Today I read something that reinforced what I have come to understand at some level but now I’m able to make a deeper connection.

Shigeo Shingo taught that it is not enough just to teach people “how” to do something; they must also be taught “why” they are doing it. This allows them to think independently and connect a wide variety of different problems with the same tool set. They are not stuck with a check-list mindset—i.e., always checking what they are currently looking at against what they have already seen.

Only once in my life has that prescriptive solution worked for me. I remember walking through the sheet-metal fabrication shop at John Deere during my first week out of engineering school and seeing almost the exact shape of part being stamped out of a sheet that I had been assigned in a project my senior year when learning about parts nesting and sheet utilization. I had received an A on the project and voilà—my first cost-savings (work simp) project! Not since then have I been so lucky.

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