An interesting thing happened on the way to perfection…

Toyota’s recall and reputation crisis seem to be getting worse day by day. This was a company so obsessed with making cars of unmatchable quality and reliability that they helped set a higher standard for the industry, compelling their competitors to follow. Relentless waste and defect reduction through process control and continuous improvement is their strength and sweet spot, and their comfort zone. This is the machine that helped change the world.

Now Toyota’s new challenge is one well outside their comfort zone. The relentless quality machine is now…well…human. And while they still need their best engineers focused on finding the root causes and developing and rolling out fixes, Toyota is challenged to regain the trust of a fearful owner body through all levels of communication – people communicating with people, not just a quality machine conducting a safety recall.

Humans have many things in comm...