s improve the bottleneck

in the system. And this is what flow does, are you’re looking for where are the disruptions

to flow, and the long-term outcome is better financial performance.

Joe: It seems in the last few years, Kata and TWI have become somewhat intertwined.

Can you tell why that’s so and is it intertwined from your perspective?

Mark: It is. Kata only needs a pattern, and so it’s like if we look at a horse, one is looking

at the frontend, and one’s looking at the backend. The frontend, TWI had patterns. We had








pocket cards, and these are the patterns that people followed. Now when you have enough

of an organization actually following the same behavioral traits and patterns, then it becomes

a culture. And so Mike Rother has done a wonderful job of looking at the culture that has

evolved after nearly 70 years of using the Job Instruction and other TWI programs into two

meta-patterns and what he sees is an improvement pattern and a coaching pattern, and the

coaching pattern is teaching you to do the improvement pattern. Now if you want to peel

back the layers, the improvement pattern is the TWI methodology of problem-solving. Now,

they also had an improvement pattern and a card as well. It was called the second level

supervisor’s card which taught a manager how to coach the supervisor on using the TWI

programs.

Joe: Somewhat very much like the Toyota coaching card and improvement cards then?

Mark: It’s exactly -- well, there are a few minor pieces. A number of people are really

struggling -- I mean, he has a beautiful meta-pattern setup, but it’s not detailed. Now, if you

go back and this is what we have done in trying to integrate the TWI programs is we tell

people, okay, first step is problem solving and, by the way, use these five discovery steps.

This is the improvement piece. The very first piece you need to do is discovery. And then we

have another series of five steps that are basically building some structure into your

organization. We have two steps that we had defined that are coaching patterns; one is

coaching the person, the other improvement or sustaining piece is changing the system.








We’ve actually got it detailed down that you can follow, rather than just generic, asking a

set of questions.

Joe: Mark, is there something that maybe I missed, and you’d like to add to this

conversation?

Mark: Yes. I had a big learning experience this year when we began to experiment with

trying to teach all three of the TWI programs simultaneously or in sequence in a very short

length of time. We discovered that there was really a big gap between the traditional method

of teaching TWI which is using mostly the TWI as an on-boarding process where you have a

large group of employees, new employees that you’re bringing on, or a new production line,

or a new piece of equipment, and even if you look at how Toyota uses the Job Instruction

today, they’re using it obviously to teach the new employee. But the way Ohno used it and

applied it, I mean he didn’t have a new plan, he didn’t have a new product, he didn’t have

new employees, and so he actually applied it in a slightly different manner and this is what

we’ve ended up doing is how do you adapt implementation as a useful sort of implementation

to existing employees, existing products, and existing companies, and that’s the new

integrated process that we’re working on.

Joe: What is upcoming for Mark Warren?








Mark: Let me go over a little bit about the Job Instruction. We have released the session

outline and each one of the Job Instructions, Job Methods, and Job Relations programs are

really scripted programs that are setup to do two hours a day, five days a week and people

get certified to train these, but delivering the training and applying the training are two

different things. This past year, we released a manual that actually does the background

material for a trainer of what you need to know about the coaching process and after the

initial training program. We have the TWI summit, the 14th and 15th of May this year.

Hopefully, I will have an outline or a manual of this new, integrated TWI approach completed

in time for the summit.

Joe: How could someone contact you?

Mark: The best way is probably via email. My email is [email protected], and my

website is Tesla2.com.

Joe: Okay. Well, I would like to thank you very much, Mark. This podcast would be available

on the Business901 iTunes store and the Business901 Website. Thanks again Mark.

Mark: Thanks for having me.




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Joseph T. Dager

Business901

Phone: 260-918-0438

Skype: Biz901

Fax: 260-818-2022

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.business901.com

Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is President of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

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