Articles

Coaching and Reflection The Spirit of Follow-Up The deeper you go into Toyota’s history, the more you realize that its system did not appear through design...

What Good Looks Like (and Common Pitfalls) Context At its best, Step 7 is the living expression of Toyota’s historical follow-up pattern: real problems...

Overview – Why It Matters In Step 6 we verified whether our countermeasures worked — logic met reality, and results confirmed learning. Step 7 asks the next,...

Tools and Methods Context and Caution Before naming tools, it’s important to remember the foundation: All of TPS depends on technology, behavior, and...

Coaching and Reflection Summary – Why Coaching Reflection Matters The final act of problem solving is not closing a report — it is coaching the learning that...

What Good Looks Like and Common Pitfalls Why Reflection So Often Fails In most organizations, reflection is the first casualty of urgency. Once the line...

Overview – Why It Matters Step 8 marks the final stage of structured problem solving — and the true beginning of organizational learning. After the...

Tools and Methods The Mechanisms of Reflection In Toyota, reflection is not just a “meeting” or a single moment after success or failure. In its fullest form...

Coaching Countermeasure Thinking Every strong countermeasure system depends on equally strong coaching. Even with sound methods, results drift when teams treat...

Even a verified cause does not guarantee a lasting fix. Step 5 begins where analysis ends—turning understanding into action. In Toyota practice, this was the...

What Good Looks Like (and Common Pitfalls) Even with solid analysis and well-intentioned teams, many problems return—or were never truly solved in the first...

Overview: Why It Matters Even the most brilliant root cause analysis achieves little without an effective countermeasure. Step 4 may have identified why a...

Coaching and Reflection Introduction – Teaching the Discipline of Confirmation The final part of Step 6 shifts from tools to people. Good checking habits don’t...

Tools and Methods The Purpose of Checking Tools Step 6 is where thinking meets verification. The purpose of this phase is simple but profound: prove, with...

What Good Looks Like (and Common Pitfalls) Introduction – Proof Over Perception Checking results is deceptively simple: look at the data and decide if the goal...

Overview – Why It Matters Where Thinking Meets Reality In the first five steps of problem solving, we moved from defining a problem to identifying causes and...

In the first three articles of this Step 3 series, we examined the purpose, methods, and quality standards for setting targets and goals: The Overview...

In the previous article, we explored why setting a clear target and goal matters — how direction and measurement together give problem solving its compass. Now...

In the first two articles of this Step 3 series, we explored why targets and goals matter and how to write them effectively. The Overview explained that every...

When my first boss at Toyota asked if I knew the difference between a target and a goal, I remember pausing longer than I’d like to admit. I’d used the two...

Setting the Context This is the fourth and final article in the Root Cause Analysis series. In the earlier pieces we discussed why analysis matters, the tools...

Setting the Context Root cause analysis is both the hardest and most important step in problem solving. Every tool we use — from a simple 5 Why chain to a...

Setting the Context Root cause analysis quality depends less on the tool and more on the thinking standard behind it. After years of reviewing hundreds of RCAs...

Setting the Stage In the previous series, I wrote about the importance of clarifying the background, defining the problem, and setting targets and goals. Those...

Coaching Step 1 When You Can’t Go and See Series Context This article concludes a four-part series on Step 1: Clarify the Background, the foundation of...

The Story: A Perfect Problem That Wasn’t A few years ago, a client asked my colleague and me to review their problem-solving process. One team presented what...

The Hardest Easy Thing Someone once said that a problem well defined is half solved. That sounds simple. Almost obvious. But watch people try to do it, and...

The Illusion of the Perfect Tool In almost every conference room, someone eventually reaches for a marker and begins sketching a flow chart or value-stream...

The Illusion of Clarity Everyone thinks their problem is clear — until they try to measure it. Phrases like “we have a quality problem,” “we’re missing...

The Right Tool for the Right Job A maintenance technician walks up to you during a gemba walk. "We've got a problem on Line 3." Do you pull out a formal A3...

The Resolution Problem A team presents their background work. They've documented the situation. They've described what's happening. They've written a clear...

The Five-Minute Disaster I was sitting in a conference room at one of our National Laboratories watching a meeting fall apart. The presenter was...

Why We Created AI A3 Prompts For decades, A3 thinking has been one of the most powerful problem-solving approaches—but it's also been one of the hardest to...

Getting Started with AI-Assisted A3 Problem Solving Artificial intelligence is transforming how we approach problem-solving. When combined with the proven A3...

Here is an example of an extremely detailed A3 Problem Solving report broken down into 76 slides for build up. This is an excellent example of the attention to detail and analysis of actual work that should go into A3 Problem Solving.

How artificial intelligence can enhance A3 thinking while preserving the essential human problem-solving process.

An authentic 24-slide QC Circle example from Japan (July 2016) showing systematic problem-solving for machining defects reduction.