# Toyota: 14,000 suggestions a day - **Episode:** [217](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/217.md) (2025-07-24) - **Type:** interview - **Tags:** toyota, suggestions, production - **Time:** 28:23–33:40 (start 1703s) - **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/217?t=1703](https://truthliesandwork.com/217?t=1703) --- [28:23] Leanne Elliott: At the start of the episode, we teased you with a story about a factory where the production line was intentionally shut down multiple times a day. That factory is, in fact, the Toyota factory in Derby, England. Yeah [28:36] Andrew Palmer: So, one of the visits that we did for the second season of Boss Class was to the Burnaston car plant, which Toyota runs in Derby. And Toyota is famous around the world for lean management and the principles that it has around continuous improvement and so on. But if you go into the plant, you see this come alive just immediately in a way which is unmistakable. It's sort of visible and audible. It's the It's the way people talk, right? You have people sort of with snatches of Japanese in kind of Derby accents is just a kind of strange auditory experience. But when you are in the assembly plant, their principle at Toyota is this idea that everyone is empowered to come up with ideas for how to improve the carmaking process. This kaizen, continuous improvement. And every factory employee is expected to come up with 2 a month. And so you're getting up to 20,000, something like that in a month. They have these famous andon cords, which is by each workspace as the body of the car is moving through the assembly plant. There's a cord that hangs down a bit like a clothesline, and you can pull that cord at any point. And that is a signal. Sometimes it's a signal of something very trivial, but that can also be a signal of something is wrong and we need to change it. And what happens is that gives your supervisor, the supervisor has something like 2 minutes to get down there and sort it out. And if they can't, then the whole line stops, but that's fine because what they want to do is encourage people to identify and surface problems. And the guy I was talking to said that when new people come onto the line, their first and natural reaction, if you think about this, right? Here's this cord. If you pull this cord, you're potentially going to stop the entire factory and you're signaling to your boss that I've got a problem and I can't solve it. So that is quite countercultural, right? I mean, it's sort of like you could imagine, especially young people coming into the workplace, wanting to impress their bosses, like, am I really going to pull that cord? So they spend quite a lot of time socializing people to understand that it's important. So the first shift they get everyone round, the new person is there and is encouraged to pull the cord. And everyone does this football chant crescendo. So, woo, kind of thing. And they pull the cord and a big cheer. But everything is geared towards that. And I'm going to give you a little test here. So there's in this plant, there are There are— how many people are there? 2,000 people who work there. And I want you to guess how many times this cord is being pulled in a day [31:37] Al Elliott: I would guess somewhere between 5 and 7. So 6 [31:42] Andrew Palmer: I said 20, and the real answer is 14,000 [31:46] Leanne Elliott: What? [31:47] Andrew Palmer: Yeah. So it's just completely Completely off the scale. I mean, like you just would have no idea. Now, as I say, some of those pulls are, you know, you're kind of, you know, there's a slight, you need a break for whatever reason or something like that. But even if you strip those away, there's this very, very high volume turnover of kind of, you know, observations or this is a thing we ought to think about that then translates into a smaller number of suggestions for improvements that then goes through a process. at the company in general of kind of like, do we do this? Do we not? Some of those improvements are plant-specific. Some of them get rolled out around the world. And that number was just like mind-blowing to me. It's like I had, I was so out on the guess. And clearly they're very used to that. They know that people are kind of being low single digits as a sort of first approximation. So that was one very clear example of a lived culture [32:51] Al Elliott: So just to get these numbers right, 2,000 people there, 14,000 times a day. That's an average of everyone pulling it 7 times a day [32:59] Andrew Palmer: That is right. Now, I am going to, like, I will check this afterwards. So you'll hear from me again if I've got that, but that's my memory. I think the important thing is the difference between, you know, You are at 5 or 6. I was at 20. The real number is ludicrously higher. And as I say, that number does include things which would be kind of, you know, I need to take a break or whatever it is, right? Sort of, so can you fill in for a minute? The important thing is that this is some sort of extremely kind of well-functioning feedback machine. that is also operating within the assembly plant, and the two go together