Toyota Kata – The Lean Thinker

January 17, 2025January 17, 2025

Toyota Kata: From Kaizen Newspaper to Experimenting / Learning Record

In a traditional kaizen event there is usually some kind of todo list for keeping track of progress implementing the ideas of the team. A common name for this form is “Kaizen Newspaper.” The below example is pretty typical. This is a real one from the early 2000’s.

Generic kaizen newspaper showing What, Who, By When, Status

This form reflects a bias in western (certainly USA) business to focus on getting stuff done. I think it might be helpful to reflect a bit on the assumptions that are built in to this structure.

One of my favorite quotes is from Grace Ng: “All customers have problems, all problems have solutions. But not all solutions have problems, and not all problems have customers.”

In the context of this form, the “What” or “Action Step” is usually a solution. We are going to do something. And once the “What” is decided, then the rest falls into place- Who is going to do it, by when are they going to get it done, and what is the current status? And it is all to easy to get pulled into the implement vortex without ever thinking about “Why?” are we doing this – what are we trying to accomplish? How will we know we have accomplished it?

This is also a typical structure for a management staff meeting, and even discussions about strategy – they devolve into “What are we going to do?” and often skip over “Why are we doing it?” In other words, “What problem are you actually trying to solve?”

The “Progress Wheel” tracking percent complete implies an assumption that there are multiple steps involved, and implies a conversation about what those steps are as that wheel is filled in. The quality of that conversation depends on the skill of the coaching and facilitation.

The “By When” or “Due Date” implies that days will pass before we expect this action to be completed. It might be tomorrow, but often is not in practice.

This means that we expect that we wouldn’t get everything done that week. These newspaper items frequently carry over and are supposed to get done as follow-up work after the kaizen week is over. In practice, these things often fall victim to the daily whirlwind and languish. The “newspaper” is now more of an archive. It isn’t about today anymore.

Here is form from another company in the same era. As an aside, this company added “Complexity” to their list of wastes, and perhaps we can see some of that reflected here. But it takes a step in the right direction by adding “Problem to be solved” and, through the “Target Reference” block tries to tie it back to an intended result. It also has a column for “Results” on the far right.

What neither of these forms does, though, is ask “What result do we expect? They depend on skilled facilitation and coaching to ask that question as the team is proposing the idea. One of the challenges we often face (again, in the West and especially the USA) is with our focus on action we don’t default to asking that question.

One exception I experienced in May 2001 was a Shingijutsu consultant (and I don’t remember who it was, unfortunately) who had us modify our kaizen newspaper that week to add a column that captured the cycle time we expected to save as a result of implementing that step. (I know the date because I did the modification on the original file and still have it in my archives.)

The idea was to make sure that we were implementing enough changes to deliver the cycle time target.

What it didn’t do, though, was capture the actual cycle time savings from the action.

What Are We Trying to Achieve?

A common assumption in many continuous improvement efforts is that if people participate in enough of these kaizen events they will experience a mindset shift. The challenge here is that the events themselves are usually focused more on results than on explicitly teaching and practicing the mindset¹.

Don’t get me wrong – results are important, especially if you want to keep doing this. It is rare that any organization has infinite (or any!) patience for a lot of discussions around history, hypotheticals, or theory.

That means we have to actually solve real problems. We have to get stuff done. We have to at least look like there is a bias toward action if we want to survive as change agents in most organizations. The key is to solve the problems in ways that develop people’s problem solving skills.

That means making the mindset we want to teach more explicit.

This is the whole point of Toyota Kata.

Build the Coaching Into the Process

A highly skilled coach or facilitator brings teaching the problem solving / scientific mindset into the process, regardless of the forms and structure being used. But we can make this easier on both the coaches and the learners with adjustments to the structure.

While all of the artifacts of Toyota Kata are designed to do this, I want to avoid my tendency for scope creep and stay focused on one (really two) of them that fulfill the intended purpose of the Kaizen Newspaper in a way that develops peoples problem solving skills.

The Learning Record (aka the Experiment Record aka the PDCA Cycles Record aka the PDSA Cycles Record)

I call this form the “powered gear” that drives the entire process. Let’s look at the structure². The form is structured in a way that turns action items into hypothesis tests.

The first, obvious, thing is that we aren’t just saying what we are going to do and by when. Each action, which we are calling a Step or an Experiment, has a specific predicted result or outcome. Separating the step being taken (the action) from the intended or predicted result helps people distinguish between the two. Allow me to elaborate.

I often see a result or outcome being listed as something that we are going to do. This can go as far as something like “Increase gross margin by 3%” as an action to take.

But that is an outcome (and an indirect outcome at that). It doesn’t say what we are actually going to do that we predict will produce that outcome.

One (the action) is cause. The other (the result) is the effect. Distinguishing between cause and effect is one of the core fundamentals we are trying to teach people who are making improvements or changes.

Explicitly separating what we are going to do from the result we expect helps people practice this mode of thinking. But the coach has to be prepared to ask good questions rather than just buying whatever is written in the boxes.

Taking this a step further, I have sometimes found it helpful to ask a learner to first decide what they want to learn, or the effect they are trying to achieve and write that in Box #2 first. THEN I ask, “What action are you going to take that you think will [ read what is in Box 2 ] ?” and write that action in Box #1.

I can also ask the learner to say, “I intend to [ read what is in Box #1 ] in order to [ read what is in Box #2].” For example, “I intend to rearrange the end of Alice’s work path in order to cut 3 seconds of walking from her cycle time.” If that sentence doesn’t make grammatical or logical sense, there is more thinking to do.

In general (this is a rule of thumb, not a hard rule) there are three kinds of actions that get listed here.

