Category: Toyota Kata

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Output vs. Takt Time

The team’s challenge is to reach steady output of 180 units per hour.

Their starting condition was about 150 per hour. Their equipment and process is theoretically capable of making the 180 per hour with no problem.

They calculated their takt time (20 seconds) and established a planned cycle time of 17 seconds.

Some time later, they are stuck. Their output has improved to the high 160s, but those last 10-12 units per hour are proving elusive.

This is the point when I saw their coaching cycle.

Looking at their history, they had set a series of target conditions based on output per hour. Their experiments and countermeasures had been focused on reducing stoppages, usually on the order of several minutes.

“Does anybody have a calculator?”

“Divide 3600 seconds by 180, what do you get?”

“20 seconds.”

“Do you agree that if your line could reliably produce one module every 20 seconds that you would have no trouble reaching 180 modules per hour?”

Yes, they agreed.

“So what is stopping you from doing that?”

They showed me the average cycle times for each piece step in the process, and most were at or under 15 seconds. But averages only tell a small part of the story. They don’t show the cumulative effect of short stoppages and delays that can cascade through the entire line.

The team had done a lot of very good work eliminating the longer delays. But now their target condition had to shift to stability around their planned cycle time.

Performance vs Process Metrics

This little exercise shows the difference between a process metric and the performance metric.

Units-per-hour is a performance metric. It is measured after the fact, and tells the cumulative effect of everything going on in the process. In this case, they were able to make a lot of progress just looking at major stoppages..

Stability around the planned cycle time or takt time (you may use different words, that’s OK) is a process metric.

It shows you what is happening right now. THIS unit was just held up for 7 seconds. The next three were OK, then a 10 second delay. It’s those small issues that add up to missing the targeted output.

The team’s next target condition is now to stabilize around their planned cycle time.

Since they averaged their measurements, their next step is to (1) take the base data they used to calculate the averages and pull the individual points back out into a run chart and (2) to get out their stopwatches and go down and actually observe and time what is really going on.

I expect that information to help them clarify their target condition, pick off a source of intermittent delay, and start closing the remaining gap.

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The Myth of 10,000 Hours

In this TEDx talk, Josh Kaufman, author of The First 20 Hours outlines his theory of learning a new skill.

One of his key points is the prevailing belief that you must spend 10,000 hours practicing a skill to become good at it.

This equates to over 5 years of practice 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Intuitively, we all know we have developed competency at tasks in far less time.

The 10,000 hours is practice to become able to perform at an elite, world-class level against intense competition. A top grand master at chess. A winning starting NFL quarterback. To get on the top podium at the Olympic Games.

But as Kaufman points out, the first part of the learning curve – up to basic competency or even above, is very steep. The thousands of hours are for developing on a far more shallow slope into the level of the elites.

In the video, Kaufman broke the basic learning process down to four steps which mirror the structure behind Toyota Kata.

Deconstruct the Skill.

We, in the lean community, made a huge mistake in attempting to deconstruct “continuous improvement.” Instead of deconstructing the process of continuous improvement, we instead deconstructed the production processes that resulted.

We ended up with a list of production process characteristics – “you have to have kanban,” and “you have to have standard work” rather than breaking down the skills that were applied to achieve them.

Toyota Kata gives us a deconstruction of the basics of continuous improvement so that we can learn them. That doesn’t mean there aren’t advanced nuances to learn, but those are built on the foundation of competence with the basics.

And basic competence can get you a long way.

Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean you can get away without understanding the basic tools. It’s just that, in so many cases, they have been put into place without that understanding. The tools are there to help define “what should be happening” and clarify “what is actually happening” so you can apply the correct thought process and use them to drive improvement. Without the underlying thought process, taught by the improvement kata, sustaining the “tools implementation” is very difficult.

Learn enough to self-correct.

Learning enough to self-correct means that you can recognize the difference between what how you are doing it, and how you want to be doing it.

(There’s that “should be happening” and “is actually happening” theme again.)

You can certainly teach yourself to play the piano, or even teach yourself multivariate calculus.There were no flight instructors for Wilbur and Orville Wright, yet they managed to develop very sophisticated skill with aircraft that were dangerously unstable by any modern standard.

But to learn effectively, you need some baseline of what “doing it right” looks like. Sometimes that is obvious. Sometimes it is more subtle.

This is where having a coach really helps. A coach stops you before you get into trouble. He can correct a nuanced imperfection in your technique that may have a major impact. Having a coach can get you to this point much faster.

That’s why many people hire a coach, sometimes by a different name like “taking lessons” or “going to school” to help them get through this phase more quickly.

Most of the good Toyota Kata classroom training out there gets you close to, but usually not quite over, this point. You can try it, you can get through a PDCA cycle with good coaching, but likely you can’t pick up enough to self-correct yet. THAT requires practice with a coach until you catch on to what “good” looks like.

Remove barriers to practice.

If you are coaching or teaching, this is far as you can get someone to go if they really don’t want to participate.The learner has to want to learn the skill, because everything past this point requires internal motivation.

Feeling stupid is a barrier to sitting down and doing the work. The opposite way to say the same thing is “needing to look like you know what you are doing before you know how to do it.”

This is one reason there has to be self-motivation – because you have to be willing to be incompetent in order to build competence.

For some reason corporate training, and related adult education programs, call it “good” if you have your backside in the seat for the required number of hours. Does it matter if you were on your email the whole time? Often no.

So people get sent to the Corporate Training Department’s “Problem Solving” course, get it on their transcript, and are expected to be able to do it. Same thing for “Handling Problem Employees,” “Lock-out / Tag-out” and a myriad of other corporate topics. The goal is almost to simply create a record that you attended, so they can say “We trained him” and remove legal responsibility.

Toyota Kata doesn’t work that way. Many managers struggle with the idea that they have to do more than just attend the class. They are their own barriers to practice.

What are yours?

Practice at least 20 hours.

This isn’t the “myth of needing to practice.” You actually need to do the work.

20 hours of practicing the improvement kata breaks down to roughly 40 days if you are thinking that way on purpose and reflecting on your actions, and consciously self-correcting for about half an hour a day.

The more you try, the more practice you get, and the quicker you will come up the learning curve. It isn’t that hard, but you do have to work at it.

