One of the questions Mike Rother was trying to answer with his research that became Toyota Kata was: “What are the unseen managerial routines that lie behind Toyota’s success with continuous improvement and adaption?”
And to summarize (in my own words), what he found was:
1. A pattern for problem-solving and thinking that is taught by coaching a learner through a challenge focused on a business objective.
2. A pattern employed in the coaching process that also applies the problem-solving and thinking pattern to the process of coaching and leadership.
These patterns are consistent with what Steve Spear found during his research in Toyota. You can see those patterns in action in his HBR article Learning to Lead at Toyota.
But Toyota’s managerial and leadership routines aren’t what this post is about.
My question is: What are your unseen managerial and leadership routines?
Those routines – the way people talk to each other, the default response to problems and the unexpected, the structures that support those conversations – cause the results you get.
If you want to truly transform the results your company gets, then understanding that cause-and-effect relationships between the process structures (what we might call the “lean tools”) and those conversations is critical to success. Steve Spear’s original research into Toyota’s systems firmly established that link for them, and by implication, for everyone else. (His PhD research is summarized in the 1999 HBR article Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System. Yes, we’ve known about this for decades).
So here’s my point:
If you want to change the results your organization is getting, you have to change those managerial and leadership routines.
It isn’t just about process structure tools – though those tools are designed to structure those conversations.
It certainly isn’t about getting everyone “belts” of whatever color – unless that training has the explicit purpose of changing the day-to-day conversations in meetings, in the hallways, in the daily huddles.
The process you are trying to improve is the process of management and leadership.
My working hypothesis here is that the way the shop floor runs is a result of the way the leaders engage.
The implication here is that the shop floor processes are in an equilibrium: They aren’t likely to change on their own. If we make changes to them, such as putting in “lean tools,” the managerial and leadership routines that created and maintained the original system are going to exert a force to restore those “improvements” to the original baseline.
When we say things like, “Managers don’t support the changes,” this is what we are talking about. It isn’t resistance to change. No one is actively undermining the work that was done.* They are just continuing to do what they have always done, and those activities are what created the original process in the first place.
*Usually. I have seen active sabotage, but only once.