Et tu, Toyota?

I was gripped by anxiety today when I found out that Toyota is recalling another 1.13 million vehicles, and even more if you count Canada.

I worry for Toyota owners of course, American and Canadian alike.  But professionally, I feel even more worried for us advocates of lean and agile principles who have depended on Toyota to provide a one-word motivation to our audiences.  For decades, Toyota has been our hero, and even if we quickly disavow the company now as having any major role to play with lean, the questions about Toyota’s quality and processes are going to come back to haunt us, and we need to be prepared.

So today’s recall news brings agile presenters (and would-be Toyota owners) together to ask three new common, and newly urgent, questions:

• Is there actually a problem?  Do friends let friends buy Toyota any more?  Or is this nothing more than an emotional media circus?
• If there is a problem, was it caused by Toyota’s adherence to lean principles?  If so, what do we need to adjust in our teaching of lean?  If not, what do we need to do in describing how Toyota fits into our world view as agile/lean advocates
• What should our go-forward plan be, as consumers, and as advocates for lean/agile principles, in light of this year’s Toyota-related events?

Is there a problem? 

Well, as agilistas of all races, colors, creeds, and sexual orientation are prone to say, “it depends.”

Thesis 1:  this is media hype, like what happened to the Audi 5000 ten years ago.  Jamie Flinchbaugh provides this excellent summary of the journalistic and blogosphere debates around the Toyota Affair.  He points to a valuable article by Business Week’s Ed Wallace on how media coverage of this type of incident has fanned the public’s tendencies to prefer the hype around an emotional story to verifiable facts, which tend to be less interesting.

Thesis 2:  Toyota has an actual long-term problem with their electronic throttling system.  Today’s recall supports a theory the New York Times advanced already in February that Toyota has had problems in their electronic throttling system design which go back to 2002 or even 1998, and what we saw in 2010 was not just driver error, oversized accelerator pedals or loose floor mats.  The smoking gun here is that when the first recall broke in January, Toyota brought consumers in to have their accelerated pedals shortened and mats tightened, they also did a quiet computer reflash on the vehicles to allow the braking system to override the throttle, which it didn’t previously do.

The ABC story which provided the most details about the throttling problems, however, included footage which was clearly doctored, which suggests that whatever the truth of the matter, hype is part of the equation as well.

If there is a problem, was it caused by Toyota’s adherence to lean principles?

Let’s assume there is a long-standing problem with Toyota’s electronic throttling system.  Or even a shorter-standing problem with floor mats.  To what extent should we blame lean?  The Wall Street Journal’s headline article on January 30 discussing the Toyota affair was entitled “How Lean Manufacturing Can Backfire.” 

Mark Graban of LeanBlog observes that the WSJ seems to make frequent ill-informed attacks on agile/lean techniques, particularly “just in time” manufacturing, and if he's right, this is no exception.  If, indeed, the use of large quantities of standard foot pedals was the root cause of the problem, as they explain, that’s hardly a manufacturing choice Toyota can be said to have made from lean principles, which calls for small, quality batches.

Moreover, if Toyota knew about problems with their foot pedals, floor mats or electronic throttling systems and didn’t act on them, then Toyota was definitely NOT following fundamental principles of agile and lean that call for “failing fast” and “building in quality.”  Toyota is famous for providing a literal “emergency stop” cable which could be pulled by any person on the production line who finds any fault in the product, and which should result in an immediate halt to production until the problem has been fixed.  As Gad Allon says eloquently, there were enough quality problems being reported to Toyota as early as 2002 for someone to have done something much earlier.  He calls this “The Andon Cord that Wasn’t Pulled”

Toyota, in fact, persists in denying that there’s a problem with the throttling system, even while issuing soft fixes on it, including in this webinar which provides Extreme Scientific Detail.

So Where Does That Leave Us?  Can We Still Use Toyota Quality to Motivate Agile Converts?  And Should We Buy Toyota?

Any long-term admirer of Toyota and what it stands for may be disappointed in the recent quality problems with the cars, and with what seems like clear violations of the agile/lean philosophy that should have prevented these problems.  However, as many others have said quite eloquently, Toyota is still quite exemplary in most ways, under most circumstances, compared to the competition, particularly when it comes to using lean processes to leverage generally higher quality. 

• Long-time Toyota watchers predict that Toyota will continue to beat out their competition in finding and removing these defects, in the long run.

• And as Marty Larivieri says, the fact that the WSJ is using the example of Toyota to show that lean principles lead to lower quality could certainly mean that “apparently someone who is too young to remember the Chevy Citation and its X-body siblings is now old enough to write for a major newspaper.”   

All the same, in my slides, I am temporarily going to start talking about Toyota the way people talk about their favorite rock band, and explain “I only like their old stuff.”