And working at it is more than just reading the five questions.

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Toyota Kata, Kaizen Events and A3

I’ve been asked to explain the relationship between “Toyota Kata” and Kaizen Events, and I am guessing that the person asking the question isn’t the only one who has the question, so I thought I’d take a crack at it here.

To answer this question, I need to define what I mean when I say “kaizen event.”

Kaizen Events

In a typical western company, a kaizen event is geared toward implementing lean tools. There are exceptions, but I think they are different enough to warrant addressing them separately. (If you don’t read this, I changed my mind as I was writing it.)

At this point, I am going to borrow from an earlier post How Does Kaizen Differ From a Kaizen Event:

The kaizen event leader is usually a specialist whose job is to plan and lead these things, identifies an improvement opportunity. He might be tasked by shop floor management to tackle a chronic or painful problem, or might be executing the “lean plan” that calls for a series of implementation events.

It is his job to plan and execute the event and to bring the expertise of “how to make improvements” to the work force and their leaders.

Here’s the Problem

The full-time kaizen event leaders typically get really good at seeing improvement opportunities, organizing groups for improvement, and quickly getting things done. They get good at it because they do it all of the time.

The area supervisors might be involved in a kaizen event in their area a few times a year if that. Some companies target having each employee in one kaizen event a year.

That’s 40 hours of improvement. All at once. The question is: What do they do (and learn) the other 1900 hours that year?

What do they do when something unexpected happens that disrupts the flow of work? Usually kaizen events don’t deal with how to manage on a day-to-day basis other than leaving an expectation for “standard work” in their wake.

But “standard work” is how you want the work to go when there aren’t any problems. When (not if) there are problems, what’s supposed to happen?

This is why many shop floor leaders think “kaizen” is disconnected from reality. Reality is that parts are late, machines break, things don’t fit, Sally calls in sick, and the assembler has to tap out threads now and then. In the hospital, the meds are late, supply drawers have run out, and there is a safari mounted to find linens.

These things are in the way of running to the standard work. They are obstacles that weren’t discovered (or were glossed over as “resistance to change”) during the workshop.

The supervisor has to get the job done, has to get the stuff out the door, has to make sure the patients’ rooms are turned over, whatever the work is. And nobody is carving out time, or providing technical and organizational support (coaching) to build his skills at using these problems as opportunities for developing his improvement skills, and smoothing out the work.

OK – that is my paradigm for kaizen events. And even if they work really well, the only people who actually get good at breaking down problems, running PDCA cycles, etc. are the professional facilitators or workshop leaders. Many of these practitioners become the “go-to” people for just about everything, and improvement becomes something that management delegates.

What are they good for? Obviously it isn’t all negative, because we keep doing them.

A kaizen event is a good mechanism for bringing together a cross functional team to take on a difficult problem. When “improvement” is regarded as an exception rather than “part of the daily work,” sometimes we have to stake out a week simply to get calendars aligned and make the right people available at the same time.

BUT… consider if you would an organization that put in a formal daily structure to address these things, and talked about what was (or was not) getting done on a daily basis with the boss.

No, it wasn’t “Toyota Kata” like it is described in the book, but if that book had been available at the time, it would have been. But they had a mechanism that drove learning, and shifted their conversations into the language of learning and problem solving, and that is the objective of ALL of this.

Instead of forcing themselves to carve out a week or two a year, they instead focused on making improvement and problem-solving a daily habit. And because it is a daily habit, it is now (as of my last contact with them a couple of months ago), deeply embedded into “the way we do things” and I doubt they’re that conscious of it anymore.

This organization still ran “event” like activities, especially in new product introduction.

In another company, a dedicated team ran the layout and machinery concepts of a new product line through countless PDCA cycles by using mockups. These type of events have been kind of branded “3P” but because changes and experiments can be run very rapidly, the improvement kata just naturally flows with it.

Kaizen Events as Toyota Kata Kickstarts

If you take a deeper look into the structure of a kaizen event, they generally follow the improvement kata. The team gets a goal (the challenge), they spend a day or so grasping the current condition – process mapping, taking cycle times, etc; they develop some kind of target end state, often called a vision, sometimes called the target and mapped on a “target sheet.” Then they start applying “ideas” to get to the goal.

At the end of the week, they report-out on what they have accomplished, and what they have left to do.

If we were to take that fundamental structure, and be more rigorous about application of Toyota Kata, and engage the area’s leader as the “learner” who is ensuring all of the “ideas” are structured as experiments, and applied the coaching kata on top of it all… we would have a pretty decent way to kickstart Toyota Kata into an area of the organization.

Now, on Monday morning, it isn’t what is left to do. It is the next target condition or the next obstacle or the next PDCA cycle.

Toyota Kata

If we are applying Toyota Kata the correct way, we are building the improvement skills of line leadership, and hopefully they are making a shift and taking on improvement is a core part of their daily job, versus something they ensure others are doing.

One thing to keep in mind: The improvement kata is a practice routine for developing a pattern of thinking. It is not intended to be a new “improvement technique,” because it uses the same improvement techniques we have been using for decades.

The coaching kata is a practice routine to learn how to verify the line-of-reasoning of someone working on improvements, and keep them on a thinking pattern that works.

By practicing these things on a daily basis, these thought patterns can become habits and the idea of needing a special event with a professional facilitator becomes redundant. We need the special event and professional facilitator today because a lot of very competent people don’t know how to do it. When everybody does it habitually, you end up hearing regular meetings being conducted with this language.

We can be more clear about what skills we are trying to develop, and more easily assess whether we are following sound thinking to arrive at a solution. (Luck is another way that can look the same unless the line of reasoning is explained.)

What About A3?

When used as originally intended, the A3 is also a mechanism for coaching someone through the improvement pattern. There are likely variations from the formal improvement kata the way that Mike Rother defines it.

However, if you check out John Shook’s book Managing to Learn, you will see the coaching process as primary in how the A3 is used. Managing to Learn doesn’t describe a practice routine for beginners. Rather, it showcases a mature organization practicing what they use the Improvement Kata and the Coaching Kata to learn how to do.

The A3 itself is just a portable version of an improvement board. It facilitates a sit-down conversation across a table for a problem that is perhaps slightly more complex.

