Their knowledge remains locked inside their heads, not communicated to others in the organization through policies, procedures or training programmes. The second requirement for a learning organization is actually to modify behaviour based on new knowledge and insights. If you visited their factories you would have been equally astonished, but for a different reason. The company had not succeeded in changing its behaviour to reflect the new knowledge. The knowledge had been created, acquired and transferred at least among the management team, but behaviour had not been modified.
Systematic problem solving is one of the staples of quality.
There are a variety of traditional tools for organizing and interpreting data, but more important is state of mind. Florida Power and Light, the US state utility that was the first non-Japanese winner of the Deming Prize, Japan's highest quality award, is renowned in the field of problem solving. One of its managers, in the early days of its programme, made a presentation about why there were power outages in a particular part of south-eastern Florida. He got up in front of a large group, and explained that the source of the problem was lightning strikes hitting the power lines. His audience remained unconvinced, so he was asked to undertake a systematic analysis.