A straight up hypothesis test – make a change with a predicted effect on the process, like the example with Alice’s work cycle above.
Gathering more information – for example getting more detailed information about the current state of part of the process. This might be something like breaking down the cycle time of an individual operator into discrete steps. This could be where I learned Alice has 4 seconds of walking back to the start.
Trying something in order to learn. For example, we have a target process that we can run, but we don’t have a good idea what the obstacles might be. The experiment would be something like “Run to the target process and carefully observe what actually happens” and the expected outcome would be “To learn what the obstacles are.” This is particularly effective for finding sources of process variation.

In general, and this is also more of a guideline, I want to see enough detail that we could give the sheet to someone familiar with the process and they could carry out the experiment from what was written. (This is just a thought experiment! DON’T actually do this. I can confidently predict that you’ll end up repeating the experiment because “what actually happened” won’t be what you thought – though that is an experiment in communication in its own right.)

The “Review / Coaching” line (yellow on this form) is the gate. We don’t cross that line until we have the coaching conversation, just to make sure everything I mentioned above is tight.

All we have at this point, of course, is a hypothesis. “If I do what is written in Box #1, I predict I will see (or learn) what is in Box #2.” Now we have to test that hypothesis. That is why we call this an experiment.

WAIT A MINUTE! Back up! What Obstacle Are You Addressing?

When you are running experiments, you are working to overcome some obstacle that is between you and your goal – your target condition. You want the process to operate in a new way (the target condition), but for [reasons] it can’t. Those reasons are obstacles.

This is different than the typical approach of just brainstorming a bunch of things to do and implementing them. We are targeting a specific way of operating (which is often an intermediate stage on the way to something more challenging).

We want our learner / improver to have an obstacle, problem, unknown of some kind, in mind. It may take – it usually takes – more than one experiment to learn enough to overcome that obstacle and move on to the next.

Address one obstacle at a time.

The Experimenting Record provides structure to reinforce this mindset by having the improver write the specific obstacle or problem in the space on the upper left corner before engaging any experiments. If they don’t know what the obstacles are, then write that as the obstacle, try to run to the new work pattern in order to learn.

“What problem are we actually trying to solve?” is a question that can often reign in an otherwise chaotic discussion about what to do.

The upper right corner has a space for a “process metric.” Without going off on another deep tangent, this is the attribute of the process result that we are trying to affect. The target condition should include a target value for the process metric so we can tell if we are actually making progress toward the target condition.

The process metric can be something like the cycle time of a particular operator; the minutes of exercise I am trying to achieve every day; the amount of variation in a process parameter we are trying to control. These are all things that we can immediately, directly, measurably affect by changing the process in some way.

Why did I address this part of the form second when it should be done first? Because it is very common to bleep over this part and just start writing experiments only to have the effort get diffused later.

Maybe my little digression was unexpected which might result in you remembering it a little better.

Now – Run Your Experiment

In the classic Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle we discuss “Do” and “Check” as sequential activities. In practice they are simultaneous, or nearly so. You should verify that the action you are taking is actually the action you planned to take. CHECK that your DO matches your PLAN.

If you ended up doing something different, you want to make a note of that, because you likely can’t say your plan didn’t work if you didn’t actually carry it out. What ACTUALLY happened? What did you experience? What did you see? What result did you actually get?

The things that we want to see written in Block #3 of the Experiment Record are objective facts. Please don’t just repeat what was in Block #1 in past tense. As a coach I want to see what you actually did as well as the actual outcome vs the planned outcome. And this includes outcomes that you didn’t anticipate. Sometimes those are good surprises – collateral benefit. Sometimes you learn that you need to pivot to a different idea.

Block #4 is subjective. What did you actually learn? There is usually more to this than what was simply in Block #2. This is also a good time to look at your obstacle list and make additions, deletions, and edits. Those are also things that you learned.

After Your Experiment

If you have had an impact on the current condition, update that. As I mentioned above, scrub your obstacle list and make sure it is up to date.

Have you achieved your target condition? If yes, awesome. Time to do a summary reflection, take a deeper look at your current condition, and establish a new target condition with new obstacles. (Same thing if you have reached the “achieve by date” without hitting the target condition.)³

If not, are you still addressing the same obstacle? If yes, then move to the next line on the experimenting record and fill in Block #1 and Block #2 for your next experiment.

In all cases, let what you have learned inform your next step. Notice how this is different than blindly executing a complex action item.

If you are addressing a new or different obstacle, then same thing, but please start a new form.

Why So Much Detail?

Our results-as-action-item corporate culture has a heavy bias to glossing over the details, and they are often not discussed or thought through. An action item might have a due date that is weeks in the future, and other than saying “It’s on track” not much will be discussed.

The Experiment Record is designed to have a small step every day (or nearly every day), discuss what was learned, and allow that to inform the next step so we aren’t blindly executing into something that has become irrelevant.

To be clear, a skilled, experienced coach can bring all of these questions out with a team using the traditional kaizen newspaper. The purpose of the Experiment Record is to make it easier for everyone, the coach included, to dig deeper into the kind of thinking we are trying to teach. It makes these questions explicit rather than relying on the experience and skill of the coach or facilitator.

Honestly, having these things explicit also establishes an expectation that the coach is going to ask about them. When a coach or facilitator starts pushing for more detail within the structure of a process that is overtly superficial they can, well, come across as a jerk. We call it “Socratic Teaching” but we have to remember what happene d to Socrates. Better to have a process that makes the structure transparent to everyone.

Even outside of the Toyota Kata ecosystem, this process can bring a cadence of accountability to things as mundane as staff or project status meetings. The key is to not allow any step to go beyond the next scheduled meeting. “I can have that done in four weeks” becomes “What will we do before next Wednesday?” and “What result do we anticipate from taking that step?”

Back to the Kaizen Event

Try this experiment in your next kaizen event.

Throw away your kaizen newspaper.

