Tag: Toyota Kata

Posted on

Toyota Kata and Hoshin Kanri

Jeff asked an interesting question in a comment to the post Often Skipped: Understand the Challenge and Direction:

[Hoshin Kanri] seems to suggest I reach long term objectives (vision) through short term initiatives/projects as if I can (should?) know the steps. [Toyota Kata] says I don’t know the way to reach my long term vision, so I limit focus to next target condition and experiment (repeatedly) toward the vision.

Seems contradictory to me. What am I missing?

Let’s start out with digging into what hoshin kanri is supposed to do. I say “supposed to do” because there are a lot of activities that are called “hoshin kanri” that are really just performance objectives or wish lists.

First, hoshin kanri is a Japanese term for a Japanese-developed process. We westerners need to understand that Japanese culture generally places a high value on harmony and harmonious action. Where many Americans (I can’t speak for Europeans as well) may well be comfortable with constant advocacy and debate about what should be worked on, that kind of discussion can be unsettling for a Japanese management team.

Thus, I believe the original purpose of hoshin kanri was to provide a mechanism for reaching consensus and alignment within a large, complex organization.

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, hoshin kanri concepts emerged out of their Japanese incubator and came to western business. In this process, the DNA combined and merged with western management practices, and in many (never say “all”) western interpretations, the hoshin plan tends to be something patched onto the existing Management By Objectives framework.

That, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. Hoshin kanri’s origins are from MBO migrating to Japan where they took MBO and mixed in Japanese cultural DNA.

However, I’m not comfortable that what we have ended up with in the west meets the original concept or intent.

With that as background, let’s get to the core of Jeff’s question.

What is the purpose of hoshin kanri?

Let’s start with chaos. “We want continuous improvement.”

In other words, “go find stuff to improve,” and maybe report back on what you are going to work on. A lot of organizations do something like this. They provide general guidance (if they even do that), and then maybe have the sub-organization come tell and report what they expect to accomplish. I have experienced this first hand.

“I expect my people to be working on continuous improvement,” says the executive from behind his desk in the corner office. Since he has delegated the task, his job is to “support his empowered workforce” to make things better.

image_thumb.pngFlatly, that doesn’t work unless the culture is extremely well aligned and there is a
continuous conversation and stream of consciousness within the organization. That is very rare. How to achieve that alignment is the problem hoshin kanri is intended to solve. It isn’t the only way to do it, but it is an effective method.*

A Superficial Overview of the Process of Hoshin Kanri

The leadership sees or sets a challenge for the organization – something they must be able to do that, today, they cannot. This is not (in my opinion) the same as “creating a crisis.” A crisis just scares people. Fear is not a good motivator for creative improvement.

Different parts of the organization may get a piece of the challenge, or the leadership team may, as a whole, work to figure out what they need to accomplish. Here is an important distinction: “What must be accomplished” is not the same as a plan to accomplish it. A challenge, by its very nature, means “We don’t know exactly what we will have to do to get there.”

This can take the form of KPI targets, but that is not what you are doing if there is a simple percent improvement expected with no over-arching rationale.

Now comes the catchball.

Catchball is not Negotiation of the Goal

Catchball is often interpreted as negotiating the goals. That’s not it. The goals are established by a market or competitive or other compelling need. So it isn’t “We need to improve yield by 7%.” followed by “Well, reasonably, I can only give you 5%.” It doesn’t work like that.

Nor is it “You need to improve your yield by 7%, and if you don’t get it then no bonus for you.” That approach is well known to drive some unproductive or ineffective behavior.

And it isn’t “You’re going to improve your yield by 7% and this is what you are going to do to get there.”

Instead, the conversation might sound something like “We need to improve our yield by 7% to enable our expected market growth. Please study your processes as they relate to yield, and come back and let me know what you think you need to work on as the first major step in that direction.”

In other words, please grasp your current condition, and come back with your next target condition.

That sounds a lot like the Coaching Kata to me.

SIDEBAR:

Toyota Kata is not a problem solving method. 

Toyota Kata is a set of practice routines designed to help you learn the thinking pattern that enables an organization to do hoshin kanri, and any other type of systematic improvement that is navigating through “We want to get there, but aren’t sure exactly how.”

