The “House of TPS,” is popular in the US and Europe as a summary of the Toyota Production System. We trace its origins and review its design and components in a 2007 version from Toyota Europe. Nigel Thurlow posted in on LinkedIn and says he was in the room when his Toyota colleagues drew it. We explore why the Greek temple theme was adopted, and suggest it may have been to make TPS appear less foreign to Americans.
Once stripped of the temple, it is a stack diagram, and we review the content of the boxes from bottom to top. While popular and widely copied in multiple variants by American consultants, the only Houses of TPS I could find in Japanese are translations of Jeffrey Liker’s.
While the House of TPS resonates with Americas, even the version developed within Toyota fails to provide more than a list of keywords, while leaving out key elements. The best it can do is motivate the reader to dig deeper.
Nigel Thurlow posted it to counter “the flood of AI-generated Toyota slop appearing on LinkedIn.” More generally, if you google “toyota production system house of TPS,” you retrieve dozens of versions with different contents.
The Greek Temple Theme
The graphic element in this picture is a stylized Greek temple facade:
Greek temples in the US
In the US, it evokes the White House North portico, the facade of the Supreme Court, and the courthouse in Monticello, GA, used in My Cousin Vinny. In Europe, it’s the facade of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pantheon in Paris. Wherever people see themselves as heirs to ancient Greece, this architecture says that the building hosts an institution that commands respect.
White House North
Supreme Court
Courthouse in “My Cousin Vinny”
The use of this symbol for a production system out of Japan is remarkable because the Japanese authors who write about the philosophy of TPS never mention Plato or Aristotle. Instead, they discuss the Owari and Mikawa cultures.
Fujio Cho and the House of TPS
Art Smalley credits Fujio Cho for creating the House of TPS, but is hazy about when. He says it was used in the 1970s and 80s for training at Toyota in Japan. One would expect some Houses of TPS from that vintage to be floating around the web by now, but the only ones that Google finds in Japanese are translations from Jeffrey Liker’s book The Toyota Way.
Prior to becoming CEO of Toyota, Fujio Cho ran Toyota in the US from 1988 to 1994. During that time, he seems, among other things, to have nurtured the image of Toyota as a corporate citizen of the US.. According to Pascal Dennis, he made “Beloved company” one of his Hoshins.
In the early 1980s, the success of Japanese carmakers in the US was causing a nationalistic backlash. The US carmakers were lobbying the government for import restrictions, and vandals attacked Toyota cars on GM parking lots. To defuse this tension, the Japanese carmakers voluntarily restricted the volumes they shipped, and built factories in the US, employing Americans and working with American part suppliers. Fujio Cho’s came to Georgetown against this background. The Greek temple theme was a small way to blend in with American culture, while an equivalent Japanese icon, like a torii, would instead have accentuated otherness.
The meaning
Once you strip away the Greek temple theme, you are left with a simpler diagram that lets us focus on what it says:
It looks like a stack diagram or toaster model, the likes of which are common in software, for example to describe layered protocols. Stacking layer A over layer B means that the software in layer A invokes functions in layer B. In a typical toaster model, you have data stores at the bottom, integration middleware above them, and a shared user interface at the top.
The toaster slots in between are parallel modules that users interact with through the top layer and that interact and share data through the common data environment in the bottom layers. Toaster models, however, explain the architecture of information systems, not what they do.
Stacking, in the House of TPS, does not have a consistent meaning. “Jidoka” and “Just-In-Time” make use of what is in the “Standardization” layer below, but “Toyota Production System,” on top, encompasses everything else in the stack. It’s not a module on top of “Jidoka” and “Just-In-Time.” In this regard, Jeffrey Liker’s house on p.33 of The Toyota Way is more consistent:
Stack diagrams do not include arrows, and the meaning of the arrows in the House of TPS is not clear.
Standardization
Standardization is the foundation of the house, and, when you build a house, you start with the foundation. The implication is that you can’t do anything about Jidoka or Just-In-Time until you have, if not standards, at least a “process of establishing the repeatability and predictability […] in work.” The rest of the text then implies that, unless you have properly maintained standards, you can’t improve.
Standards and improvement
Walking into a factory that muddles through with neither good standards nor a process to generate them, what are you supposed to do? Standardizing its current, flawed processes could take so long that you never get to do anything else, and it wouldn’t, by itself, improve anything. Undertaking this would be stepping into what, in the software context, Frederick Brooks called the current physical tar pit.
