The 10% Solution

Toyota discovered something that sounds impossible:

Teams spending 10% of time improving HOW they work consistently outperform teams spending 100% on deliverables.

They called it kaizen.

Any assembly line worker could pull the andon cord, stopping production to fix problems or suggest improvements. American manufacturers thought this was insane.

"You're letting workers stop million-dollar production lines?"

Yes.

And it made Toyota unstoppable.

Here's why: That 10% meta-work doesn't just fix today's problems. It eliminates entire categories of future dysfunction.

Like debugging your operating system while competitors just restart when things crash.

But the cord only catches visible problems.

What about the issues everyone sees but nobody mentions?

Enter the "elephant autopsy"—monthly sessions specifically designed to discuss the undiscussable. That process everyone hates but never changes. That recurring failure pattern everyone recognizes but pretends doesn't exist.

The framework is simple: Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed for.

"Longed for" is where elephants finally get named.

I've watched teams transform when someone finally says: "I long for meetings where we actually make decisions." Or "I long for a world where we stop pretending the timeline is realistic."

That's when real change begins.

Yet some teams resist these practices violently.

And that resistance?

It's data.

Tomorrow: Why the biggest pushback reveals the biggest opportunity.

This is Part 3 of 5 in "The Silence Tax"