An executive I am working with mentioned today that Toyota Kata is what is informing their policy deployment process. Without that foundation of thinking, their policy deployment would have been an exercise in assigning action items and negotiating the goals.

So what is the difference between hoshin kanri and Toyota Kata?

There isn’t a difference. They are two parts of the same thing. Hoshin kanri is a mechanism for aligning the organization’s efforts to focus on a challenge (or a few challenges).

Toyota Kata is a practice routine for learning the thinking pattern that makes hoshin kanri (or policy deployment) function as intended.

In hoshin planning, you are planning the destination, and perhaps breaking down individual efforts to get there, but nothing says you already know how to get there.

It isn’t an “action plan” and it isn’t a list of discrete, known action items. Rather, it is specific about what you must accomplish, and if you accomplish those things, then the results are predicted to add up to what you need.

What to Do vs How to Get It Done

At some point, someone has to figure out how to make the process do what is required. That has to happen down at the interface between people and the work actually being done. It can’t be mandated from above. Hoshin helps to align the efforts of improving the work with the improvements required to meet the organization’s challenge.

From the other side, the Improvement Kata is not about short-term objectives. The first step is “understand the challenge and direction.” Part of the coach’s job is to make sure this understanding takes place, and to ensure that the short-term target condition is moving in the direction of the challenge.

We set shorter term target conditions so we aren’t overwhelmed trying to fix everything at once, and to have a stable anchor for the next step. It enables safer learning by limiting the impact of learning that something didn’t work.

However, in Toyota Kata, while we might not know exactly how to get there, but we are absolutely clear where we have to end up.

The American Football analogy works well here. The challenge is “Score a touchdown.” But if you tried to score a touchdown on every play, you would likely lose the game. The target condition is akin to “get a first down.” You are absolutely clear what direction you have to move the ball, and absolutely clear where you need to end up in order to score. But you aren’t clear about the precise steps that are going to get you there. You have to figure that out as you go.

Hoshin Kanri focuses the effort – “What to work on.”

Toyota Kata teaches the thinking behind “How to work on it.”

*Though hoshin kanri may be effective, getting it to work effectively is a journey of learning that requires perseverance. It is much more than filling out a set of forms.

Posted on

Toyota Kata in Health Care

I’m about four months into helping a major regional hospital develop a solid foundation for applying the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata to learn “improvement thinking.”

They now have active improvement boards running in pre-op, post-op, surgery, radiology, the lab, the emergency department, the cardio-vascular floor, medical-surgery floor, ICU, cardiac rehab, billing, admissions, case management, and supplies. I think that’s everything going right now.

Several of these departments have more than one board, and a few are beginning to get started spontaneously.

We are starting to see the culture begin to shift in many of these departments. Staff are getting engaged in improving the work flows, administration team members are more engaged with the staff.

Directors and managers are starting to reach across organizational boundaries to deal with obstacles and problems at the departmental interfaces.

And the organizations are starting to shift how they talk. When confronted with a list of problems, leaders are starting to ask “OK, which one are we addressing first?” Leaders are asking “What do you expect to happen?” and “What did we learn?” when talking about actions. They are working to engage thinking in their organizations vs. just giving direction.

Is it all rainbows and unicorns? Of course not. But the effort is clearly being made, and it shows. My overall process coaching is getting much more nuanced, because they are “getting” the fundamentals.

OK, so what did we do?

We started out with two weeks of pretty intense “kick-start.” One week was half-days of training and simulation (with a morning and afternoon group), getting a feel for the rhythm of the improvement kata, and a taste of the coaching kata, and culminating with the first round of improvement boards getting set up with at least a direction, if not a clear challenge.

We deliberately did not use industrial examples. And now that I’ve done it a few times, I can incorporate more health care language and examples into the sessions, which just makes it easier.

Week two was pairs of learners/coaches being coached through grasping the current condition, establishing a target condition, and the first couple of PDCA cycles / experiments.

But what made it work is they kept at it.

The next month, we did it again. We coached the established boards to tighten up their game, while establishing a series of new ones.

Because they had kept at it, the first round of boards now had a routine for their improvement cycles and coaching. And once there is a pattern, then we can work on improving it.

What I am learning.