Ask your team to list the problems that have to be overcome to achieve the goal for the week (which is really a target condition). Put those on a seperate sheet. You can use the Toyota Kata “Obstacle Parking Lot” but that is really just jargon. Call the problems whatever you want – just make sure they are problems and NOT actions to take, or things to implement. What is it about the process that makes it hard to change to the new way? What kind of issues come up that prevent the new way from working smoothly?

Then pick off one of those problems and start a rapid cadence of learning using the Experiment Record format. Keep those cycles quick. Can you do one every 15 or 20 minutes? Probably. The first experiment may well just be a simulation of sorts to learn if this idea is even worth pursuing. Cardboard, tape, holding things by hand to represent a fixture.

If you have a large team you might be tempted to work on more than one of these problems at a time. OK – but first convince me there won’t be any cross-talk between those problems or those experiments. It is really hard to learn when the conditions are changing under your feet because someone else is tugging on the other end of the rope.

At each major step you want to work to stabilize what you have before making the next change. Do this quickly, but incrementally. Doing otherwise is leaving a shaky process behind, and this is disrespectful to the people who have to deal with the aftermath.

At the end of the event celebrate, not so much the results, but what you have learned about making improvements. Wherever you are is where you should be.

Come Monday morning – here is the cool part – don’t stop. Maybe you only run one experiment a day vs. three or four every hour, but keep moving. Keep those coaching cycles running at least once a day.

Congratulations – you are now solving problems in a way that develops people’s problem solving skills.

What’s Next?

Did you find this helpful? Would you like me to go into similar depth on other pieces of the Improvement Kata, such as obstacles, process vs. outcome metrics, etc? Is there something specific you would like me to cover?

Introduction to Toyota Kata

I recently did an “Introduction to Toyota Kata” session for Kata School Cascadia. The intent is to give an overview of my interpretation of the background, and how Toyota Kata fits into, and augments, your Continuous Improvement effort.

Here is a direct URL in case you can’t see the embed on your phone or pad: https://videopress.com/v/4vWvDZRe

In this presentation I go over what I mean when I say “culture” and then briefly discuss a “continuous improvement culture.” Then introduce the “why” of Toyota Kata as a way to start to nudge the culture in the direction we want it to go.

Finally I overview the structure of the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata, then answer a couple of questions.

January 25, 2024January 24, 2024

What Conversations Does Your VSM Drive?

Continuing on the theme of value stream mapping (and process mapping in general) – in the last post, Where is your value stream map? I outlined the typical scenario – the map is built by the Continuous Improvement Team, and they are the ones primarily engaged in the conversations about how to close the gap between the current state and the future state.

The challenge here is that ultimately it is the line leadership, not the Continuous Improvement Team, that drives whether or not this effort is long-term successful.

Getting a continuous improvement culture into place means changing the day-to-day patterns of interaction between people and groups of people. We can put in all of the lean tools we want, but if those conversations don’t follow, the system quickly reverts to the previous baseline.

What is interesting (to me, but I admit I’m a geek about this stuff) is that this is a meta level thing. While we are working on improving the performance of the value stream, we really have to be working on the performance of the process of leadership in the organization.

The value stream map can help with this, but we have to be deliberate about it, and realize that it will be an incremental and iterative process, just as we find in trying to improve how any process functions.

Start With Where You Want To Go

For line leadership, before we even start drawing process boxes, the first step is deciding why you are even doing this. What problem are you trying to solve? What aspect of your current performance needs to change… dramatically?

Is your system unresponsive to customers? Do customers expect deliveries inside your nominal lead times? Does that disrupt your system? What lead time capability would let you routinely handle these issues so they weren’t even issues anymore, just normal operations? That objective is going to bias your current state VSM toward understanding what is driving your lead times, where, when, and for how long, work is idle vs. actually being processed, etc.

Or maybe you need to increase your capacity while holding your costs (vs. just duplicating the existing processes). Now you are going to be focusing on the things that constrain your throughput, activities that consume time within cycles of output and the like.

Establishing that focus is a leadership / management task. It doesn’t work to just say “We need to improve” or even worse “We need to get lean.”

Sometimes these things are obvious frustrations to management, but often they are overwhelmed with general performance issues, or trying to define problems in terms of financials. That is an opportunity to focus back on the kind of performance that would address the financials.

The cool thing here is that you really can’t get this wrong. If you set a goal of radically improving your performance on any single aspect of your operation, you will end up improving pretty much everything in the process of reaching that goal. But it is critically important to have a goal to strive for, otherwise people are just trying to “improve” without any objective.

Then map your current state. The challenge gives you context. The current state map gives you a picture of how and why the system performs as it does.

Just so we don’t get sucked down the whirlpool of focusing too much on the business process in this discussion, the reason why you are getting this clarity is to get (and keep) the leaders engaged. If the objective is something abstract like “get lean” it is easy for them to think they can just get updates while they deal with the “real issues.” We want to attach this to a real issue that they are already working on.

Thus there is no “lean plan.” So many companies make “lean” somehow separate from other business objectives. I never could understand that. Maybe they are trying to separate “gains” that are a result of the “lean program” from those created by other initiatives. It doesn’t work that way. There is only one operating system in play, and that is what drives your day-to-day performance. If you don’t like the performance, you have to change the operating system. That is a management function, and it can’t be delegated.

The photo above is a current state map from a process that took several weeks to ship a part that the customer had ordered. Since it was a make-to-order shop, this was, shall we say, challenging for the customer relationship people.

As the team built the map it began to sink in that the time actually making the part was less than 30 minutes, and the value add was about six of those minutes. Their performance metric was “Past Due Hours” which was an abstraction of the programmed jobs that were behind the promised ship date.

Because the customers were always asking the business team members, “Where’s my stuff?” those customer reps were, in turn, always on the shop floor trying to get their orders expedited. They were competing with one another for a place in the production queue.

