Stand in the Circle

Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, was famous for a teaching method that sounded almost like a punishment. When a young engineer arrived with a theory about what was wrong on the factory floor, Ohno would draw a chalk circle on the concrete, tell the engineer to stand inside it and watch, and walk away. Hours later he would come back and ask what had been seen. If the answer was thin, the engineer stood there longer.

Ohno wasn't testing anyone's patience. He believed most people do not actually see what is in front of them, and that a report about the floor, however accurate, is a different thing from having stood on it. Toyota's phrase for the discipline is genchi genbutsu: go and see for yourself, at the real place, with the real thing.

I think about that circle every time I watch a leadership team review an AI dashboard. A dashboard is testimony: someone, or something, telling you what it noticed. It can be accurate, even brilliant, and still be one voice at one remove. What Ohno understood is that testimony becomes something stronger only when you have been present, standing where the work happens, watching the same thing happen that everyone else is watching.

In my coaching rooms the pattern is nearly identical. A leader gets a perceptive read on what a community needs, from a survey, an analyst, or lately an AI summary, and the read is often right. But it isn't trusted, by the leader or by anyone else, until people have stood in the room together and seen it for themselves. The room tells you what the report can only suggest.

The more powerful our tools for seeing at a distance become, the more deliberately someone has to keep standing in the circle.

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.

Where are you relying on a report about a place you have never actually stood inside?