More Andon Cord

I was listening to Gene Kim’s new podcast, Idealcast, interview with Dr. Steven Spear (Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System), and the subject of Andon Cords came up. Since I had recently written a post on Andon Cords, I was very curious if their conversation would line up with my thoughts or if it would show a different angle or new depths. The text of the conversation was (from Ep 5):

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Gene Kim

The notion of the Andon Cord is that anyone on the front line would be thanked for exposing an ignorance/deficiency for trying to solve a problem that the dominant architecture or current processes didn't foresee.

Dr. Steven Spear

That's right. Basically, the way the Andon Cord works is you, Gene, have asked me, Steve, to do something and I can't. And, I'm calling it to your attention. Such that the deficiencies in my doing become a reflection of the deficiencies in your thinking / your planning / your designing. And we're going to use the deficiencies in my doing as a trigger to get together and improve on 'your thinking and my doing' or 'our thinking and our doing'.

Gene Kim

And the way that's institutionalized amplifies signals in the system to self correct.

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To me, that definitely feels like a new angle or view point on Andon Cords. It still feels like it aligns with the “popular definition”, but it’s more clear in it’s description. It seems to follow a line of thinking that “We’ve got a problem occurring right now; let’s use this as an opportunity to look at the problem together. And, then let’s think about ways to improve the process in the future.” Which feels like a more directed statement than “the capability to pause/halt any manufacturing line in order to ensure quality control and understanding.”

But, the definition Gene (Mr. Kim?) and Dr. Spear’s give does imply something I want to point out: Gene’s scenario is one where the person using the Andon Cord is someone directly involved in the processing line. It’s by someone who is directly on the line and seeing a problem as it’s happening. The cord isn’t being pulled by someone who wasn’t asked to be involved in the process.

I wonder if there are any texts on recognizing when an Andon Cord is being used inappropriately? Is that even a thing?