Toyota Kata : Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results

by Rother, Mike

  Be Clear About What You Are Undertaking

  Some other ways to phrase the second overarching question might be:

  How do we get everyone in the organization to think and act along the lines of the improvement kata described in Chapters 5 and 6?

  How do we get this behavior routine into an organization?

  Figure 9-1. The task

  How do we spread improvement kata behavior across the company so it is used by everyone, at every process, every day?

  How do we learn a new way of thinking and acting?

  Which is to say that before we go any further, we should be clear about the challenge. Knowing about the improvement kata that lies behind Toyota’s success, and that it is about behavior patterns and developing such behavior patterns, ask yourself: Is this what you intend to do?

  Developing new behavior patterns across an organization involves a more significant effort and further-reaching change—particularly in leader behavior—than what you may have assumed that “lean manufacturing” is about. It should be clear to you at this point that bringing continuous improvement into an organization—“lean” or the “Toyota Production System”—involves a different kind of challenge than we originally thought. Toyota’s embedding of the improvement kata and the coaching kata into daily work represents more than just adding something on top of our existing way of managing. It means changing how we manage (Figure 9-1).

  Organization Culture

  Trying to get each person in an organization to think and act in certain ways means you are working on organization culture. Most organizations that are interested in Toyota’s approach probably do not need to completely change their existing culture, but rather, to make an adjustment, like maneuvering a curve in the road, as shown in Figure 9-2. So how does one make such a change in organization culture?

  Figure 9-2. Making a shift in organizational culture

  What Do We Know So Far About This Challenge?

  Since the late 1980s, Toyota has successfully—though not without difficulty—been spreading its approach to local citizens at new Toyota Group sites around the world; that is, inside Toyota. This includes North America and Europe, and it suggests that Toyota’s improvement kata should be practicable for organizations and people outside of Toyota. However, in Chapter 1, I stated the following:

  To date, it appears that no company outside of the Toyota group of companies has been able to keep improving its quality and cost competitiveness as systematically, as effectively, and as continuously as Toyota.

  Astute readers may have already been wondering as they started this chapter: “If no company outside Toyota has succeeded in bringing such systematic continuous improvement into all processes every day across the organization, then how can anyone answer the question being raised at the beginning of this chapter and tell us how to do it?”

  The fact is we simply do not yet have authoritative answers to the second overarching question, and that includes Toyota itself too. For example, Toyota’s efforts to spread its approach to its outside suppliers have achieved many point successes in a wide variety of processes and value streams, but even those efforts to integrate the improvement kata into everyday operation across the organization at these other companies have so far not met expectations.

  What I can do in this chapter is share with you what we have learned with regard to the second overarching question—which in fact is quite a lot—and how we are working on issues raised by that question.

  You Need to Become an Experimenter

  The goal of this chapter—and this book overall—is to set you up to experiment and thereby develop your management system in accordance with the needs of your situation. If you want to change behavior patterns and organizational culture, then it is quite likely there is no other way:

  There is probably no approach that fits all organizations. Each company should work out the details by developing its management system to suit its particular situation.

  There is great value in striving to understand the reality of your own situation and experimenting, because it is where you learn. No one can provide you with a solution, because the way to answering the second overarching question—as with any challenging target condition—is and should be a gray zone.

  But we do know how to work though that gray zone. The improvement kata, the means by which processes are improved, is a way of experimenting, and we can apply it to almost any sort of process. So when I say you need to become an experimenter, it does not mean that you have to start a separate activity. We can continuously improve and adapt, train people, and develop our organization culture simultaneously, with the same activity. In fact, this describes quite well how Toyota goes about it.

  There is now a growing community of organizations that are working on this, whose senior leaders recognize that Toyota’s approach is more about working to change people’s behavior patterns than about implementing techniques, practices, or principles. In fact, as you strive to develop improvement kata behavior and thinking in your organization, that step-by-step effort will have an effect on your techniques, practices, and principles. That is a good way to look at it.

  What Will Not Work

  Some of the early lessons from our experimentation were about approaches that do not work for changing people’s behavior. Let us get those out of the way from the start. If you wish to spread an improvement kata (a new behavior pattern) across your organization, then the following tactics will not be effective:

  Classroom training. Even if it incorporates exercises and simulations, classroom training will not change people’s behavior. It seems for several years now we have assumed that simply comprehending Toyota’s system would automatically lead to its adoption—because it makes sense! This approach has been decidedly ineffective. Intellectual knowledge alone generally does not lead to change in behavior, habits, or culture. Ask any smoker.

