The
Andon
Cord
The origin of the word “Andon” in Japanese comes from a fire burning lamp made out of paper and bamboo.
The “Andon” became used as a signal to highlight an anomaly during manufacturing processes when the original Toyota founder, Sakaichi Toyoda, pioneered the concept of Jidoka.
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The idea behind Jidoka is that by stopping the system when a defect is detected you get an immediate opportunity for improvement and to find the root cause of a problem, as opposed to letting the defect move further down the line and be left unresolved.
Jidoka was later developed at Toyota by Taiichi Ohno and this led to the best known manifestation of the Jidoka principle, the Andon Cord.
Toyota implemented the Andon Cord as a physical rope that followed the assembly line and could be pulled to stop the manufacturing line at any time.
This wasn’t an ‘ask permission to stop the line’, the pull cord actually physically stopped the line. As the story goes, anyone could pull the Andon Cord anytime and was encouraged to do so without hesitation.
The Andon Cord has since become a metaphor used by some modern day Web Scale organizations as well.
Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, described in a 2013 letter to the Amazon’s shareholders a practice he called the Customer Service Andon Cord.
This was an established practice of metaphorically pulling an Andon Cord when they noticed a customer was overpaying or had overpaid for a service. These were considered defects at Amazon because they had a vision of being an organization that was always customer centric and they would automatically refund a customer, without the customer even asking, if the service delivery was suboptimal.
At Netflix the Andon Cord process is actually artificially induced in order to actively improve the companies IT processes by discovering points of failure. A process called Chaos Monkey intentionally tries to break systems in production by randomly killing live running production servers. The point is to force their application design to be such that one thing breaking should never create cascading failures.
A key part of the Andon Cord way of working is understanding that things breaking is an opportunity for improvement. Flaws in a system aren’t being created by the Andon Cord they’re just being revealed by it. When an employee pulls the Andon Cord they should be celebrated because they’ve given you the chance to fix something that may well have had serious ramifications further down the line if left unchecked. You need your employees to feel comfortable pulling the cord, not intimidated by the idea of stopping a process in order to fix it.
Instilling Andon Cord behaviours in a company takes a strong continuous improvement plan and a serious commitment to the ideals it represents.
Are you ready
to be proud and
pull the cord?
(Tap cord to pull)
Are you ready
to be proud and
pull the cord?
(Click cord to pull)