Go and See

Definition

"Go and See" is Toyota's addition to the center of the PDCA cycle (Figure 6-7): at every step of Plan-Do-Check-Act, someone verifies the actual condition in person rather than relying on secondhand reports or calculated data. Rother's summary of the underlying reasoning: "No matter how confident you are, you must always go and see the actual condition for yourself... because the situation is always changing as you move forward." A single observation goes stale — "if you were to only go and see one time... you would become progressively more removed and distant from the real situation."

In the Book

Chapter 6 illustrates the point with an assembly process in Portugal: engineers had calculated from machine-capacity data exactly which workstation was the bottleneck, but on the shop floor a completely different workstation was the actual bottleneck. Rother uses this to draw his distinction between facts and data — "Toyota makes a distinction between facts and data, and prefers facts over data wherever possible" — and notes that "the words spoken most often at Toyota may well be, 'Show me.'" The same instinct drives the turbine-blade example earlier in the chapter, where engineers proposed countermeasures for coating damage before anyone had gone to directly observe the process; the engineer who did go and watch found the real cause the others had assumed away.

Why It Matters

Data is always a compressed, time-delayed, and interpreted stand-in for a situation; it can be internally consistent and still describe a world that no longer exists or never quite existed. Treating "go and see" as a required, repeated step — not a one-time due-diligence check — is a general corrective for any decision process that has drifted toward managing the model of reality instead of reality itself, whether the "process" in question is a factory floor, a codebase, a market, or an organization.