A Kata for Developing Solutions

Creating a Toyota-style system involves developing your own solutions.

Thu, 06/10/2010 - 06:00

For more than 20 years, Toyota’s methods, known as “lean,” have made headlines. And that’s how long engineer, researcher, and author Mike Rother has been involved with the subject. Like many others, Rother began with Toyota’s production tools. And like many others, he found that these are difficult to put into practice at other companies. So he studied Toyota’s management approach, and his new book, Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness, and Superior Results (McGraw-Hill, 2010) describes what he found. In the book, Toyota actually plays a secondary role because the ways of thinking and acting that Rother discovered and describes are universally applicable. They do, however, present managers with some new tasks.

ADVERTISEMENT

For more information on Toyota Kata, visit Rother’s home page.

 …

Want to continue?
Log in or create a FREE account.
By logging in you agree to receive communication from Quality Digest. Privacy Policy.

Comments

Submitted by Karen Homa on Thu, 06/10/2010 - 10:06

I was disappointed to see the phrase "Managing People" in the title of Mike Rother's book but more than pleased to read what he learned at Toyota. It is interesting to discover that managing is not managing but coaching and teaching. It is how we at the Leadership Preventive Medicine Residency Program in New Hampshire help residents learn the skills of improvement and leadership to change a health care system to provide quality care for patients that they serve. The residents take a year to assess a specific gap or suboptimal process of care for a group of patients. They do come up with a plan and over the following year they start to implement the plan. By trying to resolve a problem the resident learns more about the process and more about whether their initial idea had value. Lots of lessons are learned along the way and it’s through their reflection and coaching that this result is achieved. So thanks for sharing what I always believed that improvement is not just about tools or didactics it is about people engaged in learning and discovering how they can be a part of making things better by unfolding the path before them and the journey is not predictable – thank goodness.

Has anyone else noticed the quality professions affinity for the martial arts? We have six sigma black belts, and now improvement katas. I suppose is speaks to the underlying components needed to be successful in both endeavors, such as discipline, flexibility, speed, decisiveness, bravery, knowledge and confidence...just to name a few.

It's too bad our culture is so relatively young and diverse that we don't have our own martial arts heritage or terminology that embodies those qualities. As Americans we are told our diversity is our strength, and Dirk and others have stated we simply can't copy Toyota, we have to figure out our own way.

So proposing a way that has to rely on the concept of "kata," will make sense to someone from Japan, but unless you are a martial artist, "kata" isn't going to mean squat.

We are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place in that we need to figure out our own way, but at the same time we realize we need to be more like them. The closest thing America has to a "kata" is....I can't really think of anything, can you? Let's face it, are a quick fix society. "Plop, Plop, fizz, fizz..." let's just take a pill instead of eating right....for example.

So unless you are a quality professional, a martial artist, or a member of the armed services, where are you supposed to find the culture and training that would make an "improvement kata" make sense on that gut level needed to actually change behavior?

Maybe we need to call it the "improvement happy meal," or the "improvement Viagra." Isn't there a cultural concept closer to home we can use to bring understanding to the masses?

David Smithstein, Founder and CEO

Dear David,

Thank you for your comment. Wow, you're right, six sigma has black belts. I never thought of that connection while working on the book Toyota Kata.

What you see in Toyota Kata is the result of careful investigation into Toyota's management approach, and Kata is the word that simply came to best describe what I found. (I have no connection with martial arts.) For example, during the latter part of the research I was discussing my findings and mentioned the word to a Toyota person who remarked, "Yes, what we do is all kata really."

In Japanese language, kata is a widely-used word meaning “way of doing things" or, specifically, any routine or pattern of behavior that is practiced to various levels of mastery. Kata in general is a teaching and learning method. Then there are many specific kata, which you practice to acquire a particular skill. This fits closely with recent brain research and is analogous to training in sports. We have perhaps mistakenly associated the word too closely with martial arts.

To learn more about the word "kata" and how dead-on it fits in describing Toyota-style management, I can suggest the following resources:

• Boye Lafayette De Menthe's book, Behind the Japanese Bow, Chapters 1 & 2.

• Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka's book, Knowledge Creation and Management, page 25.

• The Toyota Kata Homepage: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother

Ultimately the book Toyota Kata is not about Toyota, but about a routine of thinking and acting that harnesses our capability to improve, solve problems and innovate. Toyota Kata presents this behavior pattern - the improvement kata - at a level where we are talking about human psychology, and I think it can be practiced and learned in any organization. We'll see.