An added afterthought – the A3 is a sophisticated tool. It is powerful, flexible, but requires a skilled coach to bring out the best from it. It can function as a solo thing, but that misses the entire point.

For a coach that is just learning, who is coaching an improver who is just learning, all of the flexibility means the coach must spend extra time creating structure and imposing it. I’ve seen attempts at that – creating standard A3 “templates” and handing them out as if filling out the blocks will cause the process to execute.

The improvement kata is a routine for beginners to practice.

The coaching kata is a routine for beginners to practice.

Although you might want to end up flying one of these (notice this aircraft is a flight trainer by the way):

T-38

They usually start you off in something like this:

image of Cessna 172

The high-performance aircraft requires a much higher level of instructor skill to teach an experienced pilot to fly it.

And finally, though others may differ, I have not seen much good come from throwing them up on a big screen and using them as a briefing format. That is still “seeking approval” behavior vs. “being coaching on the thinking process.” As I said, your mileage may vary here. It really depends on the intent of the boss – is he there to develop people, or there to grant approval or pick apart proposals?

So How Do They All Relate?

The improvement kata is (or absolutely should be) the underlying structure of any improvement activity, be it daily improvement, a staff meeting discussing changes in policy, a conversation about desired outcomes for customers (or patients!).

The open “think out loud” conversation flushes out the thinking behind the proposal, the action item, the adjustment to the process. It slows people down a bit so they aren’t jumping to a solution before being able to articulate the problem.

Using the improvement kata on a daily basis, across the gamut of conversations about problems, changes, adjustments and improvements strengthens the analytical thinking skills of a much wider swath of the organization than participating in one or two kaizen events a year. There is also no possible way to successfully just “attend” an improvement activity if you are the learner being coached.

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“What You Could Improve” Isn’t The Answer

In fact, suggestions on what to improve aren’t an appropriate answer when it’s the question.

Sometimes on discussion forums I see a practitioner asking questions like:

  • Who should the learner be?
  • What target should I assign?
  • Which, in turn, implies “Which lean tools should I use?”

I’ll break down the questions in another post. Right now, I want to discuss the common replies.

Replies come from well meaning people who leap to “You could apply SMED” or “It looks like you are trying to put in a pull system.”

In other words “Here are some improvements you could make.” without any grasp of:

  • The actual challenge being faced by the organization.
  • The current process operating patterns that are limiting moving to the next level.

So, the advice has no grounding in what must be done, only what could be done.

If I were to reframe the conversation to a different kind of problem, those replies wouldn’t make any sense at all:

“I am looking for help fixing my 2010 Toyota Tacoma*.”

  • “You could change the sparkplugs.”
  • “How about checking tire inflation?”
  • “This fuel additive works great.”
  • “What kind of fuel mileage are you getting?”

The first question should be “Tell me what about your 2010 Tacoma is currently unacceptable to you?”

“It’s stuck on a trail with a broken axle.” probably requires a different response than “It’s running rough in the morning.”

“Lean” is no different. What are you trying to accomplish here? is a question we don’t ever seem to ask. Why? Do we really think we have a pat set of answers that apply to any situation, or to any situation that seems similar to one we have encountered in the past?

________

*My Toyota truck (it predates the Tacoma) is a 1995 that has been driven the distance to the Moon, and is now on its way back.

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The Kata of Leader Development

I’ve been parsing Turn the Ship Around to better understand David Marquet’s message from his experience as captain of the USS Santa Fe (SSN 763), a Los Angeles Class nuclear powered attack submarine.

And I’ve been promising to link his concepts back to Toyota Kata. So now I’m going to try to do that.

You can see part of the back story by reviewing my original post and watching the video here: /2013/11/06/creating-an-empowered-team/

Here is the rest of the back story.

Capt. Marquet was originally programmed to take command of the USS Olympia (SSN 717) which is also a Los Angeles Class submarine.

Except that the “improved” versions of Los Angeles Class submarines, from SSN 751 onwards, are really a completely different design. In any other navy, those later versions would be a different class of ship.

The Olympia is the earlier version, the Santa Fe is much newer.

The Olympia looks like this:

image

This is the Santa Fe:

image

The obvious difference is the (lack of) dive planes on the sail. The Olympia doesn’t have those forward missile tubes. The sonar is different. The reactor and power plant is different.

Capt Marquet’s problem was that he was ordered to take command of the Santa Fe at the last minute, after studying everything about the Olympia for an entire year.

Traditionally, a (US Navy) submarine captain’s credibility and authority is anchored on him as a technical expert on every aspect of what the machine can, and cannot, do. This is the foundation for him giving good orders to the officers, NCOs and crew. In practice, the command model is that the ship is a machine with one brain and many hands.

A lot of businesses run the same way.

Except that Captain Marquet wasn’t a technical expert. On the first cruise he gave an order to do something that the Santa Fe couldn’t do, the Navigation Officer knew it wasn’t possible, and passed the order along anyway “Because the Captain told him to.” That is where the little video in the previous post picks up.

OK, that’s the back story.

Developing Leaders with the Improvement Kata

Challenge and Direction

Like in the Improvement Kata, Capt Marquet got a clear challenge and direction from his boss, Commodore Kenny. The performance of the Santa Fe was sub-standard. They were doing poorly on inspections, making mistakes, morale was poor, reenlistment (an indicator of morale) was the worst in the fleet. Officers were resigning. Capt Marquet’s task as the new Captain was to get that performance up to where the Navy needed it to be.

Grasp the Current Condition

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Turn the Ship Around describe Capt Marquet’s careful and deliberate effort to understand the normal operating patterns of life on the Santa Fe. How did people interact with one another? What mechanisms were inhibiting initiative? What were the sources of fear, hope on board? All in all he found a competent, but dispirited, crew who was not as bad as they allowed themselves to believe they were.

But the process of “making decisions” was paralyzed by mechanisms pulling authority and control to the highest levels of the organization.

He was looking for the mechanisms of the process, of the way work was organized, of the way decisions were made, that were casting the shadow of poor performance and poor morale. He knew he could not address those things directly. He had to deal with the underlying process mechanics, and ultimately learn which ones impacted his key performance metrics.