Where standards don’t exist for a process, they are an output of improvement on this process, not a prerequisite for its improvement. Once in place, they do serve as the basis for further improvement.
The other items
The items on both sides, “consensus and nemawashi,” “Genchi-Genbutsu,” “Visual controls,” “PDCA,” or “Root Cause Analysis,” are not standards. They are practices you learn by applying them in improvement work. There is no way to make them part of the culture as a prerequisite to any improvement.
Visual management is foundational in the sense that it is part of every improvement. Whether you are redesigning a production line or a scheduling system, you need to consider how to make its status, changes, or events visible to the humans it affects.
On the other hand, a project to implement visible management throughout a plant while not doing anything else is unlikely to change shop floor practices or to enhance performance. Visual management is not a point of intervention, but the house of TPS can lead you to believe that it is. I don’t think it is the intention, but the house metaphor certainly suggests that conclusion.
Jidoka
The description of Jidoka as “the ability to stop a process by man or machine in event of a problem using Andons, Fixed-Position Stop, Line-Stop Cord, Pokayoke,” which says nothing about automation and does not do justice to the concept of Jidoka as described elsewhere in the Toyota literature.
“The ability to stop a process by man…” is not an innovation. Overlooking the gender-specific wording, machine shops have traditionally relied on machinists noticing funny noises, odors, or abnormal surface temperatures on machines to raise alarms. It required the machinists to be by the machines, monitoring them constantly. The ability of a machine to stop when its operation finishes, or when it malfunctions, is essential so operators can walk away and do other work while it goes through an automatic cycle.
The Type G loom
For example, the history of Toyota website has a page featuring the Type G automatic loom that is often hailed as the first example of Jidoka. It describes automatic shuttle change as a major innovation, on par with stopping the loom when the weft broke:
Automation
While the word “automation“ was not coined until 23 years later, by Delmar Harder at Ford about transfer lines, we immediately recognize the shuttle change device as automation, and a predecessor to the switch from reels to cassettes for film of magnetic tape.
Jidoka is “automation with a human touch,” but the automation aspect completely vanishes in the House of TPS. The ability of an automatic machine to stop when it malfunctions is no longer anything special, as the “Instant Pot” in my kitchen has it. See also Jidoka isn’t just about “stop and fix”.
Automatic stop
The ability of a machine to stop when it malfunctions was a breakthrough in 1924, but is now built into household appliances.
The 1965 SEB pressure cooker did not stop automatically. You screwed the lid on tight, and put in on a stove to heat. Once it reached the target steam pressure, the release valve rose, started to rotate, and hissed. This was the signal to lower the heat. Then you needed an external timer to tell you when to turn it off. If it burned food, you had to be close enough to notice the smell.
By contrast, the 2026 Instant Pot contains its own heater, is programmable, senses food burns and stops automatically when they occur, beeps, and displays “burn” on its screen.
The human touch
“Automation with a human touch,” as the design of production lines as human-machine systems, is a substantive topic. It is also a departure from the earlier concept of automation. Open any book about automation, and you see no consideration of the role of people. Take, for example, this picture from a 2007 article called Towards Intelligent Manufacturing, drawn by Galdenoro Botura Junior, showing a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) without a single human:
Production with interactions between humans and machines was the subject of Working with Machines.
Expanded usage of “jidoka”
Instead of reducing Jidoka to just “the ability to stop a process,” Toyota seems to have expanded it. It seem to encompass all of manufacturing and industrial engineering, regardless of automation. The line-stop cord, for example, is for the detection of an anomaly by a human. This is exactly what the Type G loom avoided. When a machine reads a tag on a carrier to trigger the right program for the workpiece, it is a poka-yoke involving automation.
If you separate the mounting of two similar fasteners across two stations, operators cannot confuse them. It’s also a poka-yoke but it involves no automation. It says that, strictly speaking, poka-yoke and jidoka overlap.
The Men in the Middle
While there are words about “respect for humanity” in the text added below the house, inside it there is only this representation of employees. They are all men, with the roles of improving the system through kaizen and maintaining standards:
Consistent with the auto industry at large, women comprise about a quarter of Toyota’s US workforce. This picture would be more accurate:
The employees are also building cars. As a Martian with no prior knowledge of Toyota, you would not guess it from this House of TPS. Furthermore, it contains no mention of Toyota Human Resource policies and practices. This includes hiring employees for careers, helping them with career planning, and providing learning opportunities through job rotations. On this topic, the Liker version provides slightly more.
