ABSTRACT
Knowledge is vital to production and production improvement and you can’t study knowledge without studying people and organisation. This chapter looks at these three concepts: ‘people’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘organisation’, showing the relationships between them. Understanding what people know is the key to understanding why they organise production the way they do. In turn, that helps us to improve processes. We must understand not only production theory, but also the current state of knowledge in the organisation.
In TFV theory, the people aspect of production is addressed primarily in the V perspective. The value (or supply) chain is effectively a set of relationships linking and governing organisational sub-systems which each add value to the product. These relationships are, above all, human relationships. This insight is central to both the Toyota Production System (TPS) and the Last Planner System.
The necessary nature of these relationships and the basis for their improvement is addressed in the concepts of conversation for action (language action perspective) and improvement cycle (Deming or Shewart cycle). The former is built around the concept of commitment and the latter around learning. These concepts do not set out to simply describe the organisation of production as it is, but to offer prescriptions as to how it should be done. Both emphasise: (i) the principled investigation of and engagement with reality; (ii) clear and co-operative communication.
Communication can also be analysed in terms of flows (F). In the simplest terms, this is merely a matter of mapping the lines of communication in a similar matter to value stream mapping. However, building on Shingo’s distinction between process flow and operational flow, it is possible to perceive a conceptual link between the F and V perspectives. Thus, conversations for action and improvement cycles can be identified as communicative (or knowledge) operations. The theoretical consequences of such a move are yet to be fully explored.
Koskela identifies four aspects of management: organising; planning; adherence; and improvement. However, the most important challenge facing Lean Construction is the initial transformation that orients an organisation towards continual improvement. Therefore, learning is emphasised here as a necessary fifth aspect.