There is an icon in the middle of the map. Here is a close up:

This is Jim. He was an hourly associate whose nominal job was to pull the paperwork, match it up with raw material, and stage the work package into the production queue.

But this role made him the gatekeeper. So the customer service people (you can see their names in the lower left corner) would be pressuring Jim to jump their hot orders (and they were all hot by the time it got to the point where there was paperwork release – another story) into the queue so they could tell their customers that their orders were “in production.”

This put Jim in the position of having to make the priority decisions that the leadership wouldn’t make. Ultimately it was Jim who decided which customers would be disappointed that day. That made his day way more stressful than his pay grade. Respect for people? Hardly.

It also resulted in a staged order queue (materials and paperwork on carts) that snaked through the shop until it finally (days later) got to the actual production cell which, once they started, could actually knock things out pretty fast.

None of this addressed the past due issue. In fact, this made it worse.*

The key question for this team was “Who needs to have what conversation about work priorities so it isn’t all on an hourly associate to decide which of our customers will be disappointed?”

Who Needs To Fix This?

We want to solve problems at the lowest possible level, but no lower. In this working example, asking the shop floor workforce to fix this problem would be futile. Yes, they can propose a different structure, but they do not control how orders are released, they do not control how capacity is managed, they do not control the account managers who are fighting for a spot in the queue. They had been complaining about this bind for a long time. It wasn’t until the people running the business saw how the overall system worked that they understood that this is a systemic issue, and “the system” belongs to line management.

The facilitation question that got their attention was “Do you want Jim to be the one who decides who gets production priority?” Of course the answer was “No.” And that wasn’t about Jim, rather it was the realization that this WAS the existing process, and that wasn’t how they wanted things to operate. As my friend Brian says, “You may not like your normal, but you have to deal with it.”

That is generally the case at the value stream level. Value stream problems are usually at the interfaces between processes. The shop floor can’t, for example, transition from a push scheduling system to pull on their own. If they try, they create conflicts with the existing scheduling system and this usually tanks their metrics – even if performance is actually getting better.

These are all management discussions.

Key Point: The value stream level is a systems view. While you absolutely want input from the people who are engaged in the work every day, working on the system itself is not something that can be delegated by line leadership. They are the ones who are responsible for the overall system, and they are the ones who need to be responsible for changing it.

The Future State Map is a Hypothesis

Once you understand the current condition, the next step is to answer the question, “How does the process need to operate in order to meet our goal?”

The purpose of mapping a future state is to design process flow that you believe will meet your challenge if you can get the system to work that way.

It isn’t about seeing what you could do by removing waste. It isn’t “what could we improve,” it is “what must we change to reach our objective?” Again, this is a management function. It’s called “leadership.”

Which brings me to the title of this post.

Who Is Talking About This Stuff?

If the Continuous Improvement Team simply facilitated the process for line leadership (the actual stakeholders) to grasp the current condition and establish a target (future state) condition, what is crucial is who takes ownership of closing the gap. If the C.I. team are the ones discussing the problems they are often in a position of having to sell and justify every step of the effort to get to the future state.

Likewise, I have seen a lot of cases where the people primarily participating in building the value stream map were working level team members. Yes, it is absolutely necessary to have their insights into how things really are for people trying to get stuff done. Yes, it is critically helpful for them to understand the bigger picture context of what they do. However, all too often, I see senior leaders disengaged under the umbrella that they are “empowering” their workers.

Just to be clear: We absolutely want to create conversations about improvement at the level of the organization where value and the customer’s experience is actually created. The point here is that those conversations cannot be the exclusive domain of the working levels. It is critical for line leadership to be, well, leading. They can’t just delegate this to the continuous improvement specialists. Nor can they simply leave it to the working levels to sort it out – not if they expect it to work for any length of time.

Who reports on progress?

When an executive wants to know the progress toward an improvement goal, who do they call? Do they call the continuous improvement team to report? Or do they call the actual stakeholder who is responsible?

This is an easy trap to fall into. The C.I. Manager wants to show they are making a difference. The senior manager knows the C.I. Manager probably has better information. But that isn’t the conversation we want to create. The conversation needs to be between the line leaders. Yes, the C.I. team can (and probably should) help structure that conversation, but if they inject themselves into the middle (or allow senior management to put them there) the vital vertical connections are weakened – if they ever existed.

Thus, it is critical for the Continuous Improvement team to have a crystal clear picture of who should be having these conversations, and be actively working to nudge things in that direction. This is the process the C.I. team should actually be working to improve.

What should people talk about?

Ah, here’s the rub. For some reason managers today have a reluctance (or even disdain) to talk about operations, preferring to keep conversations in financial terms of cost, earned hours, yield and the like. These are all outcomes, but they are outcomes of process, and it is only by changing the process that those outcomes can sustainably change.

That conversation about progress I talked about above? That can’t be solely about the performance. It has to be about what is changing in the way the work is being done, and more importantly, what is being learned.

What the future state value stream map does (or should be used to do) is translate those business objectives into operational requirements for the process.

What Is Your Target Condition?

How we start to see the organic intersection between Toyota Kata and the value stream map.

The future state map defines a management goal. It also highlights the problems that must be solved to get there. (Those are the “kaizen bursts” that Learning to See has you put on the future state map.)

Those problems, or obstacles in Toyota Kata terms, at the value stream level become challenges (again in Toyota Kata terms) for the respective process owners.

Now the conversations move to the right level. Rather than asking for the status of action items for the “lead time reduction initiative,” the line leaders are discussing progress toward getting the changeover in stamping down to 17 minutes, and the cycle times in the weld cell under the takt time.

