General Motors new CEO, Mary Barra, released to the public a report of a thorough and independent investigation led by Anton Vulakas into how the company managed, or failed to manage, a single small problem in the development of a single car platform. It’s still too early to tell how much this small problem — inadequate force on a detent plunger in the ignition switch — will cost GM, but it will be in the range of a billion dollars.

Business schools will be discussing this investigation for decades. Right now I can find in this report two simple and important lessons for would-be Lean practitioners. 

1) This quality problem had nothing to do with what happened on the factory floor.

I am always concerned when I hear people assert that Lean is just a set of tools to be used on the factory floor. Such an attitude actually feeds the very problem that GM faced: the sense that it’s not my problem.

The tools most people think of when they first learn about Lean — kanbans, 5S, poka yoke, and and so on — are not just some tools that some Japanese people came up with because they are cool.

While they can be, but aren’t always, essential tools in a Lean environment, these tools are but results, results that are far down a long list of results of a particular way of thinking about the business, why it exists, and its relationship with the customer, employees, and community. Lean is not about these tools, but about the way of thinking that got to these tools.

No doubt GM uses Lean techniques on the factory floor, but the word “factory” doesn’t even appear in the Valukas report. Lean is much more than a set of tools to be used on the factory floor. If you don’t realize this you are setting yourself up to create the very sort of quality problems that GM created for themselves and their customers

2) The sheer complacency of GM management, including low level engineering project managers, is as mortifying as it is defining of mass producers.

When the researchers and authors of “The Machine That Changed The World” came up with the term “Lean manufacturing” to describe the phenomenon they were seeing, they contrasted Lean with the practices of “mass production.” While anybody who has spent time in both Lean and mass production facilities understands that this is an appropriate comparison to make, over the years I have come to believe that the term “mass production” just doesn’t get to the core difference between the two approaches.

The core difference, I firmly believe, derives from the utter complacency of the mass producer.

This complacency is well illustrated in the Vulakas report. My own experience offers a striking example of the problem.

I can’t say how many many many times I have heard people recite the mantra, when faced with a problem, “Oh, I think it’s okay.”

They “think” it’s okay because they don’t want the inconvenience of dealing with a problem and, fortunately for themselves, by deeming it “okay”, they are able to pass the problem along to somebody else in the hope that somebody else will deal with it instead. This “Oh, I think it’s okay” attitude is nearly endemic in American business. “Oh, I think it’s okay” is the defining jargon of American corporate complacency.

As reports of the problem came in, GM middle managers classified a pattern of car engines and electrical systems shutting down seemingly randomly, including in emergency situations, as a “consumer convenience” issue. Having done that, it’s easy to picture them spending the next several years justifying this by telling each other, “Oh, I think it’s okay.” Well it wasn’t okay. It cost at least thirteen lives and will cost the company a thousand million dollars. That’s not “okay.”

For all the publicity surrounding Toyota’s supposed unintended acceleration problems it’s hard to picture Toyota’s employee’s telling each other “Oh, I think it’s okay.” (I am always extremely skeptical of a claim that an auto engine is producing more accelerative horsepower than the brake system on the same car can produce decelerative horsepower. One only has to compare widely published and independently measured acceleration times and braking distances to understand that the brakes will easily gobble up far more power than the engine can produce.)

So two key take-aways from the GM crackup:

1) Don’t believe that Lean only goes on, and quality problems only come off, the factory floor. They don’t.

2) You accept “Oh, I think it’s okay” at your own risk.

Copyright 2014 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.