The Shingo Prize

“Curmudge, I’ve long suspected that you were an aficionado of the Lean culture and not a fan of Lean tools, but your most recent readings confirm it.”

“Right as (almost) always, Julie.  If I were teaching Lean Overview, you’d think it was a Sunday School class.  There are tons of books on Lean out there, but they say either how to do Lean or how we did Lean, i.e., their focus is on tools.  Amy Edmondson’s book, which we discussed in recent postings, is different.  She suggests that if you don’t properly frame your team’s task, which includes explaining ‘why,’ your journey to success is sunk before the ship leaves the dock.  Put most simply, how is tools, and why is culture.”

“As I understand it, the subject of your latest project, ‘The Shingo Prize,’ is also focused on why.  But this sounds like a simple binary issue; you either win the prize or you don’t.”

“Not so simple.  Of course there are only a few winners of ‘The Shingo Prize,’ but everyone wins by participating.  The more an organization puts into their effort to win, the greater their reward from the experience.”

“Explanation time, Professor.  This sounds interesting, and I want to learn more.  What is it that you have been studying?”

“It’s a 64-page booklet called ‘The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence, Model and Application Guidelines.’  The authors were a team from the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University, and I’ve been reading Version 7.1, published in May 2012.   They have observed that Lean, Six Sigma, and their many predecessors have often failed to yield expected benefits.  The authors call these ‘programmatic or tool-oriented improvement initiatives,’ and they propose that these programs underperformed because they did not adequately focus on their underlying principles and key concepts.”

“I guess you’re saying that the older programs had too much ‘how’ and not enough ‘why.’  But I always thought that Liker’s ‘The Toyota Way’ was the bible for The Toyota Production System (TPS) and Lean.  It contains the 14 Toyota Way Principles with ideal behaviors under each one.”

  

“When I compared Liker and Shingo I found the guiding principles and supporting concepts to be complementary but, for the most part, not identical.  There appear to be a lot of ways to say ‘Do the right thing.’  Perhaps the Toyota way succeeded at Toyota because everyone in the company learned to live the TPS every day.” 

“Okay, Old Guy, how can an organization whose Lean journey went astray get back on the track by fully adopting Shingo?”

“You almost answered your own question, Julie.  Fully adopting Shingo is to do everything in their booklet that constitutes your best effort to win the Shingo Prize.  That means that everyone is working on continuous improvement and understanding why they are doing it.  This is much more than training part of the staff and doing Kaizen events here and there and now and then.  The organization transforms its culture by doing it.  It’s like trying to pass calculus without doing the homework problems and taking the exams or learning to swim by reading a book.”

“Gosh Curmudge, I see your point, but I hope Shingo is not as hard as calculus.”

“It’s like the familiar quotation, Julie, ‘It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.’  In our next conversation we’ll say more about the guiding principles and supporting concepts of the Shingo model.”

Kaizen Curmudgeon