In my working example above, the first target condition was to have Jim simply pull the next order from a FIFO queue in a series of slots on the wall. The customer service reps had to meet every morning and could reshuffle the orders in those slots all they wanted, but Jim’s job was just to take the next one. That pushed the initial conversation to the one they had been avoiding: The customer service team talking among themselves, rather than making Jim the arbitrator.

There was a lot of other work as well. They established a rigid FIFO with a fixed WIP level of staged orders. Instead of pushing days of work into that queue, there was a buffer of about an hour (to absorb variation in processing times between various jobs).

At the same time, the team running machines now understood the rate of processing that was required to keep up with the volume of work. That had been totally hidden by the queues before. All they knew is that they were behind. Now the conversation shifted to “Are we going fast enough?” It shifted from discussions about backlog (which really are not productive) to discussions about rate of processing which is the only thing that affects the backlog.

Getting all of this dialed in and stable took a few weeks of daily conversations between the Operations Director and the various managers and supervisors whose work impacted the flow. It involved walking the floor, putting in visual indicators that clearly defined what should be happening – the target condition – and they discussed reasons things looked different: The actual condition now, and what obstacles were being surfaced as they worked to reduce the WIP buffers.

The net result?

Learning is Critical

The current performance is an outcome of the current system. People do their best within the system they have to work within, and we have to assume the system reflects management’s understanding of how things should operate to get the best results.

Even if someone knows a better way, that knowledge is wasted unless it is applied to the overall system of operating – the way we do things.

Epilog

You would never say “The freezer is cold enough, we can unplug it now.” You have to keep putting energy into the system just to keep the temperature where it is. Tightly performing production systems are no different. Over the course of the next year or so past due hours slowly crept back up for unknown reasons. Why? Because they didn’t talk about it every day.

*When a shop is behind, the management reflexes are (1) increasing batch sizes and (2) expediting. There really aren’t any better ways to make the throughout and response times worse.

December 19, 2023December 19, 2023

Where is your value stream map?

Thanks to everyone who left comments on the last post, Learning to See in 2023. You are making me think.

Although Learning to See (the book) describes building your value stream map on A3 / 11×17 paper, most of the maps I have seen have been large affairs on a wall.

I like this approach because it shifts people into the position of standing side-by-side talking about what is in front of them, which fosters collaboration.

The question in the title, though, is more about whose wall is it? Who sees this every day, who is standing and talking about the current state, the future state, and steps to close the gap between them?

I usually see these in the Continuous Improvement team’s workspace. That was certainly the case for the one in the photo. Sometimes they would bring management into that room to discuss progress, but all too often that became a report-out to the managers.

And right there we have an interesting situation: The Continuous Improvement Director and his team have a much deeper understanding of what was going on than the people in charge.

This was partly because it was the Continuous Improvement team members who made these maps in the first place. And they were the ones tracking the metrics, including quality, productivity. They were the ones identifying the problems, and they were the ones working to solve the problems.

And they were the ones complaining when things eroded because management “wasn’t supporting the changes.”

What’s the problem here? What were they actually expecting the line leaders to do?

As a Continuous Improvement team (and if you are reading this, that is likely you), your ultimate goal is to enable the line leaders by engaging through them rather than engaging for them.

You likely have to get there step-by-step, with successive target conditions, but it is the level of engagement of those leaders, and their growing competency in doing so that you and your C.I. team should be tracking on your walls.

Think about what that would look like.

March 27, 2023March 27, 2023

Toyota Kata: Coaching vs a Report Out

Andrea brought up an interesting point in our weekly open Toyota Kata discussion. She noted that as the coaching conversation became more and more fluid, it tended to become more like a report-out from the learner than coaching them. That got me thinking about a couple of things.

Reverse Coaching

Something I think I have talked about in the past is the technique of using the Improvement Kata structure to report out. In other words, report out progress (like in a meeting, for example) as though you were answering a version of the Coaching Questions even though they aren’t being asked.

Review what we are are trying to accomplish.
Where we are now.
The last step taken, what happened, what has been learned.
The next step being taken, what we expect (or expect to learn)

It would be really simple, for example, to format PowerPoint slides in this sequence. I discussed this a little bit way back in 2008, before Toyota Kata was published.

My hypothesis here is that people would like hearing a report in that format, and the boss might well start asking others to do the same thing.

Maintaining the Coaching Structure

Of course I don’t think this is what Andrea was talking about. It was the opposite. The learner is so familiar with the structure, and well prepared, so the coaching questions seem moot.

So what is a coach to do?

Here is my question:

Are You Challenging Your Learner?

When you are getting a report-out with little room for coaching this is actually a good thing. It means that your learner has developed and what may have been challenging in the past is now more or less routine.

Keep in mind that your learner has two thresholds of knowledge. One is around the actual process or task they are taking on. That is what is actually being discussed in the coaching conversation.

The other threshold of knowledge is around learning to tackle tough challenges with the scientific thought structure.

With beginner learners, both of these knowledge thresholds are pretty apparent. As a coach you are working to develop their thinking patterns, to make that scientific thought structure habitual. You do that by giving them challenges that take them a bit beyond their threshold of knowledge, and then coach them to apply scientific thought to take on that challenge.

As they get better, they will apply scientific thought to any problem they take on. Congratulations, Coach, it worked. You can tell this is happening when the conversation starts to sound like a report-out. What once was a tough problem is now handled routinely.

OK, Coach, Time to step up your game.

What challenge can you issue that would have your learner struggle a bit with grasping the current condition? Establishing a target condition? Figuring out what the obstacles are and isolating them? Developing good experiments?

In other words, how to you push your learner a bit beyond their threshold of knowledge of tackling challenges scientifically? Then you are back into the learning zone and both of you are operating at the next level.

