In 1983, John Shook went to Japan to work for Toyota Motor Corp. He was a young American who'd been to Japan before, was a student of lean management and was attracted to Japanese ideas about process improvement, quality and distributed responsibility. But he didn't know what he was getting into.
Although Shook was the only Westerner in Toyota City at that point, he was trained as any other fresh arrival was. "Every newly hired college-graduate employee began learning his job by being coached through the A3 process," Shook says. "The employee would arrive at his new desk to find waiting for him a problem, a mentor and a process for learning how to solve that problem. The entire process was structured around PDCA [plan, do, check, act] and captured in the A3."
Shook discovered that A3 was the international term for an 11-inch-by-17-inch sheet of paper. But at Toyota it had come to symbolize a process -- a way of thinking, communicating, learning and getting things done. The company meant to use it to create an entire organization of problem solvers. Shook says, "Toyota's insight many years ago was that every issue in an organization should be described, analyzed and solved on a single sheet of paper that everyone touching the matter can see."
An A3 report depicts an issue, analyzes the situation and its underlying causes and identifies the required outcome. It proposes corrective actions, prescribes an action plan detailing who will do what and when. And, finally, it creates a follow-up review process.
No two A3 reports do these things the same way, however. While they have a typical order to using these prescribed actions, they differ largely in both look and substance. Shook says in that sense they're not unlike résumés.
Shook ended up spending 10 years at Toyota -- and was the first American to become a manager at the company. Now, in his book Managing to Learn (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2008), Shook details his time at the company and discusses A3 as a management principle.
He writes: "I was mentored, saw others being mentored, mentored others myself. I debated, coached, cursed, and was cursed at. I came to understand others and caused others to understand me. I learned to get things done, to engage the organization, to garner its resources to effectively get things done. 'John, you must use the organization. It is there for you. Use the organization as if it were a tool to wield, an instrument to play,' my boss implored me. I honestly had no idea what he was talking about at first. But he kept coaching, kept imploring, kept mentoring. And, eventually, I began to see."
A3 was designed to produce a desired outcome not just by focusing on that outcome, but by creating a process that would ensure that the outcome gets achieved. For instance, you wouldn't tell someone that her report needs to include only what matters; instead, you would restrict her to a single sheet of paper to write the report. Tightening focus would be an inherent part of the work.
Focusing on progress rather than only results requires that those authoring A3 reports gather facts, seek and account for feedback, identify the owners of work and construct clear follow-up loops. That, all before any work begins. It's an iterative process that forces learning to be based not on abstract study but the "place where work occurs," says Shook. That can have surprising results.
"They learn that what they first thought the problem was, turns out not to be the problem," says Shook. Usually they make that discovery because of how relentlessly the A3 process drives authors to identify root causes. "Completing and then discussing the material in an A3," Shook writes in Managing to Learn, "forces individuals to observe reality, present facts, propose working countermeasures designed to achieve the stated goal, gain agreement and follow up with a process of checking and adjusting for actual results. As a result, the A3 represents a powerful tool for problem-solving, making improvements and getting things done."
This article is adapted from "Problem Solving By Design," by Michael S. Hopkins, which appeared in the Summer 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. The complete article is available at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/.