Conditions for survival in the manufacturing industry in VUCA era
Satoru Murakami
CEO Goal-System consultants Inc.,
"Uncertain" and "ambiguous" things that we are not good at
So far, we have considered approaches to "variation" and "complexity" in TPS and TOC, so from this time on, we will consider "Uncertainty" and "Ambiguity" whose existence itself is not certain.
Actually, we are extremely bad at dealing with these two words in the four words VUCA. Ambiguity is "the content is difficult to grasp and is not clear that it can be understood in two ways (or more)", which is literally a very ambiguous state.
In particular, Japanese people are said to avoid "explicit expressions" and use ambiguous expressions in everything. Japanese grammar can omit the subject and may sound ambiguous due to the grammatical nature of the predicate being the last. And furthermore, not only the meaning of words but also "reading the air" often obscures one's feelings.
It is also said that Japanese people prefer to use ambiguous expressions in communication with others, and to let the other person "guess the true intention" through the context and expressions before and after. Certainly, it is pointed out that the ambiguity and the roundabout way of saying it are Japanese kindness and beauty.
However, ambiguity is forbidden not only in Japan and the Japanese, but also in the world of manufacturing and operations management. Today, the most difficult thing we have is the "uncertainty" and "ambiguous" events. As we have seen, what we can handle well in the present situation is the "visible things (Entity)" that everyone can understand. Up to this point, even if the problems are a little complicated, you can handle them quite well.
However, as uncertainty and ambiguity increase, cognitive bias, which I will explain later, helps and gradually becomes an area that cannot be handled well. For example, in an event where the probability of receiving an order for a sales project or the success or failure of an experiment at the basic research stage can be expected to completely fail and be wiped out, no matter how large the safety margin (buffer value) is set, it is absolutely not certain.
In the first place, unlike variations, these are "risks", so it is not possible to evaluate risks over time. There is an extremely capricious "Uncertainty" event that is different from the statistical variability that we have examined so far, past experience and knowledge do not apply, and it cannot be covered by the mechanism of buffers and Kanban alone, "ambiguous".
Dr. Goldratt points out that when people and organizations encounter uncertainty things in reality, they are afraid of the uncertainty, but they operate according to "strict predictions that do not hit" and inventory. It is said to be causing an increase and a decrease in performance.
Of course, this is the worst way to do it, and the correct answer is that the prediction is not correct. In this case, if you improve your operations management so that you can supply it with a short lead time, you will not have to predict the future, and if you respond to what actually happened, the uncertainty should be significantly reduced.
Ford, Toyota, and TOC each method basically target reality that is visible in reality (current reality). I think that the operation methodology explained so far is also a method of what to do with the present (current reality), and it is a method of causing "change" in the troublesome real problem in front of us.
However, the environment we have to deal with today is becoming more uncertain and at the same time needs to be upgraded to win. Innovation is required to survive at the global level, not at the level of catch-up, which is not defeated.
Today, the environment goes beyond "unstable" and steps into the "uncertain and unknown" territory. In the first place, the future is uncertain, no matter how hard we try to solidify the present, we will not know tomorrow.
As I've said many times, "complexity," "uncertainty," and "unknown" are different types of problems.
