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 KataThe 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 RotherThis 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 systemand 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...

Toyota Kata is an excellent book but its not for beginners or anyone who is simply curious about the "Toyota Way". There are many good books written about Toyota but they all leave you with the unanswered question, "so what should I exactly DO?". Toyota Kata answers this question and give pratical advice on how to teach and learn behaviors (kata) in your organization to handle the uncertain future.Despite the fact that author has an easy to read writing style, some of his concept are so complicated that I would say its a difficult read. But at least for my business, a necessary one! We have started book studies about Toyota Kata that have provoked some interesting debates and pratical application.

I read this with our leadership team for work. We found it very useful in dissecting our procedures and policies. Sometimes it got a little tedious to try and read, but overall lots of good information.

I must admit I initially avoided reading this book as I was not a big fan of "Learning to See." But a steady stream of recommendations forced me to capitulate, open up my mind, and give it a try... for which I have been greatly rewarded!Pro:+ Brilliant break down of Toyota's tribal knowledge... I've just gotten a bit wiser!+ Gives the user a systematic way to manage smarter+ Good introduction to basic concepts like one-piece flow, vision/direction setting, and similar+ Concise history of where the Western management system came from+ Useful to any leader, even those not interested in "lean" or Toyota's continuous improvement methods!Con:- Overuses, "more on that in the next section" indicating the flow of information is out of sequence.- Weak visuals - I adjusted about half of them during note taking (FYI - I think there is math error in Figure A2-13).- Please add more references - what study did you use to come to conclusion x, y, or z? Naysayers call this stuff a fad until we show them the science.- Rother says on page 17 that Toyota's kata "precedes principles." I don't buy this. Kata is a system guided by certain principles and not something "beyond" them. The principles (and related systems) behind kata may be more important than others, but it definitely does not precede them. Every system, or kata, should have an aim, and for maximal impact/consistency that aim guided by a principle.Neutrals:> Include more about Eastern culture - I get that kata can be successfully brought to the West. However, I think it's definitely more prevalent in the Eastern culture so I conclude that the conditions there must be in some way be more conducive than those elsewhere. Consider the Japanese tradition of "cherishing" problems and not hiding them! No one's fault, merely an unfortunate situation! In the West, however, "I'm sorry" is usually interpreted as, "I was at fault" leading to a tendency to blame, resulting in people hiding problems and making kata harder to establish.Bottom line: Highly recommended! Either 2nd or 3rd in my entire operational excellence/lean library (ranking would depend on who is asking and the problem at hand). Don't let anything prevent you from putting this at the top of your reading queue, even if that means putting down another book.Note: When reading a book like this, I read it slowly, making tons of notes. It takes me several extra weeks, but it allows extra reflection time, prevents me from skimming, and helps foster a deeper understanding and appreciation for the author's view point. I mention this because some of my "con" points may sound critical but this is not the case at all! I respect each author, and show this by offering ideas - after all it is far easier for me to nod my head in agreement than say nothing...

Muy buen vendedor

Good

Kata explained well and with many practical examples

Good to learn TOYOTA KATA

Toyota Kata es quizás, y quizás sin el quizás, el mejor libro escrito sobre la filosofía Lean en la última década y entre los tres mejores de todos los tiempos. Deja de lado las herramientas y consigue exponer de forma metódica en entorno o la forma de pensar y actuar que da como consecuencias las herramientas. Mike Rother nos ofrece de manera sintética un enfoque de gestión de empresas, de aplicación rigurosa del método científico al día a día de una organización, y una forma efectiva de desarrollar a las personas de la empresa. Si no lo has leído aún, no lo dudes. Es una de las mejores lecturas que puedes hacer. Y además es muy amena. Un libro sobresaliente.