I participated in Kata Con 5 this past week in Savannah, GA. If you are unaware of KataCon, it's put on by a group called Lean Frontiers and involves Mike Rother, the author of Toyota Kata. You can find more information at katasummit.com.
First, what the heck is this all about anyway? Well the first presentation from Mike Rother explained it rather succinctly.
Toyota Kata is...
...A way of working and working together
...Scientific thinking as the ingredient that makes teams stronger
...Skills, mindset, aspect of culture developed through practice
Toyota's business model has two major pillars - Continuous Improvement and Respect for People. These two pillars also suggest a way of thinking behind it all. We challenge ourselves to respect all people, our employees and our customers, and we are constantly trying to make things better for each other and our customers. There are people behind it all, and so that is where we focus. Kata can be translated in English as a "routine of exercises." In the context of Toyota and Lean, it is described as the routine of exercises in thinking and practice we do as a company together to make things better.
The thing I've learned is that everything we are trying to do to make things better takes practice. Whether you read books like 2 Second Lean, Toyota Kata, or any other business development type book, it all comes back to the idea that we actually have to go to do something. It's through that doing that we learn, that we become a better team, and we make things better for each other and our customers. To me, the idea of Kata, solidifies the underlying thinking and doing that must occur in order for us to make things better. It drives the actions of respecting people by allowing them to use their minds to come up with inventive solutions to problems they face.
I'd like to talk a little here about one of the deep experiential workshops I was able to participated in. What you see in the photo is a child's bicycle. Novo Nordisk had us participate in the same activity they used to train all their people in the method of Kata for improving things. I'll use this activity to describe the methods involved and the roles we take to accomplish these methods.
ONE | Set and Get the Challenge/Direction
We were given a seemingly impossible challenge. If you have ever had to put one of these bikes together you will know how long it may seem to take your first time through. Luckily for us we only had a portion to put together in sake of the time we had. We were challenged to put the bike together in 45 seconds.
This step aligns us all together with what we are trying to do, and because it's a challenge, it gives us some motivation to meet that challenge. In business this challenge can be anything. I've seen videos from Paul Akers (2 Second Lean) challenge his plant with "from order to ship out the door in 2 hours!" What happens when you are given that challenge, well you need to work on figuring out how to hit it!
TWO | Understand the Current Condition
You don't just get to the challenge right away though. You need to first understand what is happening right now. In this step we were given the standard work instructions and had to figure out what that meant for our team. So we split up the work and tried it out. We then wrote down what each of us was doing in a simple block diagram. Then we timed ourselves doing the whole thing. It took us 1 minute 45 seconds to complete - and that was trying pretty hard too. We have to remember, putting more pressure on people to perform better in the same operation without making any changes will surely lead to quality issues, fatigue, and long term costs. As we put the bike together we were able to quickly see issues. Typically, when organizations "do Lean" they will go see and eliminate waste. In this step we could definitely see a lot of the waste. Motion (reaching), waiting (for the only wrench in the kit), overprocessing (using a wrench to tighten something that could be tightened mostly by hand), etc. all could be seen in our current condition.
THREE | Set the Target Condition
Now that we could see what was happening, it gave us a good view of what could be done that can get us closer to our challenge. This step we set our target condition. What is meant by that is not just a time enhancement (let's build it in 1:00 minute), but also a state of how we would get there. So we drew another block diagram with our minds on eliminating the waste of waiting for the wrench. Hand tighten where we could, and pass the wrench around as one person finished. This way once we had tightened it by hand, all it would need was one last turn of a the wrench! Seemed pretty easy on paper.
At this time there is a coaching session. As the operators, we were engaged with our team lead to understand the challenge, see the waste in our current condition, and set ourselves a target. Our manager (who is in the coaching role) came over to talk to the team lead to ask questions.
What is the challenge as you understand it?
What is your target condition?
What is actually happening now? What obstacles are preventing you from reaching your target? What one obstacle are you planning to address?
What is your next step? What do you expect to happen?
How quickly can we see what we have learned from taking that step?
