In my past life before data architecture, I used to be a manufacturing engineer in the automotive industry. At the time, the popular approach was Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, driven by Toyota’s massive success in the United States.
Lean was—and still is—about increasing value to the customer by reducing and eliminating work that doesn’t add meaningful value. This spawned many tools and practices to surface inefficient habits. One that stayed with me was the concept of “going to gemba.” In Japanese, gemba means “the real place” where work actually happens. In practice, this meant that managers and engineers left the office and went to the shop floor. There they simply observed: stood and watched the work happening, and asked questions of the line operators in a curious and respectful manner. No decisions were made on the floor. Leadership took what they had learned back to the office and used those lessons to shape operational plans.
This concept came to mind as I read this post on LinkedIn:
Continue reading “Going to Gemba”