Establish the Next Target Condition

Capt Marquet was…well… the Captain. His target conditions became challenges for his next levels in the organization. Though he didn’t follow the Improvement Kata precisely, we can see from the actions he took that the mental structure was there.

If we zoom in a level, and look at Capt Marquet’s initial meeting with the Chiefs as outlined in Chapter 8, we actually see the entire pattern.

If you have served in the military, you can bleep over the next section on the role of the Chiefs.

The Role of Non-Commissioned Officers

imageIn the Navy*, “Chiefs” are Chief Petty Officers, senior non-commissioned officers. They are (very) roughly equivalent to supervisors in industry. The saying is that the Officers are responsible for doing the right things, the Chiefs are responsible for doing things right.

The sailors’ day-to-day interactions are mostly with the Chiefs and more junior Petty Officers, which might be thought of as leads or team leaders.

Thus, it is really the Chiefs that set the tone for the experience of the rest of the crew. If they aren’t “into” the job, aren’t working as a team, it is unlikely the organization below (or above!) them is as effective as it could be, and morale is likely mediocre at best.

The same goes for your supervisors.

Where a military organization differs from industry is that there is a senior non-commissioned-officer paired with an officer at every level of the hierarchy. The most senior noncom on the ship is the “Chief of the Boat” who reports directly to the Captain.

This structure is very beneficial in making sure the Enlisted perspective is brought into every level of decision making.

Although it can, and does, happen, it is relatively rare that an enlisted non-commissioned-officer would become a commissioned officer during his or her career. This is a significant shift in the career path.

Pushing Authority to Create Responsibility

Capt Marquet’s initial experiment to shift the crew dynamics on board the submarine involved the Chief Petty Officers. He meets with them and works with them in an exchange: They get authority. They take responsibility.

A few key points that emerge here are:

  • Lecturing people about “taking initiative” and “stepping up” doesn’t work. If it did, our organizations would be operating at phenomenal levels already.
  • Capt Marquet talks about the Chiefs as individuals, each with his own strengths, level of commitment, etc.
  • There was a clear challenge for them in Capt Marquet’s mind. He knew what he needed from them.
Coaching Through Grasping the Current Condition

Capt Marquet met with the Chiefs, and facilitated a conversation that first sought to arrive at a common understanding of the level of authority the Chiefs really had on the submarine. (almost none, decision making for anything of significance had been pulled up above their level).

Key Point: Capt Marquet likely already knew that the Chiefs had very little authority. But it wouldn’t work to act on that assumption without validating it in the minds of the Chiefs themselves. Further, the Chiefs had to arrive at their own truth, and they had to want to change it.

Based on his assessment, Capt Marquet guided the chiefs through a discussion about their current condition. At this point, they are the learners, the improvers, and he is taking the role of the coach. This is the bullet list he cites in the book:

  • Below-average advancement (promotion) rates for their men.
  • A lengthy qualification program that yielded few qualified watch standers.
  • Poor performance on evaluations for the ship.
  • A lean watch bill, with many watch stations port and starboard under way, and three-section in port (the objective was to have three-section at sea and at least four-section in port; this meant that each member would stand watch every third watch rotation— typically six hours on watch and twelve hours off— at sea, and every fourth day in port)
  • An inability to schedule, control, and commence work on time.
  • An inability to control the schedules of their division and men.

While this is really just a laundry list describing the general working environment that is summarized in the book, my impression is that the group had developed a good common grasp of the processes behind most of these issues. It really came down to the Chief’s authority to decide who needs to do what, and when, had been usurped by various other mechanisms in the chain of command.

If the Chiefs have no real authority to act, then the commissioned officers must make every decision and provide every direction. Those orders are often separated in time and space from the events they are trying to influence. The officers simply can’t be everywhere at once.

The dynamics can easily trigger a downward, reinforcing spiral of more and more control being pulled higher and higher, which makes the orders even more detached from reality.image.png

 

And, again, the same is true for your supervisors and team leaders in their relationship with management.

The Chiefs Establish their Target Condition

You can’t direct someone to accept responsibility.

My next question built on what we had all agreed on, namely, the chiefs did not run Santa Fe.

I asked, “Do you want to?”

Reflexively they answered, Yes! Uh-huh. Of course!

“Really?”

And that’s when we began to talk honestly about what the chiefs’ running the submarine would mean.

– David Marquet in Turn the Ship Around

I wanted to make sure they deliberately decided to take charge. It wouldn’t be any good if I directed them.

– David Marquet in Turn the Ship Around

Something that is often lost on managers learning to be coaches is that the coach can’t impose a target condition. Certainly the coach can (and should) structure the challenge in a way that ensures the learner is working on the right things. And the coach must provide guidance to ensure the learner is working on those things the right way.

But it is up to the learner to figure out how to get there, and up to the coach to ensure the learner has the skill and persistence to succeed. It is a mutually dependent relationship.

Many managers are uncomfortable with this because it means giving up control even if they know the right answer (or think they do). It means giving up control especially if they know the right answer! This is actually a lot easier for a coach who doesn’t know exactly what to do!

As the discussion continues in the book, some of the Chiefs begin to realize that with control comes accountability for the results. They won’t be able to hide behind “well, they told me to do it” because “they” is now the face in the mirror.

That is actually harder than just waiting to be told what to do. It is also a lot more rewarding if the work environment is supportive of growth vs. punishing mistakes.

The shape of a target condition

At the end, we were agreed: the sole output would be concrete mechanisms.

While it feels good to describe a future vision with words like “The supervisors will be empowered” that doesn’t address the adjustments and changes that must be made to the mechanisms that are driving the current situation.

If you want your supervisors to have more authority, but aren’t willing to dismantle the mechanisms that are withholding it from them… that isn’t going to work.

I put this question to Santa Fe’s chiefs: “What can we do so that you actually run the ship?”

The target condition they established was to have the Chiefs responsible for authorizing leave (vacation time) for the sailors in their organizations.

(In the military, you can’t just go on vacation whenever you feel like it. They have a mission to accomplish, with or without you there, so there is always a process to ensure too many people aren’t gone at the same time.)

What obstacles are keeping us from reaching the target?

There were a number of things that had to be dealt with to make this work. One of them was that Naval regulations required the Executive Officer (2nd in command) to approve the leaves of Enlisted Men.

