Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results

The Toyota Kata is my 2011 book of the year. It started me on a lot of thinking streaks and opened a lot of threads for how to effectively do my job as a Lean/Agile consultant. I already read it twice and suspect will reread it again and keep it for reference on my iPad kindle. The examples are mainly from Production and it takes a bit of abstraction to map it to Knowledge Work / Product Development, but it is worth the effort. At a very very high level this book is about the Toyota approach to management - which is to have a focused approach to improvement (The Improvement Kata) and a focused approach to teaching people how to focus on improvement (The Coaching Kata). As a practitioner of Agile and Kanban in software/product development environments, I love this focus on what REALLY makes Toyota tick. There's certainly a lot of bad mouthing of Lean and Toyota's approach to production out there, calling it tool-focused and mechanistic/unfocused. The Kata is book is very aligned with our view of Lean as Kanban practitioners - the key being the thinking about improvement rather than the actual tools. Let me try to review it by trying to apply it to the context of a Kanban team. The Improvement Kata The Kata starts with understanding the direction. Let's say we bought the Kanban / Lean Startup cool-aid and are aiming at the direction of faster end to end feedback and effectiveness through having dramatically shorter Cycle Times. Then we grasp the current condition. This is similar to the "Visualize the work" step in Kanban. Establish the Next Target Condition can mean - ok now that we understand our mean cycle time is 8 weeks and it is unstable - ranging 4-12 weeks and the direction is towards a stable cycle time of days not weeks, lets aim at stable 8 weeks meaning to reduce the variability from 4 weeks in each direction to 1 week in each direction. Sounds like a reasonable next target condition to me. Now we try to make that happen and encounter obstacles. We would need to overcome them. The Improvement Kata talks about a daily cycle of looking at the current actual condition, in light of the current target condition, understanding the obstacles explaining the gaps between the actual and the target, and urging us to choose one of the obstacles and work to address it in small experimentation steps using the PDCA cycle (Plan Do Check Act). On top of this approach sits the Coaching Kata with Five Questions that are aimed at coaching people on using the Improvement Kata. The aim is for managers to coach their people in their improvement work. The Five Toyota Kata Questions - Mike Rother This is great stuff. Really great. The key point here is the focus on the job of people to always improve in a focused way, and the job of management to work on improvement themselves but also work to improve the improvement capabilities of their people. Use this as a repeating building block, tie it to the value system and objectives of people throughout the organization and you stand a real chance for improvement work to become part of your DNA. I'm just not clear on how to implement this in Product Development/Knowledge Work. Our processing cycles are orders of magnitude slower than in production. Which means we either do coaching/improvement cycles without the ability to see samples of finished work - which invalidates the scientific nature of the experimentation cycles, or we have to suffice with much slower improvement cycles, which makes improvement part of the outer-loop cadence (e.g. retrospectives, operation reviews) rather than the inner-loop cadence (e.g. Daily Syncs). Which is a real shame because it seems Mike associates a lot of the power of the Kata with the fact it is done very often. At the moment I'm planning to use the Improvement Kata / Coaching Kata for outer-loop cadence, but am still trying to find a way to run it for the inner-loop. If you have some idea or experience with this, help me out... A possible direction is to do the improvement/coaching kata for local internal processes e.g. Dev/Test in the inner-loop. If a developer is using TDD then we can apply the Kata for his TDD cycles. For a tester we can do it for his exploratory testing sessions or for his test cases. A few more key points for me: - Having a reason/vision helps you avoid relaxing processes and instead focus on becoming more effective WITH them. - The Ability to work according to Sequence/Priority is an indication of maturity and can be a target for a pull system. - Having target outcomes are important but it is even more important to manage the means or conditions which will allow reaching those outcomes. - Having target conditions doesn't mean specifying the solution. The solution will emerge from experimentation cycles (PDCA). Mike Rother's Lean is very compatible with Complexity Thinking. Reading Chasing the Rabbit and the Toyota Production System reinforces this view btw. - To develop your own capability of improvement, the effort will have to be internally led, from the top. If the top does not change behavior and lead, then the organization will not change either. I hope I sparked your interest in this great book. There is still lots of work to be done mapping the Improvement/Coaching Katas to Knowledge Work, but even at raw unmapped form there are great insights in this book. Highly Recommended. My only hope is that someone will write a good mapping of the Toyota Kata to Knowledge work with its slower cycles. Who knows...

