Tesla’s Systems Design Lessons for Educators

Education leaders manage the most complex system of them all — the US K-12 education system.

Daniel Jhin Yoo
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read
That factory is the background is 100x more complex than the car it makes.

The biggest epiphany I’ve had this year is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine — the factory. And that is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the vehicle itself.

— Elon Musk, Founder & CEO, Tesla

Tesla Learns Hard Lessons in Systems Design

The importance of systems design is currently being lived out by Tesla and the challenges it faces in producing 5,000 Model 3 vehicles a week.

Telsa’s product designers absolutely nailed the design of the Model 3. Within 24 hours of the car’s unveiling, they received nearly 200k preorders!

Since that moment however, it is the systems designers at Tesla who have been wrangling with a far more complex task with far greater financial consequences — they had to design the system that will manufacture the car as mass scale.

Telsa’s First Manufacturing System Results in “Production Hell”

Telsa’s first approach in designing the Model 3 manufacturing system was centered around maximizing automation — more robots, less humans.

In hindsight, this ended up being a poor system design decision. Musk described this chapter of manufacturing as “production hell.” He illustrated the flaws in this systems approach by describing the poor performance of one particular robot on the manufacturing line: Flufferbot.

We had these fiberglass mats on the top of the battery pack. They’re basically fluff. So we tried to automate the placement and bonding of fluff to the top of the battery pack. Which is ridiculous.

So we had this weird Flufferbot. Which was really an incredibly difficult machine to make work. Machines are not good at picking up pieces of fluff. Human hands are way better at doing that. So we had a super-complicated machine. Using a vision system to try to put a piece of fluff on a battery pack. …

… The line kept breaking down because Flufferbot would frequently just fail to pick up the fluff. Or put it in a random location.

— Elon Musk, Tesla 2018 Q1 Earnings Conference Call

The conclusion of the Flufferbot is almost impossible to believe. It turns out that the fiberglass mat that Flufferbot held up the entire production line to put on, actually made no difference to the car! Tesla’s system engineers ended up eliminating the step entirely from the manufacturing process.

Tesla Improves the System by Integrating Humans Labor

Experienced system designers actually foresaw the flaws in Telsa’s total automation approach before Tesla did.

Ron Harbour, a partner and auto-manufacturing specialist at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, said that adding more automated equipment tends to create a more complex production environment. “You have more new equipment to launch, there’s more programming, more maintenance,” he said. “More automation doesn’t necessarily make it more efficient.”

The highest-volume plants he’s seen, Mr. Harbour added, often have more assembly workers and fewer robots. “It’s a little counterintuitive, but that’s how it is,” he said.

For Tesla, ‘Production Hell’ Looks Like the Reality of the Car Business, New York Times

Eventually Musk realized that a dramatic improvement in the efficiency of the factory wouldn’t come from incrementally improving Flufferbots. Escaping “production hell” would require a change in the design of the system itself.

Telsa has abandoned it’s total automation approach to manufacturing and instead integrating human labor when it is better suited for the task.

As a result of a better designed system, they made dramatic improvements in efficency. For example, assembling a battery pack used to take seven hours, Tesla can now assemble them in under 17 minutes.

Even with the new human-robot approach to designing its manufacturing system, Tesla has not yet reached 5,000 Model 3s a week. More systems design improvements and innovations still need to be made!

What is Systems Design?

In her book, Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows, defines a system as an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

Using Meadows’ definition of a system, we can define system design as the practice of connecting and organizing elements to better achieve the system’s intended purpose.

Looking through the lens of Systems Design, we can see that Telsa’s factory is a stunningly complex system of humans, robots, parts, and raw materials that are organized in a way to achieve the production of a new Model 3. The system designers at Tesla had to change the elements of the system (e.g. humans for robots) and reorganize the processes (e.g. eliminate the “fluff” step altogether) to achieve greater efficiency.

Why Systems Design in Education?

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

— Russell Ackoff, Operations Theorist

I’m biased, but I adamantly believe that the US K-12 education system is the most complex system of all. Because of this, I believe that administrators and leaders who manage the system and are charged with improving it, can leverage the principles and methods of System Design in their critical work.


At Goalbook, we are learning more about Systems Design and applying its principals to our work. I hope to share some highlights of our learnings with the hopes that it will be useful for others, particularly to administrators and leaders in the US K-12 education system.

Daniel Jhin Yoo

Written by

Former software developer, special education teacher, and district administrator. Building @goalbookapp to empower educators.

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