When and how should we question authority?

New York Times piece today relevant to thinking about Toyota's Production System,
as well as topics of mindfulness, high-reliability, and how to teach and reach new MPH students that I discussed a few weeks ago in "What I learned at Johns Hopkins last week" where I bemoaned the fact that the students "just sat there, unresponsive."

The Times article, by Norimitsu Inishi
Japan Learns Dreaded Task of Jury Duty
NY Times July 16, 2007

Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.

Well, that certainly sounds like the class I was in. What insights can we gain from this cross-cultural view?

They preferred directing questions to the judges. They never engaged one another in discussion. Their opinions had to be extracted by the judges and were often hedged by the Japanese language’s rich ambiguity. When a silence stretched out and a judge prepared to call upon a juror, the room tensed up as if the jurors were students who had not done the reading.

Well, in my case it's likely that, literally, the students had not, in fact, done the reading and were in no rush to call attention to themselves and get a follow up question back to them that would reveal that fact. And they were reluctant to ask a question that all by itself would show they hadn't done the reading.

One more snippet is worth quoting:

Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”

Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”

After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence....

After it was all over, only a single juror said he wanted to serve on a real trial. The others said even the mock trial had left them stressed and overwhelmed.

So, I for one will be watching with great interest to see how this evolves.

One point I have to note regards our country's history efforts to try to implement abroad things that work for us at home. Sometimes we seem, like a teenager, with our 230 years experience, to be confidently giving advice to 5000 year-old civilizations -- maybe akin to a 2.3 year old trying to advise his 50 year old parents on how to run the household.

Maybe things are as they are for a good reason. Maybe, messing with a cultural system we don't even pretend to understand and casually plannint to replace one part of their system with one that "works for us" will have, shall we say, "unintended consequences."

As I said there, the classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony:
"The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems",
http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations. Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

I am deeply concerned about not just this context-blind approach to trying to walk in and transform existing cultures, that as far as I can tell we are not very good at, but at extensions of this mental model to deciding we are going to start tinkering with DNA.

My daughter recalled a conversation she saw quoted with China's former Chairman Mao meeting with the head of France around 1980 or so, and being asked what he thought of the French Revolution. Mao's response was "It's too soon to tell."

I can't help but note that W. Edwards Deming came up with key quality improvement ideas decades ago in the USA, which was totally uninterested in them, so he went to Japan, where he was welcomed as a hero and passed along ideas adopted by Toyota that have directly led to Toyota's impressive performance. So, maybe Japanese culture had some positive aspect to it that we should be careful not to damage when adding our new "jury duty" feature.

The systems literature shows that it is generally impossible to change just one part of a complex living system without impacting all the other parts. Living things are not machines, with sub-assemblies we can just remove and replace with the latest version. This has the feeling of someone removing the propeller from a small private plane and installing a jet turbine in 98% of the cabin space, since "jets are better than props." Hmm. Not always.

Maybe a better example that I recall actually happening was the period when the US was complaining about Japanese "barriers to entry" of US car sales in Japan, back in the mid 1970's.
GM was offering a car that had the steering wheel on the left side (Japanese, like British, drive on the left side of the road and have steering wheels on the right side of the vehicle.). Also, the cars were too large to fit down most alleys and many streets in Tokyo, too large to park anywhere, and guzzled gas that was running at ten times the US price. And the car interiors were scaled for 6 foot Texans, not 5' Japanese. And, the car had no place to put a bicycle in it for the rest of the commute once a parking place was found. The US attributed low sales to wrongful Japanese barriers to free trade. The reality was that most Japanese couldn't use that car if you gave it to them for free. The basics of marketing once upon a time, when I went to Business School, were "know your customer" and "Be driven by what the customer values, not what you think they should value." In "lean manufacturing" this would be called "pull" or "value chain".

But, then, we were too busy assuming things and talking to shut up and listen.

We were violating Japanese traditions from nemawashi (walking around and gaining consensus before taking action) to the "lean" concept of genchi genbutsu (going down to the floor to see for ourselves before making pronouncements from afar of what is wrong.)

As even Wikipedia realizes:

Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) means "go and see for yourself" and it is an integral part of the Toyota Production System. It refers to the fact that any information about a process will be simplified and abstracted from its context when reported. This has often been one of the key reasons why solutions designed away from the process seem inappropriate.

So, I'm not sure this particular government policy has a learning curve and won't explode in our face when we turn it on. Maybe this has been deeply considered. Maybe not.

If the objective is to damage Japan's culture and gain a competitive edge, or at least remove their edge over us, then I suppose random tinkering might be a good idea. If the objective is the much harder task of improving the functioning of a 5000 year old civilization, it might be good to be mindful of any indications that our mental model doesn't match their reality, so we should stop what we're doing and address that and update our model with more current information. That's the key to high-reliability performance, and avoiding nasty surprises. The article gives no indication that the policy implementation is contingent on it actually working in practice when implemented.

In the classic PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), there is that "C" step, "check" that what we did had the desired effect, not an unexpected contrary effect, in case we missed some crucial fact.

That's not a bad model.


W.