  As mentioned in Chapter 8, the concept of training in sports is quite different from what “training” has come to mean in our companies. In sport it means repeatedly practicing an actual activity under the guidance of a coach. That kind of training, if applied as part of an overall strategy to develop new behavior patterns, is effective for changing behavior.

  Classroom training has a role, but the best that we can probably achieve with it is awareness. And even that tends to fade quickly if it is not soon followed by repeated, structured practicing. Classroom training should probably be kept short and provided mostly for information purposes and to participants who are about to go into hands-on practicing with a coach.

  Workshops. These are designed to make point improvements, not to develop new behaviors. Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter 2, results naturally tend to slip back after a workshop ends.

  Having consultants do it for you. Developing internal routines and capability for daily continuous improvement and adaptation at all processes involving all people—culture—is by definition something that an organization must do for itself. An experienced external consultant can provide coaching inputs, especially at the beginning, and even experiment together with you. But to develop your own capability, the effort will have to be internally led, from the top. If the top does not change behavior and lead, then the organization will not change either. More on that later in this chapter.

  Looking to metrics, incentives, and motivators to bring the desired change. As we have discussed, there is no combination of metrics and incentive systems that by themselves will generate improvement kata behavior and change your culture to one like Toyota’s.

  Reorganizing. Many companies have tried unsuccessfully to reorganize in the hope of finding organizational structures that will stimulate continuous improvement and adaptiveness; for example by bringing departmental functions into value-stream-oriented organizational structures.

  As tempting as it sometimes seems, you cannot reorganize your way to continuous improvement and adaptiveness. What is decisive is not the form of the organization, but ho
w people act and react. The roots of Toyota’s success lie not in its organizational structures, but in developing capability and habits in its people. It surprises many people, in fact, to find that Toyota is largely organized in a traditional, functional-department style.

  Anything unique about Toyota’s organizational structures, such as their team leader approach, evolved out of Toyota striving for specific behavior patterns, not the other way around. First figure out how you want people to act—for example, along the lines of the improvement kata—and strive to develop those behavior routines. If, then, along the way, making organizational adjustments is a necessary or useful countermeasure, that’s okay. But these should be seen for what they are: countermeasures, not target conditions. Keep your attention on the target condition of developing improvement kata behavior, and let the needs of your efforts there drive the evolution of your structures.

  All these tactics have their place, but they will not generate improvement kata behavior, nor the cost, quality, and adaptiveness benefits that accrue from daily application of that kata. Culture change is not achieved through books, intellect, classroom training, discussions, or anything similar.

  How Do We Change?

  The field of psychology is clear on this: we learn habits, automatic reactions, by repeatdly practicing behaviors. In order to build new mental circuits, we must practice a desired behavior pattern and periodically derive a sense of achievement from that behavior. The canon that we learn by doing, by experiencing, has given rise to the well-known and widely accepted change model depicted in Figure 9-3.

  Much of what we do is routinized and habitual. Repeated practice—conditioning—creates neural pathways and, over time, an organization’s culture. This change model is particularly important with regard to the improvement kata because several aspects of that kata are so different, and even counterintuitive, from the perspective of our current management approach. The only way to truly understand its underlying meaning and learn to apply it in different situations is by personally and repeatedly practicing it in actual application.

  Figure 9-3. A model for changing organization culture

  Ideally, following the improvement kata pattern would become automatic and reflexive, and our mindfulness thereby freed to be applied to the details of the situation at hand. This is the ideal that Toyota’s coaching kata, described in Chapter 8, strives to achieve, and a reason why Toyota people have had difficulty explaining to us the underlying pattern of what they do.

  We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

  —Aristotle

  To know and not to do is not yet to know.

  —Zen saying

  Fortunately, kata are designed specifically for passing on. In martial arts, kata were apparently created so the masters could pass on their most effective fighting techniques to further generations. In other words, kata are a way of doing exactly what we are discussing here: practicing behaviors and learning new habitual routines.