In practice this little session creates a respectful environment where we can check with each other on our plans to make something better. I remember back to watching a video from FastCap where Paul Akers works with Lucas on some amazing improvements made to his SpeedTape process. While it does not follow the questions exactly, this coaching style of leadership allows Paul to help Lucas through the thinking of improvement. It provides respect to the employee to come up with solutions that will make the operation easier, simpler, safer, and a higher quality to provide respect to our customers.
FOUR | Experiment - 1 Obstacle at a Time
After the coaching session we are set off to address the first obstacle. By trying to balance our work to focus on eliminating the waiting passing the tool around, we are able to bring down the time it took to just above 1:00 minute (I don't have our actual results - forgot to take a photo of that!). We worked through our obstacles one by one, each time with a mini coaching reflection on what we have tried so far and what we have learned from it. I have to admit, being a part of this exercise as an operator was quite interesting. I felt driven to make things better, and it really forced me to work in a team (many of us just met that hour!). Eventually we were able to get our time down under the 45 seconds challenge. We also eliminated a lot of reaching and strain throughout the process to make it easier for us in the long run. All the things we did were really quite simple. This reinforced for me that the idea of "kaizen" truly means, small incremental changes for the better.
So as a few teams we all used the kata of improvement and coaching to get our bikes built with a high quality in a short amount of time. What does this all mean though? Renata, our Novo Nordisk representative, showed a video of how they trained over 1000 of their employees this method in a single day. At the end, when we say "create value for the customer" we often forget about how the small things we do can affect our customer. So at the end of the day, Renata and her team brought in 45 families from the local community who could not afford bicycles. Each family, each child, received the bicycles from the teams. The direct link was formed from the things we did to make things better to the value we added to our communities. And so, in this conference room in Savannah, Ronald McDonald House came in and received our bicycles. For me, this was immensely powerful - creating the environment for improvement, teamwork, and direct relation of value for the customer.
That experience I hope allowed you to see how this way of thinking creates all the things we see. It underlies the actions we are taking and creates the culture of respect and continuous improvement and provide value to the customer. This got me thinking even more. First, about Toyota. Everything we "See" and "Do" with Lean really are just countermeasures to the obstacles Toyota faced trying to achieve a common challenge. As they sought to achieve one piece flow, not every operation was balanced together, and so heijunka comes to play. Inventories build up between operations because we cannot yet flow, and so kanban and pull are experimented with. These "tools" as we had seen them aren't really tools, they are solutions to the problems/obstacles that were faced by many teams!
So, how can we use this to transform? I say, set your initial challenges. Use the method of Kata to develop the thinking and actions of addressing the obstacles and creating creative solutions to the problems your teams face. Give ownership to the teams, provide coaching and mentoring so they can better solve their problems. What are the initial challenges? Right now I am thinking of these 4:
I think these are the 4 major organizational challenges. There should be another operational challenge for customer value, but I think that is going to depend on each organization specifically. That could be the idea of "from order to shipping in 2 hours" type challenge or "from order to mailbox in 2 days" type challenge. It will depend on the value creation of the organization. These 4 though I think help to create transformed leaders, highly developed employees, strong cultures of respect, and less chaotic processes.
This isn't to say these are correct, or should be followed, but are just challenges I have found many people and organizations face when first trying to implement Lean. These also could be seen as obstacles or targets. That's the thing with this method, one person's target condition might be another person's challenge within an organization. It's alright if it is not "exactly correct" as the challenge, that's the not the point! The point is to come together to rise up and take on the challenge. Form a strong team and learn together what will make things better for each other and our customers! Work the kata to get through your obstacles and practice the leadership of coaching to develop each other for long term success!
There was so much more I learned during this conference, and so many people that I was able to talk with and have deep conversations with. I might have further posts specific to those learnings, such as ownership, leadership development, handling chaos (stop the bleeding!), Training Within Industry, etc. I've since picked up the book called Training Within Industry to find out more about Job Relations, so I will have more to come on that topic soon. Right now, I just can't believe I haven't been taught this before! More learning to come and as always lots more to share!