Reading: Hiroyuki Hirano, “5 Pillars of the Visual Workplace”

Hiroyuki Hirano was a Japanese consultant who spent his career helping firms install the Toyota Production System on factory floors that had not been built for it. 5 Pillars of the Visual Workplace — published in Japanese in 1990 and translated into English by Productivity Press in 1995 — is the book in which he set out, more plainly than anyone had before, the discipline that has since travelled into Western Lean practice as 5S. The title is not a marketing flourish. Hirano genuinely thought the five disciplines — Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardise, Sustain — were the load-bearing pillars of any operation that wanted to be visible to the people running it, and the book argues the case at the level of practical detail that distinguishes operations writing one can act on from operations writing one can only nod at.

The five pillars, in the order Hirano sets them out:

Sort — seiri. Remove from the workplace everything that is not currently needed for the work at hand. Hirano’s red-tag procedure — every item of unclear purpose receives a red tag with a date, and items that remain red-tagged after a defined interval are removed — is the operational discipline by which sorting becomes a verb rather than a campaign.

Set in order — seiton. Every remaining item gets a designated location, designed so that the location is visible to anyone walking past, and so that an item missing from its location is conspicuous. Hirano is clear that the discipline is not principally about tidiness; it is about making the absence of an item legible to anyone who might need to act on the absence.

Shine — seiso. Cleaning the workplace, but for an operational reason rather than an aesthetic one: a clean floor reveals leaks, a clean machine reveals wear, a clean tool reveals damage. The cleaning is, in Hirano’s framing, an inspection wearing the costume of a chore.

Standardise — seiketsu. The first three pillars are activities; the fourth is the discipline of making them habits the operation does not depend on the goodwill of any individual operator to perform. Standardisation is the work of writing the procedure that survives the day off, the shift handover, the sickness, the hire.

Sustain — shitsuke. The fifth pillar is the only one that does not have a procedure. It is the cultural commitment to keep doing the first four when no one is watching. Most firms that fail at 5S fail at the fifth pillar; the first four are too well-defined to fail at on their own.

Two things in the book travel directly into the practice’s client engagements.

The first is Hirano’s clear-eyed statement that 5S is not a tidying initiative. Western firms that have approached the discipline as such have produced results that look impressive in photographs and that fail to survive the next quarter’s pressure. Hirano frames the discipline as operational visibility — the workplace organised so that any deviation from the standard, by anyone, at any time, is conspicuous. The aesthetic neatness is a side-effect; if the photographs look impressive but the operators cannot see deviations any sooner than they could before, the discipline has not been installed.

The second is Hirano’s insistence that seiton, the second pillar, is the structurally most demanding of the five. Sorting is a one-time judgement; cleaning is a recurring chore; standardising is a writing exercise. Set in order is a design problem, and the design problem is non-trivial: the location has to be reachable, the absence has to be legible, the put-back has to be obvious, and all of these at once. Most firms underestimate the design work in seiton and produce a partial implementation that does not survive contact with the operators.

The book is heavily illustrated, mid-1990s in its layout and translation, and concrete in a way most contemporary management writing is not. It is the place to send any client who has been told 5S is a tidying discipline and has reasonably concluded it is not worth doing.

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