This meant that even after the Chief of the Boat reviewed the leave plan, at least three additional officers had to approve as well. This added time and bureaucracy which, in turn, hurt morale because it might be weeks before a sailor knows if he can go home for Christmas, for example.

Related to that was the fact that, because of those additional checks, the Chiefs were inclined to approve leave requests without really thinking about the consequences. They knew someone else would be on the hook to say “no.”

They could be the White Hats, and shift the responsibility elsewhere. This was a consequence of the mechanism. The mechanics are part of the “death spiral” I illustrated above.

Which obstacle are we addressing now?

Here is the dilemma. Capt Marquet could ask the Chiefs to prove they could act responsibility, then give them the authority.

Or he could give them the authority, and trust that to drive responsibility.

In reality, I think only one of those choices actually works: Creating responsibility by pushing authority. The obstacle they addressed was the Navy regulations.

What is your next step or experiment?

The experiment was to actually break Navy regulations. On the Santa Fe, the non-commissioned officers would be solely responsible for approving the leave requests of Enlisted Men.

What result do you expect?

They expected that the Chiefs would start thinking through the consequences of these decisions.

This one-word administrative change put the chiefs squarely in charge of all aspects of managing their men, including their watch bills, qualification schedules, and training school enrollments.

The only way the chiefs could own the leave planning was if they owned the watch bill. The only way they could own the watch bill was if they owned the qualification process.

It turned out that managing leave was only the tip of the iceberg and that it rested on a large supporting base of other work.

– David Marquet in Turn the Ship Around

(I added the line breaks for readability online.)

This, in turn, set off multiple cycles of learning as the crew of the Santa Fe gelled into a true mutually supporting team.

In other parts of the book, Capt Marquet talks about the exchange of intent. These decisions are delegated, but they are not made independently. Rather, they worked to progressively create a working climate where people were saying out loud, both formally and informally, what they intended to do and why.

This created an environment were people could hear, and add to, the collective wisdom being shared around them. Knowledge was out in the open and spread quickly thorough the organization with these mechanisms.

But that was all a future consequence of what they learned by making this single change: To actually break the Navy Regulation, and turn 100% of the leave authority over to the non-commissioned officers.

The Overall Theme

This is just one example. The book is full of learning cycles.

People made mistakes. People acted without understanding the consequences. People acted without thinking.

But each time something happened that was contrary to the vision of the right people making the right decisions with the right information at the right time, instead of engaging in the death spiral, they sought to break it.

The crew (with the Captain as their coach) took the first opportunity to pause, reflect, digest what they had learned, and apply a mechanism into their interaction rules that applied a countermeasure.

Capt Marquet didn’t have a concrete step-by-step plan to get there. He just knew where he wanted to to go, had a clear idea of where he was starting, and took the next logical step.

As each step was taken, the next step was revealed. And so there was a little improvement every day. There was a big improvement on some days. But every day they were paying attention to see what they could learn.

And that is what continuous improvement is all about.

What You Can Do

Read the book. Study the book. Parse the book. Each chapter is a parable with a lesson. Don’t get hung up on the Naval environment, that is just a container for the higher-level story.

Study the lessons that were learned. Ask yourself what analog situations you might have, then go and study them. What mechanisms in your organization are driving people to do the things that they do?

What single change can you make that will have a high leverage impact on the level of authority?

That establishes a target condition.

What would “keep you up at night” (as David Marquet says) if you made that change?

Make that list. Those are your obstacles. Which one are you addressing now?

 

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*Just to be clear, I did not serve in the Navy, and my interactions with the Navy were only occasional and brief during my time in the military. I was a commissioned officer in the Army, and the non-commissioned officers are just as important there.

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Performance is the Shadow of Process

“Time is the shadow of motion” is an observation usually attributed to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, pioneers of modern industrial engineering.

What they realized was this: You want to save time. But you cannot directly affect how long something takes. You have to look at the motions, at the process structure that is casting the shadow of time. To change how long the shadow is, you have to change the structure of what is casting it.

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As you start your improvement effort, your challenge is often to change the size or shape of the shadow.

Grasping the current condition is looking at the process structure so you can see what patterns and characteristics of the process are shaping the shadow.

It is important to understand how the process patterns and characteristics are affecting the shadow before you just go changing stuff.

You might think “Oh, this part of the process ought to look like this…” and change it. There might be a lot of effort involved. But if you don’t have a sense of cause and effect, then you might end up with something like this:

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Change have been made, but we really haven’t changed anything on the outside.

Your target condition has three components, and it is good to develop them in this sequence:

1. The “achieve by” date.

2. The target process pattern and characteristics, and the internal process metrics that will tell you if you are working to that pattern.

3. The expected change in performance if the target working pattern becomes the norm. Then check your expected performance change against the challenge. Is it moving you in the right direction? Is it moving you enough in the right direction? If not, then go back to #2.

Edited to add: In the purest sense, you should start with the performance change you require, then determine the pattern you need to achieve it. That is what it says in Toyota Kata, and in the Improvement Kata Handbook. I don’t disagree with that sequence. However beginning improvers, when asked to first decide the performance target tend to just make a guess and can struggle if they over-reach.  I find that this is more of an iterative process than a fixed sequence.

Key Point: The target process pattern has to be what you must do to get to a specified level of performance. It isn’t “Well… we can make these improvements, and therefore might be able to deliver this improvement.” It’s “We have to make these changes in order to reach the goal we have set.”

The pattern of work is what should be emphasized. The performance level is an outcome, the shadow, of the work pattern. Your target condition is really a hypothesis: “If I create a process that follows this pattern, then I will get this level of performance.”

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Why am I emphasizing this?

Because a lot of managers have been taught, by pretty much every MBA program out there, to manage to results.

They believe that by measuring and asking about results that those results will be achieved.

That may well happen, but often the changes made are (1) not sustainable and/or (2) people are creative at finding solutions that are destructive to the long (and intermediate) term interests of the organization.

The exchange of intent that is inherent in the Improvement Kata is a way to open up this communication channel.

The person making the improvement clearly has a result based challenge, and the boss ought to be asking the questions to confirm he hears it spoken back to him in the same way he understood it.

