Improving Big Systems
The hourly updates in my newsfeed these days describe the Department of Government Efficiency's (DOGE) efforts to change the federal government's structure and performance. These changes may affect the health and welfare of millions of people in the U.S. and abroad.
The March 25, 2025, episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast asked what DOGE’s real goal is.
Klein points out that efficiency is only a useful key performance measure when it is linked to a larger purpose or aim.
Eighty-five years ago, another relatively small federal government team worked to change another enormous system, the war-production system of companies and people building weapons, munitions, and equipment.
“Training Within Industry was an emergency service to the nation’s war contractors and essential services. Its staff was drawn from industry to give assistance to industry, and its history covers the time from the Fall of France to the end of World War II—from the summer of 1940 to the fall of 1945. TWI’s objectives were to help contractors to get out better war production, faster, so that the war might be shortened, and to help industry to lower the cost of war materials.” (TWI 1945 Report. p. xi. See the full citation at the end of this article).
Shorten the war by producing better stuff faster and cheaper. That’s a succinct aim!
The TWI program directly engaged more than 1,000,000 supervisors over five years (TWI 1945 Report, p. x); the supervisors applied the methods to work with millions more people.
They got good results, too. (TWI 1945 Report, Chapter 7).
The TWI approach differed from the way DOGE operates. The TWI program taught supervisors to respectfully engage the people working in wartime production to achieve the wartime goal. Read “The New Worker’s Side” on pp. 101-102 of the TWI 1945 report to get a feel for the TWI approach.
Critically, the TWI leaders worked diligently to learn rapidly. From 1940 to 1945, the TWI management team repeatedly modified its program content and procedures to drive toward its goal.
Job Methods
The TWI program focused on changing supervisory skills and behaviors through three core courses. I recently took the basic 10-hour classes in Job Relations and Job Instruction, which I wrote about here and here.
The third course, Job Methods, taught a four-step method. The Job Methods pocket card stated the aim: to help people “produce greater quantities of quality products in less time by making the best use of the manpower, machines, and materials now available.” Unstated on the card was the higher-order aim: to shorten and win the war.
After analyzing a job in Step I and questioning every detail in Step II, Step III outlines how to develop a new method:
Eliminate unnecessary details
Combine details when practical
Rearrange for better sequence
Simplify all necessary details
My colleague Jerry Langley pointed out that these four actions are a valuable subset of the change concept catalog that Jerry and his co-authors produced in The Improvement Guide (2009).
The World War II-era Job Methods anticipates more recent improvement guides, such as the Model for Improvement and Toyota-inspired Kata. Just as the Job Methods pocket card starts with the aim of improvement, users of the newer methods must clarify the aim or desired state before diving into details of changing things.
New Opportunity for Training within Government?
The TWI experience in World War II demonstrates that changing a system of millions of people in a few years may be possible in a way that differs from the top-down DOGE approach.
While TWI primarily addressed supervision in companies contracted to supply the war effort, the methods spread to pockets of the war-time federal government including the Civil Service Commission, the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the Federal Housing Authority, the Federal Security Agency, the General Accounting Office, National Youth Administration, the Government Printing Office, the Bureau of the Census, and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TWI 1945 Report, p.p 156-7).
Of course, applying something like TWI to the U.S. government in 2025 requires agreement on the government’s aim, which is a tough political problem.
Klein and his co-author Derek Thompson just released Abundance, a book that makes the case for building our way out of the current mess in the United States. The authors describe the sclerotic consequences of regulations and processes that addressed pre-1970s problems of government overreach and legacies of discrimination. They propose reforms to address those consequences, including government reform, so that the government fosters abundance.
That’s the germ of an aim for government.
Klein and Thompson argue that “…if you believe in government, you must make it work” (Abundance, p. 220)
A 21st-century adaptation of TWI to government would build one pillar of a working government, even as we argue about the government's aim. We could change government practice starting where we are now—in state and local governments, if not within federal agencies currently being DOGE’d.
More on the 1945 Report
In his transmittal letter that opens the 1945 TWI report, the director of Training Within Industry, C.R. Dooley, wrote: “We have learned so much about the techniques of training that what we knew before is as nothing. This learning has been at the expense of the taxpayers and therefore should be preserved and used in peacetime. These techniques are as applicable to peace as to war production.”
Here's the full citation:
The Training Within Industry Report, 1940-1945: A Record of the Development of Management Techniques for the Improvement of Supervision—Their Use and the Results, War Manpower Commission, Bureau of Training, Training Within Industry Service, Washington, D.C., September 1945.
Link here for a PDF version of the report. It’s worth reading!
Dinero’s Book
In 2005, Donald A. Dinero published Training Within Industry: The Foundation of Lean, (Productivity Press, New York, New York). Dinero outlines the history of TWI, including its influence on the Toyota Production System and Lean generalizations. He includes PDF files of 24 bulletins published 1940-1945 that give insight into the TWI training and management framework.