I’m finally trying to read through some Toyota-related books to get a better understanding of the lean movement. Not too long ago, I read Sheigo Shingo’s Non-Stock Production: The Shingo System of Continuous Improvement, and sitting on my bookshelf for a future read is James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniels Roos’s The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production.
The Toyota-themed book I’m currently reading is Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results. Rother often uses the phrase “go and see”, as in “go to the shop floor and observe how the work is actually being done”. I’ve often heard lean advocates use a similar phrase: go the gemba, although Rother himself doesn’t use it in his book. There’s a good overview at the Lean Enterprise Institute’s web page for gemba:
Gemba (現場) is the Japanese term for “actual place,” often used for the shop floor or any place where value-creating work actually occurs. It is also spelled genba. Lean Thinkers use it to mean the place where value is created. Japanese companies often supplement gemba with the related term “genchi gembutsu” — essentially “go and see” — to stress the importance of empiricism.
The idea of focusing on understanding work-as-done is a good one. Unfortunately, in software development in particular, and knowledge work in general, the place that the work gets done is distributed: it happens wherever the employees are sitting in front of their computers. There’s no single place, no shop floor, no gemba that you can go to in order to go and see the work being done.
Now, you can observe the effects of the work, whether it’s artifacts generated (pull requests, docs), or communication (slack messages, emails). And you can talk to people about the work that they do. But, it’s not like going to the shop floor. There is no shop floor.
And it’s precisely because we can’t go to the gemba that incident analysis can bring so much value, because it allows you to essentially conduct a miniature research project to try to achieve the same goal. You get granted some time (a scarce resource!) to reconstruct what happened, by talking to people and looking at those work products generated over time. If we’re good at this, and we’re lucky, we can get a window into how the real work happens.