Just get them going, then leave them alone for a while to keep at it. That lets the team establish a baseline routine for how they are practicing. Then I can come back periodically and propose adjustments on one or two items that let them step it up to the next level.

I am finding this much more effective than demanding they get it perfectly from day one. There is just too much to think about.

Establish a target condition, have them practice to that pattern, grasp the current condition, establish a new target… for the team’s practice. Get the improvement engine running, even if roughly, then work on tuning it for performance.

To be clear, this is my normal approach (and it is different, I am told, from what a lot of others try to do), but I am getting a lot of validation for it here.

Results

A member of the administration (leadership team) who is actively coaching shared this chart with me today. I have “sanitized” it a bit. Suffice it to say these three lines represent the percentage of deliveries of three separate (but related) processes within or before the target turn-around time of 30 minutes. Their challenge is to turn 95% of them around in 30 minutes or less.

The vertical red line represents when they started applying the Improvement Kata to this process.

Otherwise, the picture speaks for itself.

image

They have recognized that there is no silver bullet here. Rather, there have been dozens (or more) of changes that each save a little bit of time that is adding up.

As one of my early Japanese teachers said “To save a minute, you must find sixty ways to save a second.” and that is exactly what they are doing here. They are finding a minute here, a few seconds there, and anchoring them in changes to the way they organize the work flow.

Lab Team: “Way to go!”

Posted on

How Do We Deal With Multiple Shifts?

This is a pretty common question.

Today I was talking to a department director in a major regional hospital that is learning Toyota Kata. She picked it up very quickly, and wants to take the learning to the off-shifts.

She (rightly) doesn’t want the night shift to just be deploying what day shift develops, she wants night shift totally involved in making improvements as well. Awesome.

Her question was along the lines of “How do I maintain continuity of the effort across both shifts?” She was jumping into asking how to provide good coaching support, whether there were separate boards, or a single board etc. and playing out the problems with each scenario.

My reply was pretty simple. “I don’t know.”

“What do you want to see your learners doing if they are working the way you envision?”

In other words, “What is your target condition?”

But… how do we coach them, and so on?

I don’t know. But until we understand what we want the improvement process to look like, especially across the shift boundaries, we can’t say. Different target conditions will have different obstacles.

And what worked at Boeing, or Genie, or Kodak, or even another hospital I’ve worked with likely won’t work here in your hospital. The conditions are different. The conditions are different in different departments in the same hospital!

She admitted that she was having a hard time thinking about a target without dealing with all of the potential obstacles first. My suggestion was that this challenge is her improvement board, and the best way to work out a solution was to actually follow the Improvement Kata (that she has been doing such a great job at coaching for the last month).

Trust the process. Once there is a clear target condition for the people doing the work (in this case, the learners / improvers), then we’ll better understand the obstacles we actually have to deal with. That will likely be fewer than every possible problem we can think of right now.

Establish your target condition, then list your obstacles, then start working on them one by one.

The Improvement Kata is exactly the tool to apply when you know you want to do something, but can’t figure out exactly how to do it.

Step by step.

Keep it up, Susan.  Smile

Posted on

Developing Cross Functional Responsibility

The Challenge

It’s a typical staff meeting. The function heads are around the table with the boss. One of them describes a hiccup or problem he is encountering that is outside of his control – it originates in another department for example.

An action item gets assigned in the meeting, and we move on to the next topic.

Good to go, right? Isn’t that the boss’s job?

Let’s expand the role of the boss a bit. Rather than being the conduit of all information, isn’t the role really to “Ensure cross-functional coordination is happening?”

If these meetings are weekly, there is weekly cadence to this kind of coordination, meaning if the issue comes up immediately after a meeting, it is a week before a decision is made. On average, it is a few days.

Let’s look at the nature of the language being used. The implied (but often unstated) question being asked by the function heads is “What do you want me to do?” The even worse implication is “I’ll work on cross functional issues when I get an action item to do it.” Not exactly teamwork.

Here’s another example.

Three functional managers all work in the same building… actually in the same open room. The building isn’t even that big. You can find anyone who is anywhere in the building in less than 5 minutes, just by standing up and walking around.

Their common boss is a in another city, a couple of hours away.