Then the boss should become intently curious. “What is it about the way we do things now that is creating (this result we want to change)?” In other words, ‘What is the actual condition now?”

“What process changes are you proposing as your initial step? What result to you expect? When can we see what we’ve learned? These questions are summarized in “What is your target condition?”

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Be Ready for Empowered Employees

“I want my employees to feel empowered.”

“You realize empowerment means your employees start making decisions, right?”

“Oh… I want them to feel empowered. I didn’t say wanted them to be empowered.”

(from a presentation by Mardig Sheridan)

This is a further exploration of one of my notes from the Kata Summit a few weeks ago.

Think back to your own organizational history. When people were “empowered” how often did management struggle to retain control of everything?

These same managers complain about having to make every little decision themselves, and not taking initiative.

When organizations try to take on Toyota Kata there are a couple of common patterns that frequently emerge.

One is where most of the actual coaching is done by staff practitioners, with the higher level managers pretty much staying out of the mix. Previous posts not withstanding, that actually works pretty well up to a point.

The limit is reached when the next obstacle is a limiting policy or organizational boundary that can’t be crossed.

So… while this process does build the skill of individual managers at the middle and lower levels, it doesn’t do so well building a management team. Those enlightened middle managers can be in a tough spot if their bosses are expecting them to just be a conduit for direction from above. The coaches are working to engender independent thinking in the middle level of an organization that, by the actions of its leaders, doesn’t actually want it. (Yes, that is a bit black and white, the truth is more nuanced.)

The other common approach, and the one we encourage, is one where the coach is the responsible manager – usually the learner’s boss, or at least in the chain.

Novice coaches, especially if they are actually in the chain of responsibility, often struggle with the boundary between “coaching” and “telling the learner what to do.”

He often knows the answer. Or at least he knows an answer. Or, perhaps, he knows the conclusion he has jumped to with the limited information he has.

So, creating some rationale for why, the coach gives direction rather than coaching. This can be very subtle, and is often disguised as coaching or teaching. For this, I remind coaches to “Check your intent.” If it is to “Show what you know” then step back.

The learner may well have better information. Now this puts the learner in a tough spot. He is being encouraged to explore, yet also being told what to do.

Leaders who want to create initiative, leadership, and decentralized action in their organization have to be ready to give up on the idea that they know the best answers.

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Notes From Day 2 of Kata-Con

Perfection is the enemy of progress.

  • The longer it takes, the higher the expectation.
  • The higher the expectation, the longer it takes.

My thoughts: I’ve seen this a lot. It is magnified when the leaders are detached from the process.

Process improvement is messy, and if the leaders aren’t comfortable with that messy process, they develop unrealistic expectations of what “progress” looks like.

The people getting the work done, meanwhile, end up working hard to manage those expectations. They actually conceal problems from the boss, for fear of him misinterpreting problems-that-must-be-solved with my-people-don’t-know-what-to-do.*

Trying to layer Toyota Kata over the wrong organizational structure will overwhelm people.

The organizational structure follows necessity. This lines up with Steven Spear’s research.

The organizational structure must match the needs of the process, and the target condition for learning.

If your supervisor has 20 direct reports, it is unlikely he will have the time to work on improvement in a productive way. Toyota’s team leader structure is specifically engineered for improvement, development, and getting a car off the line every 58 seconds.

 

Improvement takes time and people.

The End.

This isn’t free, nor can you calculate an ROI ahead of time. Get over it.

Start with what you MUST accomplish and look at what is required to get there. It doesn’t work the other way around.

If you don’t continually strive, you die.

If you aren’t striving to go forward, you are going backward.

My thoughts: I make the following analogy: Continuous improvement is like a freezer. There is never a time when you can say “OK, it’s cold enough, I can unplug it now.” You must keep striving to improve. Without the continuous addition of intellectual energy, entropy takes over, and you won’t like the equilibrium point.

All of our failures have come to good things.

My thoughts: By deliberately reflecting and deliberately asking “What did we learn?” you can extract value from any experience. The way I put it is “You have already paid the tuition. You might as well get the education.”

We had sponsorship challenges as the leaders caught up with the people.

My thoughts: Yet another instance of the leaders falling behind the capability of their people. When the people become clear about what must be done, and just start doing it, the only thing an uninformed leader can do is either get out of the way or destructively interfere.

People don’t like uncertainty. Kata deliberately creates uncertainty to drive learning. You have to be OK with that.

My thoughts: Another expression of the same point from yesterday.

“Learning only” has a short shelf life.

“Cool and Interesting” is not equal to Relevant.

Those are the words I wrote down, rather than the words I heard. The key point is that you can, for a very short time, select processes to improve based on the learning opportunities alone. But this is extra work for people. The sooner you can make the results important the quicker people get on board.

A business crisis should not stop improvement or coaching. Does it?

My thoughts: This is a good acid test of how well you have embedded. When a crisis comes up, do people use PDCA to solve the problem, or do they drop “this improvement stuff” because they “don’t have time for it.” ?

Inexperienced 2nd coaches coaching inexperienced coaches coaching inexperienced learners… doesn’t work.

A lot of companies try to do this in the interest of going faster. Don’t outrun your headlights. You can only go as fast as you can. Get help from someone experienced.

Just because you have gone a long way doesn’t mean you can’t slip back. You must continue to strive.

The “unplug the freezer” analogy applies here as well.

You don’t have to start doing this. But if you choose to start, you may not stop. You have to do it every day.

Don’t take this on as a casual commitment, and don’t think you can delegate getting your people “fixed.” (they aren’t broken)

Everybody gets it at the same level. Senior managers tend to lose it faster because there is no commitment to practice it every day at their level.

Awareness is a starting point, but not good enough. A 4 hour orientation, however, is not enough to make you an expert… any more than you can skim “Calculus and Analytic Geometry” and learn the subject.

Results do get attention.

“I’ll have what she’s having”

But don’t confuse results with method.

My challenges to the plant managers weren’t about P&L or service levels. They were about moving closer to 1:1 flow, immediate delivery, on demand.

Challenges must be in operational terms, not financial terms.

Move from “These are the measures, and oh by the way, here is the operational pattern” – to –> “This is the operational pattern I am striving for. and I predict it will deliver the performance we need.”

Gotta catch a plane. More later.

