More than Ford

Henry Ford is considered an icon of modern industrial production. Of course, you know that it was not he who invented the conveyor, but it was Ford who first realized the mass conveyor production. In the 1930s, more than one hundred thousand people worked at its plant in Rouge , and this was during the Great Depression.

But the name of Charles Allen is practically unknown to anyone. At the same time, the influence of Allen’s ideas on the development of the industrial industry is probably even more significant than the influence of Ford. Some of his ideas will be useful in modern IT.



At the beginning of the last century, Allen developed an approach to training in production, which was later not only repeatedly and successfully applied on a national scale, but formed the basis of the Lean manufacturing methodology and the Kaizen approach.

In modern IT companies, we often encounter problems of continuous learning and improving business processes, which are not always resolved. Despite the fact that the method of Allen for more than a century, its main concepts and ideas are still relevant and may well be applied in practice today.

The rise of Allen’s ideas

During the First World War, the US Navy demanded substantial expansion. To work in shipyards required ten times more workers than in peacetime. But so many skilled workers simply did not exist. People needed to be trained, and quickly and massively. The solution of this task was entrusted to Charles Allen, who had developed his own method of training in industry before the war [1, p.7] .

The basis of the approach of Allen was the method of four steps, each of which pursued a specific goal:

1. Preparation - to give the student to think about certain things, to help him in mastering a new thought, a topic of study. (What is the REST Framework, why is it needed, what tasks can be solved with its help).
2. Demonstration - add new ideas to what is already in the student's head, to show in practice how the work should be done. (Show how you can implement the REST method, point out the subtleties associated with a particular Framework).
3. Practice - let the student do the work himself, make mistakes and correct them on the recommendation of the instructor. (Give the task to the developer to implement its own REST method).
4. Testing - testing of learning outcomes, how much the student has mastered the new idea, whether he is able to do the work independently. (Review the code, point out errors, explain why it is so wrong and how you can do better, give the opportunity to correct the comments).

Allen’s program proved successful, and he wrote a book, The Instructor, the Man and the Job, published in 1919, based on the results of his work. Since then, Allen's ideas have become publicly and widely available ... and forgotten for the next quarter of a century.

Success ideas allen

With the beginning of World War II, the situation with the US military industry repeated, but it became much bigger. Tanks, airplanes, ships, ammunition, weapons — all this had to be produced and built, and done quickly. Of course, there were not enough skilled workers. Therefore, in 1940, a national training program for workers in the production process was organized in the USA - Training Within Industry or simply TWI. 16 511 factories took part in the program, 1 750 650 instructors were certified. A typical result was an increase in production by 25%, a reduction in the cost of production, an increase in quality, and, of course, a reduction in the time for personnel training [2, p.89] .

The main program of TWI was the approach of Allen, who by that time was already known for almost 30 years. The difficulty turned out to be that it was necessary not only to train people in new professions, but to train those who would teach. Rather so:

Develop a standard method, then train people who will train other people who will constantly train new groups of people to use this method [2, p.6] .

The direct result of the TWI program was not the workers at all, but the instructors who conducted the training at their own facilities. At the same time, the requirements imposed on the instructor were high [2, p.48] (this also applies to the position of the technical lead in our subject area) .:

1. Knowledge of work, professions - materials, tools, processes, operations, products.
2. Knowledge of responsibility - policies, agreements, rules.
3. The ability to teach is not only how to do the work, but how to do it qualitatively and safely.
4. The ability to improve working methods - to reduce the use of materials, machines, labor.
5. The ability to be a leader is to be able to assess situations, understand people, be able to work with them.

At the end of the war, the TWI program was curtailed. It did not receive further interest and distribution in the United States, mainly because the country was in an extremely favorable economic situation and the need to improve something in production went to the second or third plan. There would be an abyss of Allen’s ideas if they didn’t find use at the other end of the globe.

Pacific region

Before the war, Japan’s economy was dominant in the region, but defeat changed everything. The results of the Second World War did not promise Japan anything good. The point is not only that the production and infrastructure of the country have become ruins. And not in the fact that Japan had to pay substantial reparations, it was simply impossible. But that the United States initially wanted to see Japan as a “small and harmless” country [3, p.27] , primarily in the economic sense. If everything went according to plan, it is possible that now rice and paper umbrellas would be Japan’s main export products. But everything changed very quickly. With the escalation of the Cold War, the United States has become an economic strong Japan [4] .

A strong economy can only be ensured by strong production, and this requires skilled labor. What if there is none? To educate. How to do it? Take the achievements of the TWI program and implement them again, now in Japan. That was done.

Considered purely Japanese, production ideas such as Lean, Kaizen, etc., are in fact a continuation and development of the ideas of Charles Allen, originally formulated and tested by him in the 1910s and further developed under the TWI program in the 1940s.

Here are just a few examples from the concepts of Kaizen, which were actually formulated in the framework of TWI as early as 1943 [1, p.13] :

• Unnecessary parts and operations (waste) should be excluded.
• Work performers have good ideas on how to do this work, often they know it better than their leaders.
• Improvements do not carry values ​​if they are not implemented (very important for our country).
• We cannot afford to be too busy to find time to improve workflows (typical for development, isn't it?).
• If it is clear that it is possible to improve, this should be done now.

Of course, one should not underestimate the contribution of the Japanese to the development of production methodologies. They not only found the strength to adapt and restructure themselves to work according to the methodology imposed on them, but also to develop it into holistic and well-understood concepts. Curiously, in 1982, the book Tetsuo Sakiya, Honda Motor was published: the Men, the Management, the Machines. Intuition suggests that the analogy with the book of Allen in the title is not accidental. But the accents are completely different.

Return to sender

Japanese automobile production has always developed in the conditions of lack of resources. Therefore, their cars were light, compact, consumed little fuel. If to speak as a whole - they were absolutely not interesting to anyone.

All changed the 1973 oil crisis. Expensive, heavy, consuming American cars began to beat consumers. And companies like Ford or GM could only make big cars.

In his speech in 1979, US President Jimmy Carter said the phrase: for the first time in the history of the country, the majority of citizens believe that the next five years will be worse than the previous ones . But for the Japanese automotive industry these years have become a period of rapid growth.

When in 1984, Toyota organized its first production in the United States, at the NUMMI plant , the Japanese already faced the problem of training workers in another country [5, Chapter 7] . Here is what John Shook, one of the first employees of NUMMI-Toyota [6, p.69], writes about :

When I encountered difficulties in understanding some of the production concepts that I was taught, my Japanese colleague brought from the storeroom a stack of yellowed, bruised, stained coffee sheets of paper that were a copy of the original tutorial in English, exactly as they were Got it from us 30 years ago. Minus coffee stains.

There is nothing surprising, Toyota is an extremely conservative company, why invent something new if there is a well-functioning old one? This is not a Honda.

One way or another, but by the end of the last century, the ideas of Charles Allen not only returned to their historical homeland, but also began to actively spread throughout the world, already true under the banner of the Japanese approach.

Conclusion

Once I heard the phrase, I remember it. Not quite literally, but the essence was as follows: “Come to us, we will teach you. But remember, we will teach badly, because we do not know how well . ” Agree, sad.

In any profession there is always something to learn. You can wait for the person to figure it out himself, or you can instill the necessary skills purposefully. The second one is much faster and more productive, but it requires certain efforts and dedication from the manager in order to develop their employees.

Of course, the understanding of the method of Allen is much deeper and more extensive than is presented in this article, but there is nothing fundamentally difficult in this. In all it is possible to understand. You just need to stop being too busy doing work and start thinking about how this work is done.
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Dmitry Mamonov / Wrike