As he talks to these functional managers, they tell him of issues. But they haven’t talked to their counterpart who is 20 feet away. They are expecting the boss to do that. To say this exasperates the boss (who “gets it”) is an understatement.

In yet another organization, we are talking to various department directors about process improvement. Nearly every one of them cited problems in other departments as disruptions to their processes.

These Directors are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) expecting the CEO and Executive Team to issue directives to the other departments to fix these problems. The problem comes in when the Executive Team accepts the “assignment” and facilitates the communication. Now it’s their job.

Here is the question that surfaced in this organization: The managers were responsible for organizing and managing the processes that are internal to the department. If the Directors aren’t the ones responsible for that cross-departmental coordination… whose job is it? And if it is someone else’s job, what value are the Directors actually adding by managing the managers’ management of the internal processes, and commiserating about the problems from other departments?

All of these cases are the consequence of a management process that sends reports up, and sends decisions down. This develops a deeply rooted unconscious set of habits that are hard to change even when all agree it should be changed.

What Doesn’t Work

Saying “We need to do a better job talking to each other” isn’t going to work. Even saying “You need to talk directly to Dave about that” really doesn’t work because:

  • It is still telling him what to do.
  • The behavior repeats for every instance because “Jim” is still habitually coming to the boss for direction.

What We Are Trying

The objective (challenge) is to get the boss out of job being the sole conduit for cross functional communication. We want these guys working as a team.

In one of these cases, the boss and I took a page from David Marquet’s book, and thought it might help if he (the boss) made it clear that he is going to refuse to be the intermediary in these conversations. Now… how does he create the environment where this cross-coordination is happening as a matter of routine?

David Marquet’s “Ladder of Leadership” model may be useful here.

Grasp the Current Condition

“Start with Awareness, and Just Listen”

         – David Marquet, author “Turn the Ship Around”

imageTake a week and just listen to the words people use when talking about cross-functional problems. Are they simply stating the problem and hoping the boss will pick up doing something about it – and tell someone what to do?

Make a tick-mark on the ladder diagram for the level of each conversation.

Are they implicitly or explicitly looking to be told what to do? (Telling Jim to “Talk to Dave” or even asking “Have you talked to Dave?” is telling them what to do.)

Where is your center of mass?

“Tell me what to do” is the bottom rung. Your own current condition may well be different, but if you have read this far and this still feels relevant to you, it likely isn’t much different.

Establish the Next Target Condition

What words does the boss want to hear when one of those managers is letting him know what is going on? Not in the ideal situation, but at the next level – up one or two rungs.

For example, instead of saying “We’ve got this problem from Dave’s department.” and waiting to be told “Have you talked to Dave?” what does the boss want to hear from this department head?

Maybe “We’ve got this problem from Dave’s department, and I intend to talk to Dave to confirm that he understands what we need from him.”

Apply Rapid Iterations of PDCA

OK, now that the boss knows what words he wants to hear, how does the boss change his response so when he hears “We’ve got this problem from Dave’s department” the boss’s response drives thinking and initiative back down the chain.

Stealing another line from Marquet, maybe the boss says “OK, what do you think I’m thinking right now?”

“ummm… I’m thinking you want me to go talk to Dave about this.”

“Great. What do you expect to happen?” and then “OK, when can you let me know how it actually went, and what you learned?”

Ideally the boss wants to continue this process, setting successive targets until he hears “We had this problem, but Dave and I worked out a solution, and this is what we’ve done.”

or they only come to the boss with a problem that requires the boss to cross-coordinate with one of his peers, but they come with a solid recommendation.

Step by step.

Never give up on your people.

Posted on

The Improvement Kata PDCA Cycles Record

The improvement kata has four major steps:

image

Those steps provide a structured pattern to enable consistent practice until they are unconscious and natural.

In the fourth step, “Iterate Toward the Target Condition” we have a form, called the PDCA Cycles Record that provides an additional level of structure for the improver / learner and the coach.

This is the PDCA Record form from Mike Rother’s Improvement Kata Handbook (click the link to go to his download page):

image

The columns in the form correspond with the “5 Questions” that are part of the Coaching Kata.