Japanese Houses of TPS
What does a Japanese House of TPS look like? According to Art Smalley, the Japanese name for it is, “TPS の家.” While the House of TPS caught on in the US, it didn’t have much of an uptake in Japan.
Examples
When I google the Japanese phrase, “TPS の家,” all I find is translations of Jeffrey Liker’s version, shown above:
Another version was used in an ESD21 seminar in 2011. The fine print in the last line says “It is said to have been written by Toyota president Fujio Cho, . Excerpted from The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker.”
Both of these “Japanese” Houses of TPS are actually not completely faithful translations. For example, the left and right columns don’t have the same number of bullet points. Also, the center, occupied by Keizoku Kaizen (継続的改善) in the first one is blank in the second. It means “ongoing kaizen.”
The House of TPS in the Japanese literature
I have books about TPS by Taiichi Ohno, Yasuhiro Monden, Takahiro Fujimoto, and Mikiharu Aoki. Some are in translation and some in Japanese. Not one of them contains a House of TPS. The most recent one is Mikiharu Aoki’s “The Heart of TPS Implementation” (2009):
While the House of TPS obviously resonates with Americans, even the Toyota version provides only keywords. And it leaves out key elements. The best it can do is motivate the reader to dig deeper.
For a high-level view of a system, you might want to draw a system diagram, showing interactions between components. Drawing one requires more technical depth than a house. Reading one also requires more time and effort, for information you can use to build or operate the system. Engineers love this kind of diagram, but, for a broader audience, they are duds. They provide too much information.
TPS, by definition, is the system Toyota uses for production. As such, it’s a work in progress. It’s not the same in 2026 as in 2007, which means you can’t have a definite, vintage-independent house. And Toyota does not make only cars. The Toyota people who make industrial vehicles are adamant that their system is different from that of the car plants.
Aug 9 2026
Houses of TPS
The “House of TPS,” is popular in the US and Europe as a summary of the Toyota Production System. We trace its origins and review its design and components in a 2007 version from Toyota Europe. Nigel Thurlow posted in on LinkedIn and says he was in the room when his Toyota colleagues drew it. We explore why the Greek temple theme was adopted, and suggest it may have been to make TPS appear less foreign to Americans.
Once stripped of the temple, it is a stack diagram, and we review the content of the boxes from bottom to top. While popular and widely copied in multiple variants by American consultants, the only Houses of TPS I could find in Japanese are translations of Jeffrey Liker’s.
While the House of TPS resonates with Americas, even the version developed within Toyota fails to provide more than a list of keywords, while leaving out key elements. The best it can do is motivate the reader to dig deeper.
Contents
Toyota Europe’s 2007 House of TPS
Nigel Thurlow posted it to counter “the flood of AI-generated Toyota slop appearing on LinkedIn.” More generally, if you google “toyota production system house of TPS,” you retrieve dozens of versions with different contents.
The Greek Temple Theme
The graphic element in this picture is a stylized Greek temple facade:
Greek temples in the US
In the US, it evokes the White House North portico, the facade of the Supreme Court, and the courthouse in Monticello, GA, used in My Cousin Vinny. In Europe, it’s the facade of the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pantheon in Paris. Wherever people see themselves as heirs to ancient Greece, this architecture says that the building hosts an institution that commands respect.
The use of this symbol for a production system out of Japan is remarkable because the Japanese authors who write about the philosophy of TPS never mention Plato or Aristotle. Instead, they discuss the Owari and Mikawa cultures.
Fujio Cho and the House of TPS
Art Smalley credits Fujio Cho for creating the House of TPS, but is hazy about when. He says it was used in the 1970s and 80s for training at Toyota in Japan. One would expect some Houses of TPS from that vintage to be floating around the web by now, but the only ones that Google finds in Japanese are translations from Jeffrey Liker’s book The Toyota Way.
Prior to becoming CEO of Toyota, Fujio Cho ran Toyota in the US from 1988 to 1994. During that time, he seems, among other things, to have nurtured the image of Toyota as a corporate citizen of the US.. According to Pascal Dennis, he made “Beloved company” one of his Hoshins.
