The Toyota Language

Today I worked with a recently hired team member to troubleshoot a gripper assembly.  He's a very bright individual with very solid electrical troubleshooting experience.  The problem we were trying to fix was that a gripper was not moving forward after it had picked up a part.

When I arrived at the equipment, I saw him disconnecting many wire terminals.  Naturally, I asked him what alarm he was getting from the screen.  He told me he did not check.  Then I asked him at what step was the machine faulting out, he vaguely told me about how it faulted.  When I asked him further about how this machine should operate step by step, he was not able to clearly tell me.  We ended up spending about twice as long as it would normally take to fix a problem of this nature.

As I tried to reflect on this experience to find out how I could help him to reduce his MTTR (mean time to repair) time, I suddenly realized that it is not just his familiarity of the equipment that we need to provide training on.  Fundamentally, it is his fluency of the Toyota language that we really need to focus on.

What do I mean by the "Toyota language"?  You can think of any language as a composite of many different layers of abstractions.  The higher you go up the layer, the more abstract it becomes, but the more efficient it becomes, because it encompasses many meanings.  For example, the word "teacher" is an abstraction composed of two ideas: "people" who "provide lessons".  So, instead of saying "people who provide lessons" all the time, you can simply say "teacher".  It is the same as in object oriented programming, where "objects" are defined as a composite with a set of defined features.  Once defined, the programmer can use it efficiently as one variable, instead of having to write ten lines of codes each time she wants to use it.  In short, a language gives you an efficient way to communicate.

So in my case with my team member, because he hasn't had a thorough understanding and enough experience with the Toyota language, for example, how we follow TBP in troubleshooting, what we mean when we ask for a "point of occurrence", I had to spend a lot of time saying "people who provide lessons" instead of just "teachers"!

A good team communicates well because they have developed their own unique "team language"!