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The Four Rules Källa (Spear and Bowen Decoding the DNA of the Toyota production System Harward Bsiness review
The tacit knowledge that underlies the Toyota Production System can
be captured in four basic rules. These rules guide the design, operation,
and improvement of every activity, connection, and pathway for
every product and service. The rules are as follows:
Rule 1:
All work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence,
timing, and outcome.
Rule 2:
Every customer-supplier connection must be direct, and
there must be an unambiguous yes-or-no way to send requests and receive
responses.
Rule 3:
The pathway for every product and service must be simple
and direct.
Rule 4:
Any improvement must be made in accordance with the scientific
method, under the guidance of a teacher, at the lowest possible
level in the organization.
All the rules require that activities, connections, and flow paths
have built-in tests to signal problems automatically. It is the continual
response to problems that makes this seemingly rigid system so flexible
and adaptable to changing circumstances
The Organizational Impact of the
Rules
If the rules make companies using the Toyota
Production System a community of scientists
performing continual experiments, then why
aren’t these organizations in a state of chaos?
Why can one person make a change without
adversely affecting the work of other people
on the production line? How can Toyota constantly
introduce changes to its operations
while keeping them running at full tilt? In
other words, how does Toyota improve and remain
stable at the same time?
Once again, the answer is in the rules. By
making people capable of and responsible
for doing and improving their own work,
by standardizing connections between individual
customers and suppliers, and by
pushing the resolution of connection and
flow problems to the lowest possible level,
the rules create an organization with a
nested modular structure, rather like traditional
Russian dolls that come one inside the
other. The great benefit of nested, modular organizations
is that people can implement
design changes in one part without unduly
affecting other parts. That’s why managers
at Toyota can delegate so much responsibility
without creating chaos. Other companies
that follow the rules will also find it
possible to change without experiencing
undue disruption.
Of course, the structures of other companies
have features in common with those that
follow the Toyota Production System, but
in our research we found no company that
had them all that did not follow the system. It
may turn out in the end that you can build
the structure only by investing the time
Toyota has. But we believe that if a company
dedicates itself to mastering the rules, it
has a better chance of replicating Toyota’s
DNA—and with that, its performance.