You’ve probably heard about the Toyota Management System, and the LEAN principles that have transformed manufacturing processes around the world. But have you heard about the Andon Cord? Ah! That’s a story you must hear.

Turns out that in every Toyota plant around the world, there was a rope. The rope was called the Andon cord. And it had a very simple function. If a worker – any worker – saw something going wrong in the manufacturing process, he or she could just pull the Andon cord, and it would raise an alarm and bring the entire factory to a halt. Now, getting factories to stop production can be hugely expensive. But here was Toyota encouraging its workers to stop production if they had seen a defect. The logic was simple. It’s better to catch a problem early and solve it, rather than discover it later – after a lot of the damage had been done.

But that was not all. The Andon cord was Toyota’s way of empowering the team. Every single employee knew he had the power to stop the factory if he saw something amiss. Heck, he didn’t just have a right to pull the cord, he had an obligation to pull it if he found something was wrong. There was no fear of what the bosses would say. No worries on the losses that the stoppage might entail. In fact, once someone pulled the Andon cord – and production came to a standstill – the factory bosses would walk up to the person who had pulled the cord and thank him for helping the company identify a problem and prevent a bigger catastrophe.

Fascinating, isn’t it?  If you think about it, the Andon cord was not just a quality improvement technique. It was a culture thing. The Andon cord unleashed a culture of empowerment – a culture where workers could take a call, and not have
to wait for instructions from their leaders. Netflix has its own version of the Andon cord. And Amazon too. If a customer service person at Amazon sees a problem with a product – or a seller – she can ‘pull the Andon cord’ – and stop the sale of that product. In an instant.

Maybe we all need to have the equivalent of an Andon cord in our organisations. A system where people call out problems and try and solve them – rather than a culture where everyone gets busy pushing the problem under the carpet, hoping no one will notice. Until the day when all hell breaks loose. The Andon cord creates a culture where you trust the people closest to the action to take the right call. And not a culture where everyone is waiting for the leader to tell them what to do. Empowerment makes superstars of seemingly ordinary folks – and teams begin to deliver results no one might have imagined.

Truth is, we need an Andon cord not just in our organisations, but in our lives too. If you see something going wrong in the world around you, don’t be a silent spectator. Pull the Andon cord. If you see a colleague or a friend doing something they shouldn’t be doing, pull the Andon cord. So next time you are sitting in a car and someone else isn’t belted up, you know what to do right? Pull the Andon cord.