Four Step Paradigm or Pattern

¶ … four step paradigm or pattern of identifying the problem, investigating reasons for the problems, developing a plan for addressing the problem, and deciding what to do can be seen in both Toyota's failure and in its response to the failure and in the way that hey built themselves up.

In 2009-2010, Toyota Motor Company announced a global recall of 1.53 million vehicles due to the fact that their vehicles' break and fuel pump was problematic . More than 8.5 million cars and trucks were recalled and revealed problems included gas pedals that jammed or stuck under floor mats, causing vehicles to speed out of control. The consequence too was a series of lawsuits with a fatal accident of a police officer on a freeway.

The horrendous situation could well have signaled the demise of Toyota ruining both its reputation and sending it into bankruptcy, but Toyota spun out of its difficulty by employing the four-step problem -resolving paradigm in order to climb out of its mess.

Firstly the managers established a "Special Committee for Global Quality (SCGQ)" and identified the problem. There was a problem with the car. Recalls were executed.

It was admission of the fact that they had a problem and that something was horribly wrong with their organization that helped Toyota capture something of the trust and confidence of their clients. It also helped them acknowledge that something was grievously wrong with their company and helped them be open to the courage of investigating and rectifying.

They then moved on to examine the underlying reason behind such factors and planned specific steps to implement in order to rectify the situation and to prevent such errors from re-occurring. The managers themselves took charge of the Research and Development department and investigated line per line of car conducting intensive research until they discovered that it was the gas pedal that was horribly flawed.

Continuous improvement is a crucial step in any company's business management process and Toyota realized that the root cause for their tragedy was their ineffective continuous improvement process. They had become too casual and greedy chasing quantity of cars rather than quality and focusing more on profits than on customer satisfaction. Toyota's traditional priorities had placed safety first, quality second, and volume third. But the over-confidant Toyota had placed volume of cars above all else. Many of their new hires and vendors were also not adequately trained in the methods of Total Quality Management since continuous improvement had ceased to matter to the company.

Another problem was that decisions were centralized causing many of the problems of logical regions to be glossed over. The customer perspective was ignored with the company working form their own self-centered stance and interests. This resulted in failures of cars and breakdowns.

Toyota's next step was decision-making.

Toyota decided to reaffirm their values of placing safety and quality the highest on their list of priorities as well as to embrace their philosophy of continuous improvement (namely Total Quality Management (TQM) or Kaizen ). Toyota also formed a quality advisory group composed of globally respected and objective experts in order to ensure that no misguided decisions were made. Other decision included plan to create a response system that would be able to respond to any quality incident within twenty four hours of it being reported in the United States; at which point an inspection would be performed on site with technical specialist to analyze the reason for the incident. Toyota also upgraded its hiring and training program with an insistence on continuous education and handed particular regions regional self-reliance which meant that they could form their own decisions acting on their particular clientele. Finally, (although not exclusively), they also established an Automotive Center of Quality Excellence and a new position, Product Safety Executive, in order to ensure the quality of production.