 

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*When I was in the Army, we got a new Battalion Commander who listened to the logistics radio net, where the staff officers discussed all of the issues and problems that had to be solved. He would jump to a conclusion, and issue orders that, if carried out, would interfere with getting those problems solved.

Although he spoke of initiative and taking action, his actions revealed he wasn’t willing to trust us to let him know if there was a problem we couldn’t handle, and expected perfection in execution in situations that were chaotic and ambiguous.

We ended up finding an unused frequency, and encrypting our traffic with a key that only we shared, so the commander couldn’t hear us. Yup… we were using crypto gear, designed to keep the Soviets from hearing us, to keep our boss from hearing us.

As the information channels to him slowly choked off, he was less and less informed about what was actually happening, and his orders became more and more counter-productive, which in turn drove people to hide even more from him.

This, I think, is a working example of “getting bucked off the horse.”

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Notes From Day 1 of Kata-Con

I’m attending the Toyota Kata Summit in Fort Lauderdale. We’ve completed Day 1. Here are some notes I took. I plan to expand on some of them later.

Experiment your way forward vs. decide your way forward.

My thoughts: We like certainty. We like a plan we know will work. Unfortunately a plan we know will work is usually just a plan we have convinced ourselves should work. But we have a hard time distinguishing the difference. Such is our desire for certainty – a strongly held opinion or feeling becomes a fact.

We don’t know how it will go. We have to get comfortable with ambiguity if we want to move beyond what we already know.

Until you understand the mindset of uncertainty, you can’t teach anyone else.

My thoughts: This is probably the most foundational qualification for a manager who aspires to become an improvement coach. The improver / learner won’t know the answers.. and neither will you. You have to be very OK with that. If you aren’t, then you’re just telling people what to do, and nobody is learning anything.

Until you try, there is no baseline for learning or coaching.

My thoughts: At the start of a ski lesson, the instructor had each of us ski 50 yards or so down the hill while she watched from below. She asked us to just ski down to her. Of course, she observed.

Then each of us was individually coached on something to practice… a drill or technique that would correct one deficiency in our form.

She skied down another 50 yards, and observed us again. If we were not performing the drill correctly, she corrected until we were performing it correctly. Then our task was to practice.

Asking “What is your target condition?” is asking the learner to demonstrate his technique and understanding. For the coach, the idea is to get them to try so you have a baseline for coaching.

Warning! Be ready for empowered employees!

If a manager with only an “awareness” level of understanding enters this space, he’ll either deflate the team with inept coaching, or will get bucked off the horse he isn’t good enough to ride. The leaders can’t do this from behind. You can’t simultaneously have empowered, creative team members and maintain control. (Sounds a bit like something Heisenberg came up with…)

I am coaching (by giving direction).

No you aren’t.

My thoughts: Actually this note was my thought triggered by something someone said. But I’ve seen senior managers who want to be “coaches” and then redefine “coaching” to mean “tell people what to do.” Doesn’t work like that.

The 5 questions are a jig. The questions on the card allow you (the coach) to listen because you don’t have to think about what question to ask next.

Some days big up. Every day little up. Please try. Do your best. Until you take first step, you cannot see next step. – Toyota coordinator (master coach).

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DMAIC and Toyota Kata

A lot of the organizations I deal with have a legacy with Six Sigma, or some x-Sigma variant. If they are now trying to incorporate Toyota Kata as a way to shift their daily behavior, questions arise about how it fits (or might fit, or whether it fits) with DMAIC.

This sometimes comes about when the impetus to embrace Toyota Kata comes from outside the organization, such as an initiative from the corporate Continuous Improvement office. In this case, unless integration with legacy approaches is carefully thought through, Toyota Kata (or whatever else is coming down the pipeline) can easily be perceived as “yet another corporate initiative” or “something else to do” rather than “a new (and hopefully better) way to do what we are already doing.”

My Background

First a disclaimer. My deepest exposure to Six Sigma was during my time as a Quality Director in a large company that had a long history with TQM and then Six Sigma. Thus, I dealt with the Black Belts and Green Belts in the organization, and paid a lot of attention to the projects they were working on.

In addition, every certification project for a new Black Belt came across my desk. Unlike a lot of managers in the chain (apparently), I actually read them, parsed them, and asked questions when I couldn’t follow the story line of the project. (Apparently nobody expected that, but it’s another story.)

I worked with the corporate Master Black Belt, made input into their programs, and did what I could to create a degree of cooperation, if not harmony, between the Six Sigma community and the lean guys.

Thus I am not claiming this is anything new or profound. Rather, this is sharing my own sense of connection between these two approaches in a world where I often find them competing for people’s mindspace.

The Improvement Process Flow

As I observed it, a Six Sigma project was typically organized and conducted as follows:

An area manager, usually a Green Belt, identifies something that needs improving. He assembles a team of stakeholders. He is coached by a Black Belt through*:

Defining the problem and establishing a charter for the team.

Establishing a Measurement that will define progress.

Conducting a thorough Analysis of the process, with a primary focus on sources of variation, especially those which are intertwined with quality issues.

Developing a list or set of Improvements and putting them into place, again focusing primarily on variation in methods, etc. that drive defects.

Establishing a standard to Control the process and keeping it running the new way.

Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. DMAIC.

In actual practice, it is very similar to the large single-loop “six step problem solving” process I was taught as “the problem solving process that came out of TQM.” That is probably not a coincidence.

DMAIC projects are typically targeted at measurable significant financial payback. Black Belts are trained to find and spend their time on high-payback projects. At least in the company I worked for, there was a minimum payback they had to achieve to get their certification. They also had to demonstrate knowledge of the various high-powered statistical tools.

It makes sense for people steeped in this methodology to ask how it fits in with “short cycles of experiments and improvements” that are the anchor for not only Toyota Kata, but kaizen in general (if you are doing it right).

And, put another way, if the organization is trying to establish a coaching culture using Toyota Kata, is Toyota Kata something different from DMAIC, or do they fit together? (I have actually been asked exactly the same question about Toyota Kata and kaizen(!), but that, too, is another story.)

To give credit where credit is due, this was the topic over lunch last week at a client site whose Six Sigma projects also follow the general structure I outlined above. Jazmin, the continuous improvement leader, was already working through this in her mind, and recognized the linkage right away.

