You Get What You Inspect: A NUMMI Lesson in Lean Leadership

Here is the sixth, and probably final, installment of my tales from the NUMMI tour.

You can revisit them by starting with Tale #1 and continuing on from there.

One more important reminder from the NUMMI visit reinforced something I'd already been emphasizing for a few years: standard work and 5S are not one-time exercises to be “completed.”

The real challenge — and the real work — is building a living management system that regularly audits, monitors, and improves practices over time. That takes discipline, a kind of discipline that's often missing. It's a huge waste of effort to carefully document standard work only to let it sit untouched and ignored. Standard work and 5S require ongoing attention.

NUMMI placed strong emphasis on its standard work audit process. In the work areas, very visual boards showed which jobs had been audited and which had not. Group leaders were expected to audit one job every day.

Our host summed it up with a simple mantra:

“You get what you inspect, not what you expect.”

If leaders simply expect people to follow 5S practices, but don't practice genchi genbutsu — going to see for themselves at the gemba, the actual place where the work happens — then they're relying on hope rather than management. Sustaining standard work means actively checking the health of the system, providing coaching and course correction when needed, and reinforcing that the standards actually matter.