As a side note, the working title of the book was Beyond What We Can See, which is a play on words meaning:

a) Toyota's management system is beyond what we can see when we visit Toyota.

b) The improvement kata is a means for achieving challenging objectives that lie beyond what we can see.

c) The book describes things we've learned since writing Learning to See.

Best regards!

Mike Rother

Thanks Mike.
Excellent response. I believe you are correct about the narrow definition of Kata in the US. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that we as Americans have to look outside our culture for answers. We as Americans don't have a cultural heritage that evolved over thousands of years, so a concept like Kata would have to come from somewhere else.

I think one of our country's strengths is our ability to adapt and absorb from other parts of the world, since that pretty much defines who we are as a nation. Unfortunately, from a psychological perspective, it's easy to fall into the mind set of "not invented here," which is especially dangerous for Americans, as the "Happy Meal" isn't much to fall back on.

The sooner we can solidify our national self concept with the idea that our strength lies in our ability to adapt solutions from any source, the faster we will be able to innovate and solve the problems we face.

Thanks again, and I'm looking forward to reading your book.
David Smithstein, Founder and CEO

Being both a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and a certified instructor of Martial Arts (Filipiino Kali, JKD, and Maphilido Silat), I have always found this cross current between the two worlds interesting. Perhaps to shed some light on the issue, a reason I think this exists is that in the martial arts you are always seeking perfection of execution. No matter how long you have been a martial artist, you continue to work, examine, and work on your abilities to refine and hone them toward the point where there is no wasted motion or energy and you accomplish your goal.

As to a kata, actually we do have something like it in America. Think of any sport and remember what a coach would always drill with the team. You always work on the fundamentals. A kata is a set of fundamentals of a martial art glued together in a way that you can remember them, and perform them multiple times (to build your muscle memory you need between 1000 to 2000 reps before you "own" a movement, thousands more are required to hone the movement). Kata isn't application any more than dribbling is playing basketball. However, you can not master application until you own the fundamentals. Once you are a master of the fundamentals, the applications flow from your ability to recreate and create solutions based upon the situation you face.

Perhaps that is where we are missing the point. We are trying to copy the end results we see without putting in the hours of practice required to master the fundamentals.

Dear JROMINGER,

Thank you for the good explanation of kata. You might like “teaching a kata” and, in particular, the Dreyfus Levels of Skill Acquisition, which are both on the Toyota Kata Homepage. Here are the links:

- http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/How_to_Teach_a_Kata.html

- http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/How_to_Teach_a_Kata_files/Dreyfu…

A coach (manager) can’t give solutions, because we don’t know in advance how a game will go. So what he can offer his people is to teach them how to play, eg. dribble as you point out.

Interestingly, at Toyota training and application are not separated. To practice and internalize the pattern of the improvement kata, learners apply it in actual situations at actual work processes. The improvement kata provides the form, and the gemba provides the content. Of course, the degree of challenge that is meted out to a learner depends on the skill level the learner has attained.

Cheers,

Mike Rother

Hi Mike,
I just made it to Part IV of your book and just can't contain my excitement about the insight your book gives to how to make lasting improvements at a company. As the primary software developer for my company, my head is now spinning with ideas about how to incorporate this new knowledge into our software. Even though you indicate financial IT systems aren't used on the shop floor, it would seem like there is opportunity to support the learning kata and the records / metrics being generated. I mean wouldn't each process change basically involve a procedure, that defines the process, and a corrective action, to track, manage, and approve the effort to make changes and to ensure the kata was performed correctly before making the change?

I seem to have run into a "catch 22" paradigm revolving around a company's procedures, however. It seem that Toyota basically says "let's try to do it this way," which I assume is defined in a procedure so that everyone involved is trying to do it that way. However, they expect that problems will arise when trying to do it that way, so that they can learn.

Now the way most companies define their quality systems, an ISO auditor would come in and find all the documentation and records establishing just how often, or not, that procedure could actually be followed. It would seem that Toyota would effectively be tracking how often they couldn't follow a procedure, which many western companies would interpret as just asking for all kinds of audit trouble when the ISO auditor arrives.
The ISO standard simple states that the company gets to define how it is going to control their processes, so there is definitely room in the standard to change our existing paradigms.

How does Toyota balance the role documentation has in stabilizing a process, that at the same time is intended to be unstable enough to move forward through the learning kata?

Are there two procedures, one for the stable process, and one that introduces the new changes in a limited capacity?
You're book will be a game changer if enough people read it and "get it." Awesome job!

Thanks,
David
David Smithstein, Founder and CEO
www.TheLeanMachine.com

Add new comment