Utilizing PDCA (Part 12)

Remember the Target Condition we had to get closer to the vision to have a healthy sleep and lifestyle? Now, let’s try to create a simple PDCA for a simple, a little bit modified Target Condition that enables us to see things in action.

Vision: “Leading a Healthy Life”

Target Condition:

• going to bed at 12 AM;
• food intake after 9 PM: 30 grams;
• reading: 30 minutes;
• looking at the (laptop, smartphone) screen after 10 PM: 25 mins.

That’s a target condition for, let’s say, two weeks. Food, reading, and screen times are all important metrics that hugely affect slumber. Now, we need specific PDCA cycles to reach the Target.

First PDCA cycle would look like this:

Plan: go to bed at 12 AM (yeah, that’s an improvement for some people!) and wake up at 9 AM;

Do: do your habits of eating, using smartphones and stuff, and reading. Then go to bed;

Check: before going to bed, consider what you ate, screen time, and reading times. After waking up, check the time.

Act: it depends on the results.

So, the outcome of the current habits was that we woke up at 10 AM, we were less energetic with the lifestyle still being far from the Target. So, to solve the problem, we can jump to countermeasures and think that the solution lies in our Alarm Clock or something else.

But, on our way to go to the root of the problem, before going to bed the day we started the cycle, we focused on the metrics and found out the outcomes for food intake, screen time, and reading. Then, after waking up, we could see the overall outcome of:

We can now tell with high probability that the cause of unhealthy sleep was food intake and sleeping late. Hence, focusing on the root, we should ask ourselves the following question: “What is preventing me from eating less and going to bed earlier?” As eating more affects the digesting system and consumes energy that can make a person sleep more and wake up tired.

So, even if you put nine alarm clocks for “8 AM”, still you find yourself leading an unhealthy lifestyle. Therefore, you better stick to the PDCA kind of stuff and go to the root processes. The same with companies. Try to figure out the ways to utilize this tool in your business!

That was just the first cycle of PDCA, and we learned about the current state and identified the Act (the next step towards the Vision). The next PDCA may include even more precise goals and metrics by which you can continuously grow:

So, as you can see, the causes do not stand out at first. They must be sought through. When we do the cycle and pursue a Target Condition, we will be able to identify the obstacles, small obstacles that actually played a big enough role in the whole process.

We have misunderstood why Toyota is more successful than other organizations in achieving the challenges (target conditions) it sets for itself. It is not primarily because Toyota people have greater discipline to stick with a plan or experience fewer problems, as is often thought. Rather, they spot problems at the process level much earlier, when the problems are still small and you can understand them and do something about them.

— Mike Rother