August 31, 2022August 30, 2022

“95 Thesis” on Kaizen Events and TPS

Once again I am going through old files. These are some notes I wrote back in 2005 that I thought might be interesting here. Looking back at what I was writing at the time, I think I was thinking about nailing these points to a church door somewhere in the company. That actually isn’t a bad analogy as I was advocating a pretty dramatic shift in the role of the kaizen workshop leaders.

All Saint’s Church – Wittenberg, Germany

This was written four years before I first encountered Toyota Kata, and reflected my experience as a lean director operating within a $2billion slice of a global manufacturing company. What reading Toyota Kata did for me was (1) solidify what I wrote below, and (2) provided a structure for actually doing it.

Perhaps this will create some discussion. If you are interested in getting a Zoom session together around it, feel free to hit the Contact Mark in the right sidebar (or just click it here) and drop me a note. If there is interest, I’ll put something together.

Kaizen Events

Kaizen events (or whatever we want to call the traditional week-long activity):

Can be a useful tool when used in the context of an overall plan.
Are neither necessary nor sufficient to implement [our operating system].¹
There are times when any specific tool is appropriate, and there are no universal tools. Kaizen tools included.
(Our operating system) is, by our own model, the “Operational Excellence” pillar of (our business system). This is keyed in leadership behavior, not implementation of tools. The tools serve only to provide context for leaders to rapidly see what is happening and the means to immediately respond to problems.
Thus, focusing on implementing the tools of TPS (takt time, flow, pull, etc) outside of the immediate response and problem solving context is an exercise which expends energy and gains very little sustainable change. This is independent of whether it is done in a week-long intense event or not.
However, in my experience, organizations which take a deliberate and steady approach implementing have had more success putting the sustaining mechanisms into place. While it is sometimes necessary to bring teams together for a few days at times to solve a specific problem, or to develop a radically different approach, these efforts tend to be more focused than a typical kaizen week I see.
When the kaizen week is scheduled first, and then the organization looks for what needs improving, this is a symptom of ineffective use of the tool.
In general, a kaizen, whether it is a week, a month, or even just a few minutes, must be focused on solving specific problems which are impeding flow or are barriers² to the next level of performance. Without this focus, there is no association with the necessities of the business, and no context for the gains.
There are a few simple countermeasures which can be applied to a kaizen week activity that focus the participants much more tightly on learning the critical thinking.

Improvement can, and must, take many forms. A week-long kaizen activity is but one. It is expensive, time consuming, disruptive, and should be used deliberately only when simpler approaches have failed to solve the problem.

Classes and Courses ≠ Teaching and Learning

Bluntly, even though we preach PDCA and say we understand it, we are not applying PDCA in our education approach.

Some fundamental tenets:

All of our teaching should be contextual and focused on what skill or knowledge is required to clear the next barrier to flow or performance.
The above does not rule out teaching fundamental theory, but fundamental theory must be immediately translated into actions and put into practice or it will never be more than a nice discussion.
The vast majority of our teaching should be experiential, and based in real-world situations, solving actual problems vs. examples and contrived exercises.
We want to move our teaching toward an ideal state (a True North in our approach) where it is:
- Socratic – focusing people on the key questions.
- Experiential – learn by application to solve real problems and thus gain experience and confidence that the concepts translate to the real world.
Thus, education and training is but one tool used by leadership to help people clear the barriers and problems that block progress toward higher levels of performance.
As far as I can determine, the “Toyota Way” of teaching is similar to this model.

Content

The content of training is as critical as the way it is delivered.

Our objective is to shift people’s thinking, and in doing so, shift their day-to-day behavior as they make operational decisions. The target audience for all of our efforts are the people who make decisions which impact our direction and performance. This is anyone in any position of leadership, at any level of the company – from a Team Leader on the shop floor to the CEO.

The key is to embed the structure of applying PDCA into all of our content. For example:

The “rules-in-use” in Steven Spear’s research (Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System and other related publications).
Every tool, technique, etc. we teach, or should teach, is some application of the above. (The rules-in-use include problem detection, response, and problem solving.) I have yet to encounter an improvement tool or technique that does not fit this model.
This approach fundamentally re-frames the concept of “problem” and what should be done about it.
The Toyota Production System (in its pure state) is a process which delivers a continuous stream of problems to be solved to the only component of the system that can think – the people. This is how people are engaged, and this is what makes it a “people based system.” Leave this out, and “people based system” is just hollow words. Nearly every discussion talks about how important people are, but then dives right into technical topics without covering how people are actually engaged — outside the context of a week-long kaizen.

The Role of “Workshop Leaders” in the (Continuous Improvement Office)

No one has disputed the critical make-or-break role played by the line leadership, not only in implementation, but even more so in sustaining.

Workshop leaders are generally taught to plan and lead workshops. The emphasis is on the week-long workshop logistics; on presenting modules in classroom instruction; and on the skills to facilitate a team through the process of making rather dramatic shop floor improvements.

In a typical (not saying it happens here) implementation scenario, it is the workshop leaders who go to the work area, do the observations (usually without a lot of skilled mentoring, and usually just to collect cycle times); build the balance charts and combination sheets; plan what will be changed; how it will be changed, set objectives, targets and boundaries.

They are the most visible leadership of the teams during the week, and they are the ones tracking and pushing follow-up and completion of open kaizen newspaper items.

The effect of this (which is fairly consistent across companies) is:

The standard work tools are something workshop leaders use during improvement events.
Cycle times, observations, and looking for improvement opportunities is something that is the domain of the workshop leaders.
Actually guiding the team members through the problem solving process is the job of the workshop leaders.
The supervisors and managers are there as team members, in order to learn by participation, from this outside expert.

The question is: Who is responsible to coach the line leaders through the process of handling the problems that the TPS is designed to surface in operation?