In the early 1980s, the success of Japanese carmakers in the US was causing a nationalistic backlash. The US carmakers were lobbying the government for import restrictions, and vandals attacked Toyota cars on GM parking lots. To defuse this tension, the Japanese carmakers voluntarily restricted the volumes they shipped, and built factories in the US, employing Americans and working with American part suppliers. Fujio Cho’s came to Georgetown against this background. The Greek temple theme was a small way to blend in with American culture, while an equivalent Japanese icon, like a torii, would instead have accentuated otherness.
The meaning
Once you strip away the Greek temple theme, you are left with a simpler diagram that lets us focus on what it says:
It looks like a stack diagram or toaster model, the likes of which are common in software, for example to describe layered protocols. Stacking layer A over layer B means that the software in layer A invokes functions in layer B. In a typical toaster model, you have data stores at the bottom, integration middleware above them, and a shared user interface at the top.
The toaster slots in between are parallel modules that users interact with through the top layer and that interact and share data through the common data environment in the bottom layers. Toaster models, however, explain the architecture of information systems, not what they do.
Stacking, in the House of TPS, does not have a consistent meaning. “Jidoka” and “Just-In-Time” make use of what is in the “Standardization” layer below, but “Toyota Production System,” on top, encompasses everything else in the stack. It’s not a module on top of “Jidoka” and “Just-In-Time.” In this regard, Jeffrey Liker’s house on p.33 of The Toyota Way is more consistent:
Stack diagrams do not include arrows, and the meaning of the arrows in the House of TPS is not clear.
Standardization
Standardization is the foundation of the house, and, when you build a house, you start with the foundation. The implication is that you can’t do anything about Jidoka or Just-In-Time until you have, if not standards, at least a “process of establishing the repeatability and predictability […] in work.” The rest of the text then implies that, unless you have properly maintained standards, you can’t improve.
Standards and improvement
Walking into a factory that muddles through with neither good standards nor a process to generate them, what are you supposed to do? Standardizing its current, flawed processes could take so long that you never get to do anything else, and it wouldn’t, by itself, improve anything. Undertaking this would be stepping into what, in the software context, Frederick Brooks called the current physical tar pit.
Where standards don’t exist for a process, they are an output of improvement on this process, not a prerequisite for its improvement. Once in place, they do serve as the basis for further improvement.
The other items
The items on both sides, “consensus and nemawashi,” “Genchi-Genbutsu,” “Visual controls,” “PDCA,” or “Root Cause Analysis,” are not standards. They are practices you learn by applying them in improvement work. There is no way to make them part of the culture as a prerequisite to any improvement.
Visual management is foundational in the sense that it is part of every improvement. Whether you are redesigning a production line or a scheduling system, you need to consider how to make its status, changes, or events visible to the humans it affects.
On the other hand, a project to implement visible management throughout a plant while not doing anything else is unlikely to change shop floor practices or to enhance performance. Visual management is not a point of intervention, but the house of TPS can lead you to believe that it is. I don’t think it is the intention, but the house metaphor certainly suggests that conclusion.
Jidoka
The description of Jidoka as “the ability to stop a process by man or machine in event of a problem using Andons, Fixed-Position Stop, Line-Stop Cord, Pokayoke,” which says nothing about automation and does not do justice to the concept of Jidoka as described elsewhere in the Toyota literature.
“The ability to stop a process by man…” is not an innovation. Overlooking the gender-specific wording, machine shops have traditionally relied on machinists noticing funny noises, odors, or abnormal surface temperatures on machines to raise alarms. It required the machinists to be by the machines, monitoring them constantly. The ability of a machine to stop when its operation finishes, or when it malfunctions, is essential so operators can walk away and do other work while it goes through an automatic cycle.
The Type G loom
For example, the history of Toyota website has a page featuring the Type G automatic loom that is often hailed as the first example of Jidoka. It describes automatic shuttle change as a major innovation, on par with stopping the loom when the weft broke:
Automation
While the word “automation“ was not coined until 23 years later, by Delmar Harder at Ford about transfer lines, we immediately recognize the shuttle change device as automation, and a predecessor to the switch from reels to cassettes for film of magnetic tape.
Jidoka is “automation with a human touch,” but the automation aspect completely vanishes in the House of TPS. The ability of an automatic machine to stop when it malfunctions is no longer anything special, as the “Instant Pot” in my kitchen has it. See also Jidoka isn’t just about “stop and fix”.
Automatic stop
The ability of a machine to stop when it malfunctions was a breakthrough in 1924, but is now built into household appliances.
