Lean is all about culture. It’s an important part and in sometimes the backbone of Lean management. A culture which believes in constant enhancement practices what they speak day in and day out, is the answer to keeping and sustaining lean. However, what is less discussed is what goes into a philosophy which allows it to get the strength required to keep a management lean process, introducing Hansei.
What Exactly Hansei is?
The Japanese word Hansei means reflection, however in lean community and most significantly Toyota has much wider and bigger meaning. Hansei is not only about reflection. It’s really being true to yourself regarding your weaknesses. When you’re talking about just your strengths, you’re bragging. When you’re recognizing your faintness with sincerity, it a good amount of strength.
The art of Hansei is considered one of the main keys to the success of the Toyota Company all through the years and what a lot of people are still attempting to wrap their heads around. Most of the time, people overlook their weaknesses and try to cover up with their assets, as if they will conquer their flaws in due course. However, in reality, this is all about as counterintuitive as you can be if marketing a constant enhancement viewpoint.
You must accept the reality that you have weakness and flaws. Or else your capability to constantly enhance and have a useful effect on the philosophy which surrounds you, is at a considerable advantage.
Key Factors to Hansei
• Aid people know a problem
• Allows you to accept accountability of an issue with an utmost stage of emotion
• Pushes you in a plan of action to enhance
What are the Benefits of Hansei ?
• Aids you know trends well
• It could help people take in a task or provide credit to somebody else on addressing any issues
• Group of people could come as one and could reflect as one as a group. This is advantageous after an occasion or team activity to have what went good as well as what can change to make it well.
• There is a big advantage on sharing an idea of self-reflection to team, peers as well as leadership.
• Hansei could be one of the most valuable and powerful concepts in an organization, when it is accepted. Vital self-analysis is a hard pill to take in the American philosophy. Toyota Technical Center President, Mike Masaki discovered this out first hand.
• Upon an appointment to American facility, he pointed out a number of bad parts to American designers. This censure was met with a painful reaction by most that was not usual to Masaki, who is spent lots of times critiquing diverse factors of Toyota company at the time.
Without this, it is very impossible for you to have kaizen; Hansei is if you do wrong or bad, at first you should feel sad. Then, you should make a future project or plan to address that issue and you should openly believe you’ll never make this kind of error again.
— Slimane Zouggari