Since the company has an active Six Sigma program, with dozens of projects ongoing, we wanted to find a way to integrate Toyota Kata thinking into what they were already doing vs. introducing yet another separate initiative. (It is easier to “embrace and extend” something you are already doing than bring something brand new into the domain.)

Relating DMAIC to the Improvement Kata

Here is how I relate DMAIC to the Improvement Kata.

Define the Problem =(more or less) Challenge and Direction. This is what we are working on, and why it is important.

Measure and Analyze = Grasp the Current Condition. Six Sigma has a host of powerful tools (which are often used just because they are there … so be careful not to make easy things complicated).

I would point out that if you follow the process in the Improvement Kata Handbook, you are also initially focused on variation in the process. Lean people tend to reduce all variation down to units of time, but in that noise are all sources of variation of the process. Defects, for example, don’t count as a delivery, and so introduce noise into the exit cycles. Machine slowdowns and stoppages, likewise, disturb the rhythm of the process. Like DMIAC, the Improvement Kata, as outlined in the handbook, steers you toward sources of variation very quickly.

Thus, a Six Sigma project team, and an improver following the Improvement Kata are both going to initially look for sources of instability. (Quality First, Safety Always).

At this point, the two diverge a little, but only a little.

Perhaps because DMAIC sounds like a single cycle, a fair number of teams tend to try to Implement a Single Grand Solution. They spend a fair amount of time brainstorming what it should look like, and designing it. Then, once they think they have a solution, they put it into place by establishing new “standards” (in this context, that usually means procedures), training people, and validating that it all works.

Again – a lot of kaizen events do pretty much the same thing, they just might do it faster if it is a classic five-day event.

A few years ago I was on a discussion panel at a conference in Chicago that was very Six Sigma centric. In the various breakout sessions, the Black Belts (who are mostly staff practitioners) universally complained about “management embracing the changes” and not enforcing the new processes. They were frustrated that once they were done, things slipped back.

In other words, once the energy input of the project itself stopped, entropy took over, and things regressed back to the original equilibrium.

And (once again) traditional kaizen events often have the same problem.

Blending Toyota Kata and Six-Sigma Coaching

Think of this conversation between the Black Belt coach and the Green Belt project leader in their daily meeting and check-in:

[preliminary social rituals]

“Just to review, what is the problem you are working on?”

[Green Belt reviews the charter and objective]

“Great, so what is the target condition you are striving for right now?”

[Green belt describes the next intermediate step toward the chartered defined state. He describes how the process will operate when key parts of it are stabilized, for example.]

The Black Belt is listening carefully, and may ask follow-up questions to make sure the target condition is clearly on the path toward solving the defined problem vs. chasing something interesting-but-irrelevant to the issue at hand.

“Good. Can you tell me the last step you took?”

[Green Belt describes a change they made, or some additional data they needed to collect and analyze, or a control measure they have experimented with, etc]

“What did you expect from that step?”

[Green Belt reviews the intent of the action, and what he expected to happen.]

“And what actually happened?”

[Green Belt describes what his data collection and observation revealed about the process, or how well his control measure worked to contain a source of variation, etc…. or didn’t.]

“And what did you learn?”

[Green Belt describes insights that have been gained, especially insights into sources of variation, or the effect of controlling them. He also describes what he might have learned about the tools, or struggled with in applying them.]

“Very good. So what sources of variation or obstacles do you think are preventing you from reaching the target right now?”

[Green Belt describes the current suspects for causes and sources of variation in the process, as well as other issues that may be impeding progress.]

“Which one of those are you addressing now?”

[The Green Belt may well still be working on the last one, or might have it effectively controlled and is now addressing a new one. If he has moved on to a new one, the Black Belt is going to be especially interested in the control mechanism for the sources of variation that has been “eliminated” so it stays that way.]

For example, a follow-up question might be “Can you tell me how you are controlling that? What countermeasures do you have to detect if that variation comes back into play?”

We aren’t limited to SPC of course, and actually would rather have a binary yes/no  need-to-act/don’t-need-to-act signal of some kind.

What we are going here is iterating through sources of variation, and establishing a positive Control on each of them before moving on rather than trying to stabilize everything in one step at the end.

Once he is satisfied that the project team hasn’t “left fire behind them,” then the Black Belt can move on.

“Great. Can you tell me the next step you plan to take, or experiment you’re going to run?”

[Green Belt reviews the next action to either learn more about a source of variation or attempt to keep it controlled.]

“And what result do you expect?”

[If the Green Belt is proposing using a specific Six Sigma statistical cool, the Black Belt is going to be carefully listening, and asking follow-on questions to confirm that the Green Belt understands the tool’s function and limitations, how he plans to use it, what he expects to learn as a result, and why he thinks that specific tool will give him the answers he is looking for.]

“OK, when do you think we can review what you have learned from taking that step”

This interaction is using the Coaching Kata script to develop the Six Sigma skills of the Green Belt project leader. We already have a coaching relationship, so all we are doing here is practicing a technique to make it more effective and more structured.

DMAIC is now more like:

DM [repeat AIC as necessary]

as the team works methodically through the sources of variation as they are uncovered.

The Master Black Belt

At the next level up is typically a Master Black Belt who is generally responsible for mentoring and developing the Black Belts. They typically meet weekly or monthly and review and share progress on projects.

Only now, let’s shift the discussion to reviewing and sharing progress on developing the problem analysis and solving skills of the Green Belts. Remember, the Green Belts are line management, and we want to get them thinking this way about everything.

“Lets review your learning objective for your Green Belt last week.”

“What did he do? What did you expect him to learn?”

“What did he actually learn? Did he make any mistakes?”

“Is he stuck anywhere? What is your plan to give him additional coaching or instruction?”

In other words, they are following DMAIC as well. Except that the “problem” is the skill of the Green Belt and how effectively he is applying that skill to solve his chartered problem.

 

I am really interested in hearing from Six Sigma folks out there about how this resonates, or doesn’t, with you.

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*Sometimes I observed a Black Belt doing the same thing on his own initiative, leading the project himself. Occasionally I saw a Black Belt acting solo. I am not discussing either of those approaches here, however.