The intent is that as the coach asks the questions, the learner points to and reads his answers. In the 5 Questions, it is the “Reflection” (on the back of the coaching card) and question #4 that address the PDCA Cycles Record.

Let’s look at how this form structures the learner’s process.

The very first experiment or trial that the learner sets up is based on his understanding of the current condition and the obstacles he is facing. He selects an obstacle, decides what he should do first, and fills that step in Column 1 “Date, step & metric.”

He must think a bit and also fill in “What do you expect?” and describe what effect he expects to have on the process (or what he expects to learn) as a result of taking that step.

Then he hits the yellow bar in the middle of the form. It says “Do a Coaching Cycle.” Do not pass this point without checking in with your coach.

The coach, this time around, is going to ask the 5 Questions, but skip the reflection step, because there is no previous step to reflect on. The coach is (or should be) looking for things like (these are by no means inclusive, rather they just came to mind as I’m writing this):

  • Is the obstacle actually something which must be worked out, or something which must be learned to reach the target? Or is it just a “to do” item? He may ask some follow-on questions to clarify the connection.
  • Is the “Next Step” actually something which addresses the obstacle? Does it reflect a step into “unknown territory” that includes learning?
  • Is the expected outcome a logical consequence of taking the step being proposed? Does it have something to do with the obstacle?

By having the learner write down his intent prior to the coaching cycle, the coach can see how the learner is thinking without biasing that process. He can see if the learner is off track. If so, it’s pretty simple to erase, or even scratch out, the planned experiment and revise during the coaching session.

But either way, as  coach, I want to see the learner’s best effort before I influence or correct it. That is MY process for “grasping the current condition” and even checking the result of a previous experiment on my part by emphasizing something specific during the last coaching cycle.

Once the learner is good-to-go, the NEXT yellow bar says “Conduct the Experiment.” This is the “DO” of PDCA.

Once he is done, the learner is expected to write down his observations in the “What Happened” column, then reflect, and write down what he learned in the “What We Learned” column.

THEN, based on what he learned, plan the next step. So, move down a row, and fill in block #1 with the next step, and block #2 with the expected result.

Then he hits that yellow STOP bar again. This time the coach is going to ask the reflection questions on the back of the card – reviewing the last step and expectation, and then covering the new information: What actually happened; What did you learn; Based on that, what is your next step; and what result do you expect from taking that step?

My job as the coach is to make sure the learner can connect the dots. I want him to write all of that down before I talk to him.

I have to see the learner’s “actual condition now” before I can effectively coach him.

Why Am I Talking About This?

I have run into a few cases now where I have gone into an organization with some prior training or experience with Toyota Kata. They have asked me in to do some additional training, or coach them to the next level because they think they are “stuck.”

In a couple of those cases, I have observed a deliberate* practice of filling out the blocks on the PDCA record during the coaching cycle. Their intent seems to be for the learner to be guided by the coach as he fleshes out what actually happened; what was learned; the next step or experiment; and what is expected and writes those things on the form.

This is very effective if the intent is for the learner to “get it right.”

But from a coaching standpoint, I feel (and this is my opinion) that this practice deprives me of information I need to ascertain how the learner would do it on his own.

I also believe it runs the risk of building a dependency on the coach, and shift the psychological responsibility off the learner – it is easy to fall into the “tell me what to do” trap unless the coach is experienced enough to avoiding “leading the witness” during the coaching cycle.

In most organizations, the hierarchy that likely exists between the coach and the learner has a deeply seated habit of the boss having the answers. I want to avoid reinforcing this dynamic.

A Caveat for Brand New Beginners

When the learner is going through the Toyota Kata steps the first few times, he won’t know what to do. It is completely appropriate for the coach to demonstrate, and guide, the learner through his steps. But the organization should not confuse this effort with the intended pattern of the improvement kata.

As soon as the learner has shown that he understands the intent of the process steps, it is time for the coach to step back and let the learner try it on his own. “Take a few swings” to use a spots metaphor.

That gives the coach the best opportunity to see where he needs to focus his effort. And the PDCA record may well be scratched out, revised, or rewritten in the process. It’s OK for it to be messy. That’s what learning looks like.

_______

*This is different from a case where the learner simply isn’t prepared for the coaching cycle and hasn’t filled in the forms or even thought about what to put on them.

