Andon

So on the other side of that, there's a load of practices that also reflect how there's a need to make the space legible and predictable, but also we work towards reducing the actual... harm or risk in speaking up.

And in that sense, I also really like practices like things like the Andon Chord, which is like the classic apocryphal sort of psychological safety practice.

that comes from the toyota system where we it not only makes speaking up in quotes explicit and and and it provides a scaffold a mechanism for doing so it makes it legible but it also reduces the cost of doing so because as part of it we we recognize it's a good thing to do we thank people for pulling the cord we make sure there's an explicit loop to make sure that when we pull the cord, when we do the thing, there is an outcome, there's a benefit, and something gets paid off.

So we're making that clear.

So legibility and consequences are two big levers there.

I remember doing your course and you were explaining the Andon cord.

And if you wouldn't mind just explaining it a bit for anybody who's not familiar with it.

But I remember your question was, how many times do you think it gets pulled? And it was a jaw dropping answer, wasn't it? So would you explain a bit more in case people don't

But, uh, I'll get to that, you know, a little bit later here, because I think you can copy all the hardware.

You can see an Andon light, for example.

I was at a factory not too long ago.

They had more Andon lights.

It looked like a casino.

And when the lights went on, everybody ignored them.

"Uh, no, we're not that ready yet." "What do you mean not that ready? How long has this been up?" "Eh, four months." "Been up for four months, so if I push this button nothing's gonna happen? So why'd you put this up? It's a waste." "Oh, we're working on it." Okay.

Along with all the other lights that lit up the, uh, the landscape, right? [sighs] I mean, it's, it's in- incredible how we think we're making change when we're actually wasting a lot of time and money.

The...

As far as enabling visibility, um, this is where, as we've said in a previous podcast, the Lean tools are, are, are at your disposal here of being able to try and implement flow, implement standardized work, best known current work in ways, implement things like Andon, so our alert systems, and going to the Gemba regularly will already open up a huge facet of being able to see better problems.

So, uh, if, if it's as terms of what do managers do we need to do to create abnormality at a glance, I say refer to Lean, right? Because like I've said before, they are not there to fix the problem.

People are.

See lean tools.

Use them to your advantage to help you with that.

5S, Kanban, Andon, you name it.

Then when those problems start arising, how do you react? Do you try and plug the, the gap with a sticky plaster? Do you try and lead the witness to say, "I know the perfect answer here.

And all of their folks talk the talk, and they are taking this to a level where they're now implementing Kanban.

They have Andons.

They have the entire system.

I'm telling you some of the, and by the way, pictures there as well.

And that's not something that we can detect, and we can't rely on the agents to do it themselves.

So in, in this context, right, if you think about the Andon Cord on a factory line, then you have to ask the question, well, how can you pull the cord? Is it a human in the loop that pulls the cord? Is it the agent that can self-circuit break? Because I think that the second is the thing that really matters.

Mm-hmm.

And so if we're thinking about a reference architecture, we have to think about, like, how do we ensure that there's an Andon Cord, and then ensure that we're testing and verifying that the agents will self-select to pull the cord, so injecting some chaos into the, the actual factory line, uh, and then looking at how we would get good metrics on that.

Because I don't think that, you know, pulling the cord is a bad metric.

That's something that should happen on any line as things are going south, and, and we should accept that, and then we go back and we fix the factory, right?

So basically you cannot trust the agents to police themselves.

Mm-hmm.

That's what standard work is about.

That's what Andon is about.

All of these help us use, uh, are, are able, uh, allows us to be able to see abnormalities.

Um, and so the, the problems may have always been there, but because now we are doing Lean, we're making them visible.