Once the basic flows are in place, there will be a stream of problems revealed. Those problems will either be seen or not seen. IF problems are seen, they will either be dealt with quickly, following good thinking, or they will be accommodated so they go back to being unseen. This is a critical crossroad for the organization…. and it is the behavior of the first and second line leaders, and the support they get from their leaders, that most influences whether the system backslides or continues to get better and better.

IF problems are seen, they will either be dealt with quickly, following good thinking, or they will be accommodated so they go back to being unseen.

Note: There is not middle ground. One-piece-flow really can’t sustain in a stable state. It is either improving or getting worse. It isn’t designed to stay still, and it won’t. Continuous intervention is required for stability, and that intervention is what improves it.

Who is teaching the leaders to do this?

Each leader must have a coach, by name, who can, and will, always challenge his thinking and his solutions to problems against a specific thinking structure.

My view is this is the primary role for the Kaizen Promotion Office.

The way to do this is through application of a few core skills, and skills can be taught.

We should:

Include this vital role into the expectations of a “workshop leader” – to take them closer to being “coordinators” in the Toyota factory start-up model.
Provide these “coordinators” with a specific support process so they know that they can quickly get assistance if they feel they are in over their heads.
The role of that assistance is not to step in and solve the problem. It is to take the opportunity to teach both the workshop leader and the area manager by guiding them through solving the problem.

My experience with this concept is that teaching these skills to someone is not as difficult as most people assume. The basics of observing and seeing flows can be taught over a few days to someone who is motivated to learn. The skill of teaching by asking questions can be accelerated from the “pure” method by telling them what is being done in why. “This isn’t about the answers, it is about learning the questions.”

Application and good teaching can easily be verified by checking the leader’s (the student’s) level of skill and behavior. (The senior teacher checks the teacher by checking the student… just as the area supervisor checks the Team Leader’s teaching by verifying the standard work on the shop floor.

None of this is an advanced topic. These are the basics. Once a good context is established in people’s minds, my experience suggests that the Toyota system is no longer counter-intuitive. The tools and techniques that, at first, seem alien now make sense.

——–

¹ By this I meant to shift the operating culture to one that inherently supports continuous improvement.

² In Toyota Kata language, we would say “obstacles.” I had used the term “barriers” up to that point.

April 18, 2022April 21, 2022

Why Are You Asking Questions?

When someone brings a problem to a leader, it is typical for the leader to begin asking questions. The intent of those questions can make a world of difference.

Diagnostic Questions

In what I would contend is the more typical case, the questions are diagnostic. The leader’s intent is to get more information so that he can then propose or direct a solution. I can certainly speak for myself that when I have knowledge in the domain it is really easy to just drop into this mode. Someone is asking for advice, and I naturally reflex to giving it.

Of course there are times when this is wholly appropriate. Think of a physician and a patient or an auto mechanic and a customer. The customer has a problem that they are not capable of fixing and is engaging an expert to fix it for them or at least tell them what they should do.

Development Questions

If the intent is to develop the expertise in people then the questions must be different. This isn’t about finding the answers, it is about teaching the questions. Here the leader is coaching. The questions are about helping the problem-solver find her threshold of knowledge and the next step to learn more.

In other words, rather than asking the diagnostic questions yourself (as the leader), it is about helping the learner determine what diagnostic questions she should be asking herself, and then going about finding the answers.

Click on the image to download a Toyota Kata coaching pocket card.

This is Harder and Takes Longer

In the short term, it is always easier to just give them the answers. We are all hard-wired to seek out affirmations of our competence. Equally, we are hard-wired to avoid situations that might call our competence into question. It is uncomfortable to be expected to know something we do not. This is part of being human. I would contend it is especially hard to resist showing what I know when I actually DO know (or think I do – though often I know a lot less than I assume).

It can also be frustrating for the learner, especially if they are used to just being told the answers. “Just tell me what to do” is a response that should clue you in to this frustration.

But if your intent is to develop the organization, you have to work a little harder.

Let’s Go See – and learn together

Even if I am asking diagnostic questions, I am likely to get to a point where I start hearing speculative answers or even a hard “I don’t know.” This is a great opportunity to shift gears from diagnostic to coaching with “Let’s go see so we can both understand what is going on.”

Now you can work together to help someone get deeper understanding of the current condition and the nature of the obstacles and problems being encountered. It is also a good opportunity to ask them to document what they are seeing in ways that help them explain it better.

This can take the form of a Toyota Kata storyboard, or an A3, or whatever other structure you are trying to teach and use for problem solving and improvement.

If done well, you will turn “What should I do?” into a learning and growth opportunity for everyone.

June 15, 2021

Applying the Improvement Kata to the Process of Leadership

Whether you are a line leader or an internal or external consultant, if you are reading this you are likely working to shift the culture of your organization.

The technical “tools” alone are pretty useless unless you are already operating in the kind of culture that embeds the mechanisms of learning and collaboration deep into the structure of day-to-day work. If that kind of culture isn’t present, the “lean tools” will reveal those issues just as quickly (more quickly, in fact) as they reveal shortages, work balance mismatches and quality problems.

Making these kinds of changes is a lot harder than teaching people about how the “lean tools” work, and a lot of change agents are frustrated by the perception that the changes are not sustaining or being supported.

Back in February 2019 I gave a talk at KataCon5 in Savannah on some of the challenges change agents face when trying to influence how people respond to challenges and interact with one another. Here is the direct link in case the embed doesn’t work for you: https://youtu.be/NnvwOF4J3g8

As you watch the video (assuming you are *smile*) give some thought to how well you can paint a picture of how your efforts are influencing the patterns of interaction within the organization. Do you have something in mind for what you are trying to achieve there? What patterns are you actually observing?

And what is your role in those dynamics? How do you influence the patterns of who talks to whom, how, when, and about what? Are you acting as an intermediator between groups that don’t communicate or who are antagonistic toward one another? If so, what would happen if you stopped?

