How learning two new habits will get your improvement efforts really purring!

Hi, welcome to Lean FSL’s latest blog. I’ve been talking to clients a lot recently about something called ‘kata’, and this prompted me to dust off a book I purchased about 4 years ago by Mike Rother called ‘Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results’. I’m not sure if I missed the significance of the approach the first time, but having now revisited the book I have come to realise what an excellent and important piece of work it is.

I’m starting to come to the conclusion that the concept of kata is so fundamental to the success of an organisation’s problem-solving efforts, that its absence would almost certainly mean that a business never achieves the cultural nirvana of true kaizen. This being that improvement is done by everyone, every day and everywhere in an organisation.

The word ‘kata’ is actually borrowed from the martial arts, and describes a standard way of doing things, a training method or drill, if you like. It’s often a skill-set passed from trainer to trainee, an important concept in the nature of how Toyota trains staff in solving problems and improving processes.

Mike Rother suggests that Toyota employs two kata, the first one for a cycle of Improvement (IK) and the second kata for Coaching (CK) team members through the first kata. Even without knowing the detail of either of these kata, one can start to appreciate the benefit to most organisations of just having a standard approach to improvement (and how to coach people through improvement). How many times do we see poorly defined problem statements, trying to solve too big a problem, lack of meaningful measurement, lack of focus and drift etc, etc?

The Improvement kata (IK) is a continuously repeated routine that follows 4 basic steps:

  1. What’s the long-term vision or goal for this process?
  2. Where are we today?
  3. What is the next ‘target condition’ we can get to towards our ultimate goal?
  4. What obstacles stand in the way of achieving the ‘target condition’, and what do we need to work on first?

The term ‘target condition’ is interesting, because it is so much more than just a ‘target’. It doesn’t just describe the result required, but how the process should be operating in order to deliver the result. In other words, it’s not only the ‘what’ that is important but also the ‘how’.

Another aspect of this kata approach that I think is powerful is that it encourages teams to move towards an ultimate goal in a series of clearly defined steps, where improvements are taken one at a time, and validated before moving to the next one. This gives time to check that we are still moving towards the goal, or that maybe the goal has actually changed (it happens, it’s called life!!).

The 2nd kata is the Coaching kata (CK), and this is another eye-opener. It’s based on Toyota’s principle that every employee has a mentor. And the role of the mentor is to guide the student through each stage of the IK cycle. In practise this does not mean giving them the answer, on the contrary, the job of the CK is to guide the student through the process so that they gain the insight and learning for themselves. That way they develop a better understanding of the process they are working on, and start to become capable coaches of the IK to other people as well.

Typically, the five key questions in the Coaching kata cycle are:

  1. What is the target condition?
  2. What is the actual condition now?
  3. What problems are preventing you from reaching the target condition – and which one are you addressing now?
  4. What is your next step?
  5. When can we ‘go and see’ what we have learned from taking that step?

It’s fascinating that this kata is also based on rapidly improving one thing at a time, in hours and days rather than weeks and months. And that it incorporates (indeed, it insists upon) the coach and the student going to the ‘gemba’ to see for themselves.

At the risk of it being a bit early to think about New Year resolutions, I’ve already resolved to practice both my personal improvement and coaching katas whenever possible in 2015. Mike Rother suggests that it takes 10 years of practice to perfect both – so I still have a way to go! In the end though, I believe that developing and teaching these habits is worth the effort, as its going to make me a better problem-solver and coach to my customers.

So what does everybody else think? I’d love to hear of any experiences people have had using kata. What about any pitfalls and limitations? It’s a mistake made all too often for people to latch on to the latest lean fad, and treat it as a universal panacea. I can think of a number of current and past clients who want (or at least say that they want) rapid transformational improvement where value streams are completely redesigned, who would struggle with this approach. It also challenges strongly held paradigms in many organisations that it’s not a manager’s job to give so much time to developing their people, and that they should work things out for themselves. I couldn’t personally disagree with this more, but it’s an enormous challenge to get people to swim against that tide, particularly if their organisation expects them to also perform their traditional ‘management’ duties. Anyway, I’m up for the challenge of helping people use kata in whatever environment they find themselves in!

I’ve posted a link at the bottom of the page to Mike Rother’s excellent website, which contains a wealth of kata related material and resources you can use if you’re interested in this subject.

Finally let me end this last blog of 2014 by thanking all of you for your support and encouragement this year and sending you compliments of the Season. Let’s give thanks for the good fortune we have to be where we are in the world, and hope next year brings unexpected and welcome peace on earth!

Stay lean!

Graham

Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata website: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/Homepage.html