Focus on Arts and Ecology

Asked to guess the biggest change on production lines over the past 30 years, most people would probably respond “robots”. But having visited many factories, producing everything from cars to condoms, I think the biggest change is more prosaic: it’s tidiness.

From tyre production at Michelin to less obviously industrial plants such as Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office, neatness has turned from virtue to necessity.

In some factories I’ve seen, workers manage their stations as though they were planning to eat their lunch off them. Which, unlike their slovenly office-bound counterparts, they would never think of doing.

Automation does help cut clutter: the fewer people in a plant, the easier it is to keep clean. But the more interesting advances in tidy-mindedness on the shop floor have been human ones. An operations manager at a small component-maker reminded me last week that the efficiency and happiness of many manufacturing teams depend on the application of basic techniques inspired by Japanese producers in the 1980s.

One of these, born from lean manufacturing, is the 5S system. The original Ss were Japanese, and they have been loosely translated into English as Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardise and Sustain. The aim is to ensure workspaces and tools are organised and kept clean, allowing work to start immediately and workers to take instant visual stock of their station. The operations manager compared it to the system that allows Formula One engineers to set up and work consistently, whether their Grand Prix is in Baku or Barcelona.

Parents have urged their children to tidy up since parenting began. The roots of 5S may go back to the patriarchal Henry Ford, who instituted a “Can-do” system (Clean, Arrange, Neatness, Discipline, Ongoing Improvement) a century ago.

But by the 1980s, western manufacturing habits had declined, with dire consequences for supply chain management, consistency, efficiency and safety (often now added as a sixth S).

One US plant manager for ABB told the New York Times in 1992 that his first impression from observing Japanese workers was that they were slacking. Then he realised “everything they were doing was value-added work. There was nobody wandering around looking for parts or instructions.” Not surprisingly, production line tidiness is still one of a number of proxy measures for good management.

Where next? One largely unmapped new frontier is your own desk. The “lean office” is already upon us. The concept is often combined with agile working. Agile staff need to wage war on clutter if only to allow the next person who uses their space to sit down and open his or her laptop.

But as my colleague Tim Harford set out neatly in his book Messy, the tidy desk can deaden creativity, wellbeing and output. He cited research that showed workers achieved less in sterile spaces prepared to 5S standards, and most in offices that were not only decorated, but where the occupant could arrange the decorations.

Organising your desk, he has written, “can simply be an artful way of feeling busy while doing nothing terribly useful”, which is why the untidiness of my own desk increases as I dive deeper into a project (that at least is my excuse).

Automation is aiding disorderly office and production workers. Some of the pile of research next to me is now organised — and organising itself — through tools such as Gmail and Evernote, which highlight the most important items as I search online.

Meanwhile, methods being tested at the University of Sheffield’s squeaky clean Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre help create order from mess for production line workers.

One experiment is a Caterham kit-built sports car, which is being assembled on one side with a combination of robot and virtual reality techniques, on the other using an old-fashioned instruction booklet.

A computer directs humans to pick the right part from the right box — and detects where they go to search for them. A kitchen manufacturer is already interested in using this system to map your food preparation habits and fit your cupboards accordingly.

The history of process improvement teaches that each advance poses a new challenge for managers. This may be the greatest yet. In theory, automation should free people to add greater value. But it could also make their jobs increasingly soulless — one charge levelled at Henry Ford in his prime.

Digitisation could take four of the five Ss out of workers’ hands, absolving them of the need for neatness by making sense of chaos for them. It is up to leaders to work out how to tap the messy human creativity freed by such progress and avoid reducing workers to mere robot-shiners.

andrew.hill@ft.com

Twitter: @andrewtghill

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018

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