Perhaps the most famous example was the NUMMI plant. GM couldn't get TPS to work. So they did a deal with Toyota to take over one of their plants, just to see the system up close.
The plant they gave to Toyota had 'the worst workforce in the industry'.
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Toyota made it work. Two years after plant closure, NUMMI reopened and immediately started producing at Japanese levels. Same output rates, and same error rate.
More thinkers studied this and concluded 'omg organisational tacit knowledge'.
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This is the context in which DiBello created her Strategic Rehearsals. It is the subtext to our discussion.
The idea behind the Strategic Rehearsal is to run two 1-day simulations of a pretend manufacturing line, conducted under time pressure.
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Under time pressure, workers will default to their default mental models. They will fail to hit profitability targets, production targets, scrap rates, and inventory levels targets that are set at the start of the exercise.
This provokes a state of 'disequilibrium'.
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Disequilibrium is a Piagetian term. It simply means 'they lose faith in their mental models'.
The next day, they come back, willing to rethink their approach.
This allows them to work out, from first principles, a production system that is basically lean manufacturing.
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This is DiBello's contribution to the literature on the cognitive science of work.
One of the earliest interventions where she and her co-researchers were still developing this technique may be found at wtri.com/wp-content/upl
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Anyway, I got unreasonably excited by the story of the Midwest Foundry because of the effectiveness of the intervention.
(I sent this to a friend in manufacturing, and he got unreasonably excited as well).
It's VERY hard to get lean manufacturing to work.
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I've mostly talked about DiBello's work on extracting a mental model of business, but she's actually more well known on the cognitive science of accelerated expertise. Here's another example of her training, this time for Rio Tinto:
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And we talk quite a bit about that in our podcast episode together.
Enjoy!
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To be clear, I’m grateful you’re listening to this, but I’ve spent too much time editing the podcast that all I can hear are the flaws! 🤪