Content by Harish Jose
Wed, 05/04/2022 - 12:03
T he dictum, “purpose of a system is what it does” (POSWID) is famous in cybernetics, attributed to the management cybernetician Stafford Beer.
Beer notes: “A good observer will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the…
Mon, 07/19/2021 - 12:03
Recently, I came across an interesting insight at Toyota’s website. I was taken aback by the first sentence of this paragraph: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators disappears.”
The complete paragraph is shown below: “…
Thu, 04/22/2021 - 12:03
Today I’m looking at the ideas inspired by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that activate when someone engages in an activity, or when they observe the same activity being performed by someone else.
The phenomenon was first…
Mon, 10/19/2020 - 12:03
Today I’m looking at the “house” of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The illustration below shows the two pillars of the TPS house, jidoka and just in time (JIT).
I’ve been thinking about why jidoka and JIT are the two pillars, and why they’re…
Thu, 07/02/2020 - 12:03
Shigeo Shingo is one of my heroes in industrial engineering. He had a great mind that thrived on curiosity. Today I am looking at Shingo’s Whys. This is in contrast to Taiichi Ohno’s 5 Whys method.
Ohno’s 5 Whys method is one of the tools in Toyota…
Thu, 04/02/2020 - 12:02
In today’s column, I am looking at wu wei, which is an important concept detailed in the Chinese classic text, Tao Te Ching. This term is generally translated into English as wu = no, wei = action, or no action. There are other similar concepts in…
Tue, 02/25/2020 - 12:03
As readers of my columns know, I am an ardent student of the Toyota Production System (TPS). One of the core philosophies of TPS is kaizen, often translated from Japanese as “continuous improvement.” It is the idea that one should continuously find…
Thu, 01/16/2020 - 12:02
In today’s column, I’m looking at Weber’s Law. It’s named after Ernst Heinrich Weber (born June 24, 1795, died Jan. 26, 1878), a German physician who was one of the pioneers of experimental psychology. I highly recommend the Numberphile YouTube…
Mon, 11/18/2019 - 12:03
It has been a while since I have written about statistics, and I get asked a lot about a way to calculate sample sizes based on reliability and confidence levels. So today I am sharing a spreadsheet that generates an operating characteristic (OC)…
Mon, 10/28/2019 - 12:02
Today I’m looking at design from a cybernetics viewpoint. My inspirations come from cybernetics and design theorists Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro, and Ranulph Glanville. I was curious about how the interface of a…
