DailyKaizen

I recently received a fascinating new book called Training Within Industry (TWI) by Donald Dinero. The book explores a program called the TWI that was developed during World War 2 to quickly bring non-skilled worker up to the status of being productive. The program is a standardized approach to training that focuses on the “daily management” skills necessary for supervisors to perform their tasks with minimal waste and maximum speed. After the war the United State government through their reconstruction efforts of Japan trained thousands of Japanese managers in TWI, which was quickly adopted by companies like Toyota and became the core of what is now the Toyota Production System. In the United States, once the threat of war had passed the programs were placed on the shelf and rarely used by industry. The TWI tools and methods are simple to understand and extremely useful. Their focus is to provide frontline supervisors the skills necessary to standardize their processes, improve their processes and to stay connected to larger objectives.
As a LEAN consultant one of my greatest challenges is helping supervisors and managers sustain change after an RPIW. In healthcare most managers are promoted for their technical ability, but we have not done a great job a building their skill set in process or daily management. Thus, we often have to teach as we go leading to a lot of rework and an inability to manage change without support. I think that some of the methods and tools that TWI provides could be extremely powerful in helping solve this problem.

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