OBEYA: BRING THEM IN ONE PLACE

https://youtu.be/ktzVbw25zs8

Origin

The G21 project was a largescale project that enfolded at Toyota in the 1990’s. The aim was to navigate Toyota through the advent of the new century, by creating a vehicle (catalogue) that could withstand the challenges of the upcoming new century, including ever growing resource scarcity.

Many of you have seen one of the most prominent fruits of this project on the road. Perhaps, you or someone you know, even drives it. We are of course referring to the Toyota Prius. Less well known is another “fruit” of the G21 project, namely the “obeya” (大部屋) which translates to “big room” and was the brain child of Takeshi Uchiyamada, the chief engineer of the G21 project.  

As the project advanced, Uchiyamada started to experience the same frustrating situation over and over again. Toyota was not a small company. In fact it was an industrial behemoth. A vast variety of experts, leaders and stakeholders wandered around in that gigantic ecosystem, both in and outside the Aichi prefecture in Japan.

The G21 project could not be contained to one or just a handful of parts, in this gigantic ecosystem. It needed to blanket the whole organization. But how could Uchiyamada do that, with all these conflicting preferences and ideas? How could he do it with all these data islands that were no connected? This frustrating efforts to bring the project to the organization was replaced by a new tactic. Takeshi Uchiyamada would bring the organization to the project! He drew inspiration from already existing concepts and created a physical room that would host stakeholders, experts and decision makers on a regular basis. They would be surrounded by all the relevant data.

The idea was that this setup would maximize effective and efficient communication. Data would not stay on little islands, ideas would not have to be voiced over and over again, but rather once! These days, many organizations, including Nike, have copied this practice of the obeya.

Setup

Contrary to what some believe, there exists no universal way to actually set the obeya up. Here are two setups that we have seen in practice. Lean practitioners should feel free to deviate from these setups if they believe that it benefits the cause.

Setup A:

Wall 1: Performance metrics

Wall 2: Ideas: Concepts, design sketches etc.

Wall 3: Progress data: Kanban boards, Gantt charts etc.

Wall 4: Feedback: Internal feedback from colleagues and external feedback from the field.

Setup B:

Wall 1: Customer information: VOC, personas, feedback etc.

Wall 2: Product (or service) information: Concepts, sketches etc.

Wall 3: Process information: Value stream map, process map etc.

Wall 4: Performance information: KPIs.