Search Results for: toyota kata

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Does Your Solution Have A Problem? Does Your Problem Have A Customer?

Javelin.com is a site with a few good tools centered around startup product development. (“Lean Startup”). I really liked their tutorial around the “javelin board” which is a vertical PDCA record specialized for testing product ideas. In the tutorial, the phrase that really got my attention was this: “Not all solutions have problems, and not …

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Often Skipped: Understand the Challenge and Direction

I’ve been practicing, teaching (and learning) the Toyota Kata for about four years now, and I’m seeing some pervasive patterns that are getting in people’s way of making it work. The one I’d like to address today is skipping over “Understand the Direction.” As designed by Mike Rother, the Improvement Kata has four basic steps: …

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Flipping Tires

A couple of weeks ago I was talking listening to the owner of a medium-sized manufacturing company as he shared his experience of various “lean” consultants, books, etc. One of the stories he told was about a kid at football practice. (For my European readers, this is about “American Football.”) The coach had the linemen …

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Fast Transients

Warning: Arcane esoteria follows. A while back, Steve Spear put on a webinar about problem solving. A key theme in the early part of Spear’s presentation was about a company that realized a need to be able to cope with ever accelerating changes. My notes captured this as: We no longer do high volume manufacturing.. …

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