NO TIME TO WASTE · ISSUE 28
When Does Learning Actually Occur?
I was asked a question this week that stopped me: when does learning actually occur?
Think about it. We send people on courses. We share articles. We run workshops. But how often does the learning stick?
The uncomfortable truth is that learning doesn’t happen when we’re listening to a lecture, reading a book, or watching a video. It happens after — when we try to apply the teaching, and when we assess the feedback from the experiment.
THE BIG IDEA
Problem Solving as a Learning Process
Toyota don’t describe their 8-step problem-solving process as a quality tool or a management technique. They describe it as a learning process. Their stated aim is not to fix problems. It is to develop people — who will in turn develop the business.
This is a fundamentally different way of thinking. Most companies treat problem solving as firefighting — something that happens when things go wrong. Toyota treat it as the primary method through which people grow.
“The power behind TPS is a company’s management commitment to continuously invest in its people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.”
— Jeffrey Liker
The Toyota Way (2004)
The 8 steps — clarify the problem, break it down, set a target, analyse root causes, develop countermeasures, implement, monitor results, and standardise — map directly to the PDCA cycle. Plan, Do, Check, Act. But the real power is in steps 7 and 8: checking both the results and the process, then reflecting on what was learned.
This is where learning occurs. Not in the classroom. Not in the plan. But in the gap between what we expected to happen and what actually happened — and in the discipline of asking why.
IN PRACTICE
A services company we worked with had invested heavily in Lean training — classroom sessions, online modules, certificates. Six months later, very little had changed on the ground.
The turning point came when they stopped treating training as an event (a tick box exercise) and started treating it as a cycle. Instead of a two-day course followed by nothing, each participant was asked to take one real problem from their area, apply the first three steps of the 8-step process, and bring their findings back to the group the following week.
The conversation changed immediately. People weren’t discussing theory — they were discussing their own work. They had tried something, hit an obstacle, and needed to think through why. That reflection — not the original classroom session — was where the learning happened.
Within three months, the team had completed six structured problem-solving cycles and updated four pieces of standard work. More importantly, they had developed the confidence to tackle the next problem without being told.
TRY THIS WEEK
Three Steps Toward a Learning Culture
“We do not just build cars. We build people.”
— Toyota Motor Corporation
The Toyota Way internal document (2001)
A learning culture isn’t built by sending people on courses. It’s built by giving them real problems, a structured way to think through them, and the space to reflect on what happened. The 8 steps are not just a process for solving problems. They are a process for developing the people who will solve every problem after this one.
UPCOMING PROGRAMMES & EVENTS
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