What happens when a production team member, or a nurse doing rounds on the med-surg floor, or your front-line customer service agent encounters something that is different than it should be? What is the threshold of starting action?

All of these things are cultural norms. And the “lean tools” all impact those norms in ways that people often are not prepared for.

None of these questions are on a checklist. Rather, they are the kinds of things to think about.

March 15, 2021March 15, 2021

Kaas Tailored – Truth, Bit, Pull

Jeff Kaas talks about Leader Standard Work
https://kaastailored.com/blog/what-is-leader-standard-work/

The people at Kaas Tailored in Mukilteo, Washington are friends, neighbors, and colleagues of mine. They have been a tour stop for people from all over the planet who want to learn more about their people-centric culture of continuous improvement.

Last year when the tsunami of COVID washed over all of us, their business faced an existential threat and they made a dramatic pivot to making medical PPE – masks and face shields. Their main motivation was “This is what our community needs right now.” In fact, you might have seen a bit of their story as part of the PBS Frontline Coronavirus Pandemic episode.

Dramatic change reveals obstacles that may have been buried under the Old Normal, and this was certainly the case for Jeff Kaas and his team. The awesome part is that they doubled down on their effort to learn and practice Toyota Kata as a response. They needed better organizational alignment, tying their organization’s philosophy and direction down to their day-to-day processes, and they used Toyota Kata to do that. I think they are emerging as a stronger organization as a result.

I mentioned in the opening that they have been a tour stop for many years. To further that end, they have worked hard to make that experience available online. What is cool about it is now it isn’t necessary to travel to Mukilteo, Washington (about 20 miles north of Seattle) to see them. They can come to you.

So when they asked me if I would like to participate with them in a series of online events they will be presenting starting on March 24, 2021 my response was an immediate Yes. To be clear, my role is chiming in with color commentary, and perhaps being a little more in front when they start talking about Toyota Kata.

If you would like to participate, here is their registration page:

https://kaastailored.com/waste-tours/waste-services/virtual-zoom-2/

February 16, 2021April 25, 2022

Toyota Kata: When to Switch Obstacles

Sometimes the situation arises where the learner has been beating her head against an obstacle with little or no luck overcoming it. The question comes up: When is it OK to give up and switch to something else.

The answer is, of course, a little situational. (Consultant speak: It depends…)

The natural progression of the Improvement Kata will provide an opportunity.

As the learner is iterating against obstacles toward the Target Condition the clock is ticking because the Target Condition is always associated with an “achieve by” date. If the Target Condition is achieved OR we hit the “achieve by” date without achieving it, the learner should cycle back to the beginning and:

Verify understand of the direction and challenge. (The learner may well have gotten more clarity along the way.)
Get a complete grasp of the Current Condition. This is important because often while working toward a Target Condition the learner is only updating specific process and performance metrics, and may not be looking for collateral changes elsewhere. This is a time to take a step back, put up the periscope, and get a grasp of the complete picture.
Based on that new Current Condition, establish a new Target Condition, with a new “achieve by” date.
Now… identify the obstacles in the way of achieving that new Target Condition. Ideally they should wipe the obstacle parking lot clean and take a fresh look.

This process often helps clear the learner’s mind and see another way to get there, or see easier obstacles that were overlooked before.

This is also why it is important for the “achieve by” date to be relatively close (a couple of weeks) – because that date is a safety valve that forces a reset of the process if the learner is stuck.

If the learner asks if it is OK to work on a different obstacle, then the coach should become curious about the learner’s rationale.

Specifically, I want to understand why the learner thinks there might be an easier way vs. just saying this one is too hard. This may well require some more information gathering – a mini version of the reset I talked about above.

The key point here is to maintain the learner’s motivation. There is a fine line between struggling to solve a problem and getting frustrated. This might be a good time for the coach to engage in some empathetic questioning.

For example, name the feeling you are picking up to test your hypothesis: “It seems you are really frustrated by this…” Then listen. The learner will likely either agree, “yeah, I am.” or refute and give you more information, “No, I’m just trying to…” Then you might learn more about their threshold of knowledge with the process of problem solving.

That can open up a discussion for why the learner thinks it would be a good idea to try something else. Then use your judgement.

But as a coach, I don’t want to make switching obstacles too easy because there is a high risk of it becoming a whack-a-mole game. Some obstacles actually require digging and perseverance to overcome. Your job, coach, is to keep the learner in the game.

Sometimes, though, the learner gets fixated on a problem and doesn’t see another way. Even in this case, if the time to the “achieve by” date is short, I’d let it ride. But if that isn’t practical…

The coach may well have a broader perspective – in fact, this is part of the coach’s job.

If the learner is making progress on something I (the coach) consider a red herring, I generally let it go. There is always learning involved – so long as the effort doesn’t bog down progress.

Sometimes, though, the learner is getting frustrated and so focused that he just doesn’t see any other way.

This is time for gentle intervention with whatever questions might help the learner pause, step back, and see the bigger picture.

For example, perhaps something like “If this obstacle were cleared, how would the process operate?” This might not be the full target condition. I’m just trying to learn what “solved” looks like to the learner. Maybe just thinking about it will help them see the where they are trying to go and possibly another path to get there.

An interesting follow-up might be, “Hmmm, what’s stopping it from working that way now?”

“What would you need to learn to better understand what is going on?” might be another avenue to get the learner to look at his threshold of knowledge vs. the big ugly obstacle in front of him

It all depends on what you think will help the learner raise her head and take a different look at things.

But in the end, if you have a learner that is truly stuck, and after a few tries isn’t going to get unstuck, then, honestly, it’s time to go shoulder-to-shoulder with them and dig into things together.

What I would work very hard to avoid is direct intervention – “Why don’t you work on…” because this undermines the entire process by giving them the answers and can easily create a “what do you think I should work on?” expectation next time.