The 1965 SEB pressure cooker did not stop automatically. You screwed the lid on tight, and put in on a stove to heat. Once it reached the target steam pressure, the release valve rose, started to rotate, and hissed. This was the signal to lower the heat. Then you needed an external timer to tell you when to turn it off. If it burned food, you had to be close enough to notice the smell.
By contrast, the 2026 Instant Pot contains its own heater, is programmable, senses food burns and stops automatically when they occur, beeps, and displays “burn” on its screen.
The human touch
“Automation with a human touch,” as the design of production lines as human-machine systems, is a substantive topic. It is also a departure from the earlier concept of automation. Open any book about automation, and you see no consideration of the role of people. Take, for example, this picture from a 2007 article called Towards Intelligent Manufacturing, drawn by Galdenoro Botura Junior, showing a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) without a single human:
Contrast this with Shunji Yagyu’s rendition of the conversion of a straight line to a chaku-chaku line, with the human at the center:
Production with interactions between humans and machines was the subject of Working with Machines.
Expanded usage of “jidoka”
Instead of reducing Jidoka to just “the ability to stop a process,” Toyota seems to have expanded it. It seem to encompass all of manufacturing and industrial engineering, regardless of automation. The line-stop cord, for example, is for the detection of an anomaly by a human. This is exactly what the Type G loom avoided. When a machine reads a tag on a carrier to trigger the right program for the workpiece, it is a poka-yoke involving automation.
If you separate the mounting of two similar fasteners across two stations, operators cannot confuse them. It’s also a poka-yoke but it involves no automation. It says that, strictly speaking, poka-yoke and jidoka overlap.
The Men in the Middle
While there are words about “respect for humanity” in the text added below the house, inside it there is only this representation of employees. They are all men, with the roles of improving the system through kaizen and maintaining standards:
Consistent with the auto industry at large, women comprise about a quarter of Toyota’s US workforce. This picture would be more accurate:
The employees are also building cars. As a Martian with no prior knowledge of Toyota, you would not guess it from this House of TPS. Furthermore, it contains no mention of Toyota Human Resource policies and practices. This includes hiring employees for careers, helping them with career planning, and providing learning opportunities through job rotations. On this topic, the Liker version provides slightly more.
Japanese Houses of TPS
What does a Japanese House of TPS look like? According to Art Smalley, the Japanese name for it is, “TPS の家.” While the House of TPS caught on in the US, it didn’t have much of an uptake in Japan.
Examples
When I google the Japanese phrase, “TPS の家,” all I find is translations of Jeffrey Liker’s version, shown above:
Another version was used in an ESD21 seminar in 2011. The fine print in the last line says “It is said to have been written by Toyota president Fujio Cho, . Excerpted from The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker.”
Both of these “Japanese” Houses of TPS are actually not completely faithful translations. For example, the left and right columns don’t have the same number of bullet points. Also, the center, occupied by Keizoku Kaizen (継続的改善) in the first one is blank in the second. It means “ongoing kaizen.”
The House of TPS in the Japanese literature
I have books about TPS by Taiichi Ohno, Yasuhiro Monden, Takahiro Fujimoto, and Mikiharu Aoki. Some are in translation and some in Japanese. Not one of them contains a House of TPS. The most recent one is Mikiharu Aoki’s “The Heart of TPS Implementation” (2009):
Fujio Cho himself has not been a prolific author. There is a chapter by him in Seeds of Collaboration: Seeking the Essence of the Toyota Production System, p. 77-120. I could not find anything in it about the House of TPS.
Conclusions
While the House of TPS obviously resonates with Americans, even the Toyota version provides only keywords. And it leaves out key elements. The best it can do is motivate the reader to dig deeper.
For a high-level view of a system, you might want to draw a system diagram, showing interactions between components. Drawing one requires more technical depth than a house. Reading one also requires more time and effort, for information you can use to build or operate the system. Engineers love this kind of diagram, but, for a broader audience, they are duds. They provide too much information.
TPS, by definition, is the system Toyota uses for production. As such, it’s a work in progress. It’s not the same in 2026 as in 2007, which means you can’t have a definite, vintage-independent house. And Toyota does not make only cars. The Toyota people who make industrial vehicles are adamant that their system is different from that of the car plants.
#toyota, #lean, #houseoftps, #toyotaproductionsystem, #tps
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By Michel Baudin • Management 0 • Tags: House of Lean, House of TPS, Lean, Toyota, Toyota Production System, TPS