In this video, Steve Beauchamp shares how he was inspired by Taiichi Ohno's insights and Masaaki Imai's book on Kaizen to understand the crucial role of standardisation in driving improvement. This inspiration prompted him to delve into why standardisation often appears only in the fourth phase of 5S, as he explores its foundational power in continuous improvement.
Standardisation as a fundamental principle
Nick: In your book, you offer an alternative, almost a cyclical approach. So what is your approach that you discuss in your book?
Steve: So you know, in my experience of teaching and mentoring this methodology in my career over the last two decades, it’s kind of what I alluded to, you learn that things rarely go the way you thought they were going to go.
I've watched a lot of teams struggle with the first two phases of that traditional approach of sorting and setting things in order, and for a long time, I couldn't really figure out why, and it bothered me that it was such a struggle. And it dawned on me, a few years ago, I was reading a quote from Taiichi Ohno, which is one of the founders of the Toyota Production System.
And he said: ‘Without standards, there can be no improvement.’ And around the same time, I picked up a copy of Masaaki Imai’s book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success. And in that book, he talks a lot about the connection between the improvement cycle, which is the Plan-Do-Check-Act or action, and the standardisation cycle, which is the Standardize-Do-Check-Action, also known as your daily routine.
So the way those two things interact with each other, you have this daily, day-to-day grind, basically, if you will, like, this is the work that we do on a day-to-day basis, and then periodically, be like, we actually need to make some changes and improve how we're doing this day-to-day. So that's how those two things interact with each other.
And you know, I started having this realization that there was an awful lot of conversation around standardisation as really a foundation for improvement. And then I started asking the question, why is it that we wait until the fourth phase of 5S to talk about standards? And it kind of got me going down this road of investigating and digging into a little bit more of the context.
Kanji is a really fascinating thing to me, and you and I have talked about this a lot in the past, this conversation we've had where it's just so much meaning can be found in just a few strokes of a brush, and that I find very fascinating.
And I'm also an avid learner, so I started digging into those kanji symbols that make up those 5S. And I think it's important to understand the original context of what things mean before you start applying it to yourself. And so I started digging into those and realized that there were some things I think that were missing along the way in that interpretation.