I'd previously given this book a 5 star review based upon reading. Now I can reaffirm based on DOING! Two weeks ago we launched our first real Lean "experiment"/ improvement process. I took the role of mentor in the teaching kata, and guided my Production Manager to help me write an A3 for how to dramatically reshape our shipping department. I didn't feel entirely comfortable, as I didn't have solid experience with ANY of the tools which are touted to fill up most "Lean" books. But by simply simply writing and mentoring the teaching of an A3, as taught in this book, we discovered all sorts of issues we hadn't been considering. And then, when we began to implement the formal plan -- as this book forewarned us to expect -- we uncovered a lot of additional considerations. That was several weeks ago. We are continuing to iterate on the improvement kata; it is clear we are on the right track to substantial improvement in the department and it is also more clear than ever that Lean isn't about "quick fix", short-term thinking (another lesson from this book). I've now purchased SIX copies of the book as we are picking up speed, proceeding to roll Lean out through all the aspects of our national business. It will doubtless take me years to really feel I am a fully experienced "Lean" practitioner. But I can't praise this book enough: Forget reading all the other books until you've really read this one. I wish I could take at least one star away from pretty nearly all the other Lean books out there so this one would really stand out as the shining STAR that it is. ---- Previous review: Of the probably 15 books I've read so far on "lean", this one stands alone in actually trying to teach the thinking *behind* Toyota's mindset of continuous improvement. As the author himself admits -- despite all the books, seminars, and consulting -- NOBODY has yet duplicated Toyota's results. You can be pretty sure you will fail, also, if you try to implement lean as a group of tools taught by a consultant. The tools are absolutely the LEAST important aspect of Toyota's success. In the author's words: "What we have been doing is observing Toyota's current visible practices, classifying them into lists of elements and principles and then trying to adopt them. This is reverse engineering ... and it is not working so well." I do think Lean has a lot to offer; It only makes sense that there a better and worse ways to do everything and that improvement really has no limits. The proper place to start, and to ground, is in the philosophy and more subtle behaviors at Toyota. The particular techniques are pretty much valueless without culture change and this is the only book I've read so far which really teaches that.

"While it has been said imitation is the best form of flattery, unfortunatly those that try to imitate Toyota based on what they see on the shop floor are often left scratching their heads as to why "Lean" hasn't lasted too long or "doesn't work". I'm glad this book addresses why copying the tools will not create sustainability without having the thinking and behavior in place. This book demonstrates that Lean is not about tools, but it is about people development. Developing the capabilities within the people so they can design what method is needed. I am also glad the book has surfaced that behavior changes need to happen at all levels of the organization. However I was a bit let down that the book did not get into management theory. Based on Toyota's demonstration of their culture and behavior it's probably a fair assumption that Toyota is based upon Theory Y, however the author does not address this dynamic of the system. Overall I am glad to see a book that really starts to scratch the surface about what Lean has always been about, releasing the potential of people. This will really be an eye opener for those who believe they are Lean because they are using Lean tools but haven't changed traditional mass production management practices and approaches."

A must read on how to sustain continuous improvement by changing the way people think and act.

"Toyota Kata" could be the most important book on "lean" since "The Toyota Way". Based on six years research at Toyota, Mike Rother's book provides a very readable and straightforward approach to embedding continuous improvement - putting the "principles" of the Toyota Production System into action. Interestingly, Mr Rother argues that the "Kaizen Event" approach to improvement is not effective or sustainable because, at best, each process area will only get one or two bursts of improvement in a year. This is not continuous improvement and does truly engage the workforce. He also argues that such events produce lists of improvements which are taken on by engineers and managers as "projects" to be completed. The project approach to improvement has little impact on changing the culture of the organisation. Instead Mike Rother argues for constant daily improvement - thus "kata" - a simple PDCA routine which is enacted every day by everyone in the process, and supported and coached by managers and team leaders who have roughly 50% of their time allocated to teaching this approach to improvement. Small step-by-step improvements are more effective over time than occasional kaizen bursts, and have a significantly greater impact on the organisation culture -creating an environment of involvement and improvement. The book describes this "improvement kata" routine with a rapid cycle of small improvements. It is one of the most interesting books I have read in years. The "lean tools" are touched on briefly - described as methods for highlighting obstacles in a controlled manner for improvement - but this book is about the behavioural routines that, by persistent and regular teaching at all levels in the organisation, become the embedded culture. Everyone working in the field of lean, in any industry or organisation, should read this book. It will open your eyes to what is really necessary. If you only read one business book this year, then this should be it. This book has changed my thinking on lean - particularly on implementation. It is truly an excellent work.

L'ho letto un po' di anni fa quindi non riesco a essere troppo preciso. Lo ricordo come un libro da cui si ricava prima una buona panoramica su cosa sia il TPS, ricca di esempi e con un minimo di strooria. Poi si passa in dettaglio a vedere come funziona e come, in questo momento, e' realizzata. Sottolinea molto il fatto che l'essenza del TPS sia dinamica, la sperimentazione e il cambiamento continuo sono cio' che la caratterizza e non la sua forma attuale, statica. Descrive poi i ruoli e le procedure aziendali: chi e' responsabile di trovare e segnalare i problemi (e come) e chi e' responsabile di risolverli. In che modo i dipendenti vengono incoraggiati, autorizzati e resi autonomi e con che limiti rispetto al miglioramento del processo. Chi e' responsabile in modo esplicito del solo migloramento del processo, in che modo vengono formate queste figure, e in base a che cosa decidono cosa fare e cosa no (il faro guida della 1-on-1 production). In che modo vengono definiti, costantemente, degli spazi di sperimentazione di nuove alternative e in che modo viene valutato se la singola variazione abbia portato ad un miglioramento oggettivo o meno. Una serie di pratiche specifiche Toyota, come i kanban e i display con i contatori di riferimento per la produzione. Insomma, in un libro tutto sommato breve, un sacco di informazioni. Non ho ancora letto "Toyota way", probabilmente lo faro', ma non so bene quanto i due libri si sovrappongano/differenzino. Questo ha un taglio molto pratico ma non e' uno "stupido manuale", attraverso esempi e dettagli riesce molto bene a trasmettere la "visione" che c'e' dietro.

Amazing read and well structured

Kata explained well and with many practical examples