Posted on

How Do You Measure Toyota Kata?

I’ve run into a couple of cases where there is an initiative from a corporate continuous improvement team to “implement Toyota Kata.”

Aside from trying to proscribe each and every step of the way (which runs counter to the entire point of discovering the solution – “you omitted step 7b”), they also expect reports of metrics related to the “implementation.”

Things like:

  • Number of coaches.
  • Number of coaching sessions.
  • Number of active improvement boards.
  • Scoring learners on a dozen or so categories of specific attributes for their coaching session.

Then there are bureaucratic reporting structures demanding that this information (and much, much more) get dutifully filled in and reported up to the continuous improvement office so they could monitor how each site is progressing (often from across an ocean).

I’ve seen this before.

I’ve seen companies try to count kaizen events, and quantify the improvements for each one to justify the payback of the effort.

Similarly, I’ve seen top-level corporate leadership teams struggle to determine how to measure, at a glance, whether a site was “doing lean” to get their results (or getting the results by some other means(?) that were less appropriate).

I’ve seen companies try to manage quality by having the quality staff prepare and submit elaborate monthly reports about what was, and was not getting done based on what they felt was important.

I lump all of this under “management by measurement.” I think it is often a substitute for (1) trusting middle management to tell the truth and (2) actually talking to people.

What’s The Alternative?

First we need to work out what we really want people, especially middle managers, to actually do. What would full participation look like if you saw it?

For example, one company I work with has had a problem where middle managers send their people to internally run “kata training,” then say they have no time to coach their people, give them ambiguous or shallow challenges to work on, and generally look at the training as someone else’s responsibility.

OK, what do you want them to do?

In their book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath talk about “scripting the first moves” so someone who is unsure how to begin doesn’t need to expend limited psychological energy figuring out how to start. We want to get them going. We don’t need to lay out the entire process (that will end up being different for everyone) but we can create some clear rules or guidelines for getting started.

From the Switch Workbook on the Heath Brother’s web site:

Be clear about how how people should act.

This is one of the hardest – and most important – parts of the framework. As a leader, you’re going to be tempted to tell your people things like: “Be more innovative!” “Treat the customer with white-glove service!” “Give better feedback to your people!” But you can’t stop there. Remember the child abuse study [from the book]? Do you think those parents would have changed if the therapists had said, “Be more loving parents!”  Of course not. Look for the behaviors.

Asking that question, in terms of what they would actually see their middle managers doing, we came up with three general actions:

  • Work with their learner / improver to establish a clear challenge for them.
  • Commit to regular coaching cycles with their improver.
  • Commit to receiving 2nd level coaching during those sessions (so they can learn as well).

The question then becomes what mechanism can the organization put into place to encourage that behavior vs. just sending people to the class and not following up in any way.

It is easy to tell people what they shouldn’t do. It’s a little tougher to tell them what they should do.

In this case, we discussed establishing prerequisites for sending someone to the class. But these prerequisites are for the organization sending the participant to the training, rather than just the person attending the class.

It is the sponsoring manager who must commit (perhaps even in writing) to ensuring there is an improvement challenge; to establishing a regular coaching cycle; and to welcoming 2nd level coaching.

Perhaps this would be a commitment to the advance team who becomes a bit of an admissions committee – ensuring the support structure is there before we commit to taking someone on in the class.

We discussed taking a copy of the organization chart and putting dots on it where they had active improvement boards and coaching relationships. That would highlight which organization groups were developing their own people and which ones were doing less of it.

We discussed inviting the middle managers who have sent people to the class but, today, are not supporting, to come to the advanced team with a plan – perhaps a similar commitment – for their renewed participation. But no one would be required, because you can’t force anyone to learn something. Put your energy toward the people who want to learn. Trying to get participation from people who don’t want to do it just frustrates everyone.

And finally, create a mechanism for someone inside a non-participating organization to raise their hand and ask for help with their own development. Don’t punish the entire organization because their boss won’t play.

Now you are talking about mechanics, about actions that have testable outcomes: Experiments that can be set up and tried, improved, and iterated in the direction of something that works for your organization.

It is more work than just measuring people. And it doesn’t work every time. But it works more often than something that never works.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

“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.