I was mentored and saw my Japanese colleagues both being mentored and mentoring others in the company's most prevalent management tool-its most visible form of organizational "currency." My colleagues and I wrote A3s almost daily. This produces organizational learning that is deeply rooted in the work itself-operational learning.ĭiscovery at Toyota I difcovered the A3 process of managing to learn firsthand during the natural course of my work in Toyota City beginning in 1983. The widespread adoption of the A3 process standardizes a methodology for innovating, planning, problem-solving, and building foundational structures for sharing a broader and deeper form of thinking. But in this book I also want to reveal A3 as a management process. As a result, companies that successfully implement them for decision-making, planning, proposals, and problem-solving can realize instant gains. A3s are, indeed, powerful tools that lead to effective countermeasures based on facts. It's understandable that they focus on this immediate, though limited, application. Many people familiar with A3 reports see them primarily as a simple communication tool or problem-solving technique. Many elements of the Toyota system have been held up as the key to its tremendous success, but the most important accomplishment of the company is simply that it has learned to learn. And so this book is designed to help you learn from your problems as you seek to solve them, while at the same time producing innovative and problem-solving employees. The process by which the company identifies, frames, and then acts on problems and challenges at all levels-perhaps the key to its entire system of developing talent and continually deepening its knowledge and capabilities -can be found in the structure of its A3 process. This brief question-and-answer guide provides some basic information to help individuals take advantage of outpatient (non-hospital) psychotherapy.Introduction At Toyota, where I worked for more than 10 years, the way of thinking about problems and learning from them for more effective planning, decision-making, and execution is one of the secrets of the company's success.