Post by LeanSuite

Your last big change was decided in a single meeting. That's exactly why it never stuck. Toyota almost never makes the real decision in the meeting. By the time everyone sits down, the decision is already made. The meeting just confirms it. The work that gets them there has a name. Nemawashi. It means going around quietly before the decision, talking to people one at a time, gathering their input and clearing their objections while those objections are still small. It looks like politics. It's actually the most practical thing Toyota does. Here's how it plays out, and why it wins. The usual way: you decide fast in the room. Feels efficient. Then you spend the next three months dragging a floor that was never asked. Pushback, rework, and a plan everyone quietly works around. The delay didn't disappear. It just moved to where you stopped looking. Nemawashi flips the order. You spend the slow weeks up front, before the meeting. Aligning, listening, fixing the plan while it's still cheap to change. The decision itself takes minutes, because everyone already agrees. And the rollout runs fast and clean, because nobody is working against it. Same change. Same people. The only thing that moved was when you did the hard part. Decide in the room, and you pay for it on the floor for months. Do the groundwork first, and the floor carries the change for you. So before your next rollout, ask one honest question. Is the floor going to help you build this, or find out about it in the meeting?