  How to Experiment Use Actual Work Processes

  This is something we adopted one-to-one from Toyota’s approach: training and doing are not separated (Figure 9-4). To practice the improvement and coaching katas, students apply them in actual situations at actual work processes. In this manner your experimentation will be real, not theoretical. You can perceive where the student truly is with his thinking and skills, and take appropriate next steps. And the degree or lack of improvement in the processes serves as a metric for the effectiveness of your effort to coach and develop the desired behavior routines.

  Figure 9-4. Experimenting with real processes

  Focus On Three Main Factors

  If we want to get people, including ourselves, to think and proceed along the lines of the improvement kata, I propose three main factors that we can influence in order to achieve this (Figure 9-5).1

  Focusing on any one of these three areas alone is not effective for changing to a desired organization culture, and conversely, if any one of them is left out, the effort is also not effective. For instance, just establishing urgency for change typically generates a wide range of behavior reactions. The result is often no real change at all or something quite different from the improvement kata. We should not expect that simply pushing people will generate improvement-kata behavior.

  Figure 9-5. Three factors that we can influence

  Likewise, coaching alone achieves very little. Coaching in what?

  Finally, just defining and explaining the improvement kata, even if we were to combine that with a sense of urgency, will also not change people’s behavior. It would be like saying to an athletic team, “You should play this way in order to win,” and then leaving the team alone.

  Use the Improvement Kata to Develop Improvement Kata Behavior

  This is the most important advice in this chapter: to develop improvement kata behavior in your organization, you should utilize and follow the improvement kata in this development process itself. Simply put, the improvement kata is your means for experimenting.

  This is not about “implementing” a new management system and culture. The way to any target condition, including culture change, is unclear, and practicing good PDCA will be a key factor in successfully achieving that condition. In other words, while working toward a target condition that includes a changed culture, it is just as important to frequently check the current condition and adjust accordingly. Developing new behavior patterns is a change process that occurs over time via PDCA.

  Using the improvement kata in order to introduce improvement kata behavior is an example of applying it at a higher fractal level than at a production process. The improvement kata can be used at all levels, and anyone in the organization can be asked the five questions (Figure 9-6).

  Let us take a closer look at how this can be done. As described in Part III, the improvement kata is applied to a work process by:

  Grasping the current condition

  Defining a measurable target condition

  Figure 9-6. The improvement kata finds application at all levels

  Utilizing short PDCA cycles to move toward that target condition

  The point to realize is that precisely the same kata can be applied to a coaching process. A target condition can be established for coaching, and you can PDCA toward that target condition.

  A baseline assumption we should make here is that the improvement kata works. In other words, our experimenting is not done in order to test if the improvement kata is effective, but to learn what we need to do in order to develop effective improvement kata behavior. Ergo, if the improvement kata is not yet operating as desired, then it is the teaching/coaching of it that needs to be adjusted via PDCA. As shown in Figure 9-7, our coaching approach is perhaps the main knob we can adjust in order to develop desired behavior patterns. If you do not like the results at the work process, then scrutinize the coaching. In this regard, I encourage you to keep in mind: “If the learner hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

  Figure 9-7. If the improvement kata is not working properly, the coaching needs adjusting

  Tactics

  The remainder of this chapter describes specific tactics I have been using, which may be generic enough to be applicable at other organizations. Since a discussion of tactics is essentially a discussion of solutions (countermeasures), I urge you to view them as thought starters, ideas and inputs to your own efforts to develop improvement kata behavior in your organization. It would not be appropriate or effective for me to propose countermeasures without understanding your specific current and target conditions, nor for you to jump directly into applying someone else’s countermeasures. Again, the best advice here is to utilize and follow the improvement kata routine as you try to develop the improvement kata routine in your organization. Then you can adapt to what you are learning in your situation and find your own appropriate path to the desired condition.

  Learning to Do Before Learning to Coach

  Co
aches should be in a position to evaluate what their students are doing and give good advice; to bring their students into the corridor of thinking and acting prescribed by the improvement kata. In other words, coaches should be experienced. It is only after they have practiced improvement kata themselves that coaches will be able to see deeply enough to provide that useful advice.

  If a coach or leader does not know from personal experience how to grasp the current condition at a production process, establish an appropriately challenging target condition, and then work step by step toward that target condition, then she is simply not in a position to lead and teach others. All she will be able to say in response to a student’s proposal is, “Okay” or “Good job!” which is not coaching or teaching.