Challenging 'Challenge' Within the Toyota Way
Along the same lines, on the Toyota Global website there is an entire index page dedicated to "challenges" faced and overcome during the company's history. This is challenge in the reactive sense.
In the Toyota owner's online magazine, This Way, the value of challenge is explained as, "At Toyota, we're always challenging ourselves, looking at how we can improve what we do, and thinking up new ideas that will make customers' lives that little bit better."
This example is more inward-looking and proactive. This is the broadest and most generic example and perhaps the best explanation, focusing on a clearly stated purpose of improving the lives of customers.
What is a practitioner of kaizen, lean, or operational excellence to do? What is the standard to follow or strive for in regards to the building block of challenge? As an aid to putting challenge into practice, it may be useful to consider what it is not, or should not be. This will allow practitioners to explore the application of challenge from within the safety of guide rails. This is especially important because "proactive challenge" is internal, controlled, and reasonable, while "reactive challenge" may be external, is uncontrollable, and may be unreasonable or unresolvable. When practicing challenge, we must avoid confusing feats of foolishness with feats of strength.
Here are some characteristics of healthy challenge:
• Challenge raises the quality of the work we do rather than just the quantity.
• Challenge is built from a set of obstacles that we can handle.
• In challenge, effort leads to progress.
• Challenge leads to satisfaction with the work we are doing.
• Challenge leads to personal growth.
How is it possible to know whether the set of obstacles belonging to a challenge set before us are surmountable? First, a teacher challenges the student to do something that the student does not yet know they can do, but that the teacher knows they can do. This is the most basic rule of challenge: be guided. Second, when we challenge ourselves we are looking for improvements to current methods, better outcomes. We are not looking for miracles. The successful result of challenge should be imaginable, even if not clearly visible. Finally, challenge must be physically possible, according to reason. This may seem obvious but in truth the higher up one goes in an organization and the more distance and time is put between leaders and the gemba, the fainter reason becomes in the minds of these leaders.
When we speak of reason, it means equally rationality, logic, and what is fair and just. The opposite is muri, overburden and unreasonableness. In contrast to challenge, overburden has the following characteristics:
• Overburden raises the output of the work without always yielding a final result.
• Overburden is built from a set of obstacles that we may or may not be able to handle.
• In overburden, effort seemingly leads only to more effort.
• Overburden leads to frustration.
• Overburden does not allow time for reflection and growth.
Muri saps the attention and energy to a degree where we are forced to cut corners, reduce attention to detail, repeat mistakes, and fail to learn. Overburden may be the quantity of work, the type of work, the way we work, or how we work as a team, such as a culture of hiding problems or assigning blame. These things are unreasonable and do not challenge people in a positive way. To grow, people need to be challenged intellectually, which requires us to expose our ignorance (i.e., lack of knowledge or ability) so that we can overcome ignorance either by personal learning or by forming a team to borrow these skills from others.
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