What can NUMMI teach us?

The public radio program, “This American Life,” episode from March 26, 2010, “NUMMI,” is enormously illuminating in its treatment of why organizations fail to change—even to the point of embracing oblivion rather than taking a different path.  The oft-told tale of NUMMI—a success-turned-failure joint venture between Toyota and General Motors in the 1980’s gets a whole new dissection in search of just exactly why success turned to failure.  Absolutely must listening for all would-be change agents regardless of industry.

The conclusion (spoiler alert!): it had nothing to do with the vaunted Japanese manufacturing methods; rather, the early NUMMI success crashed and burned because of the “soft stuff,” the human factors.  Success in the original NUMMI plant failed to generalize because management and labor in other plants—even failing ones threatened with imminent closure—wouldn’t accept the change from the status quo.One is reminder of Kurt Lewin’s “unfreeze-change-refreeze” model, wherein change happens after an event or process that effectively unfreezes the status quo.  For Lewin, unfreezing is a necessary precursor to getting people to change their mindware and behavior.  The original NUMMI plant was unfrozen by already being closed and by a huge investment in building bonds between the U.S. And Japanese workers.  Absent the unfreezing, as was the case when NUMMI-like techniques were tried elsewhere, not much changed and what did change was met with massive and forceful resistance.  Even senior GM leaders in Detroit were unwilling to support change.

For the past 18 to 24 months, many in the independent school world have been verbally acknowledging that something in the industry’s financial model need to change.  And it is becoming increasingly clear that school, done the way we have for decades, must change to a leaner, less costly format.  That will require a reboot of almost everything, just as NUMMI essentially rebooted the car manufacturing industry.

But, so far, not much has changed.

Now we know why: no unfreezing forces are yet at work.  What will do the trick?  A catastrophe will, but can we figure out ways to change without so much trauma?  The evidence from NUMMI is not encouraging.