GA 187 | How to Leverage the Improvement and Coaching Katas with Mark Rosenthal

You're listening to episode 187 with Ron Pereira and Mark Rosenthal.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today's episode is going to be a little bit different than most episodes. I want to basically provide a little bit of an overview and a preview of our Toyota Kata course that we are kind of putting the final touches on, literally as I speak. We hope to release this course before the end of the year and we're really excited about it. You know, it's easy to say, oh, this is the most important course that we've ever done and all that. So I won't be that over the top. But I will say that this, the thinking behind the Toyota Kata methodology in the system has really impacted me personally and I can tell you for sure it's impacted Gemba Academy and the way that we go about our business here on a day to day basis. You know, we teach these lean principles and we'd be the first to admit that we've got a long way to go ourselves to be a better lean thinking organization and utilizing this framework, this thinking system, this teaching method that Mike Rother has really shared to the world when he released a book, Toyota Kata, and you know, he's most recently released Toyota Kata Culture, the Orange Book. As I always tell my friend Mark Rosenthal, I call it the Orange Book. It's a fantastic kind of workbook style book, kind of like the classic learning to see books that were out there that Mike and many of the Lei guys have written over the years. But it's that type of a workbook and I highly encourage folks to pick that one up. But I say all that to really emphasize that the lean tools out there, we all have heard it's not about the tools and sure, it's not about the tools. In fact, when people talk to us about Gemba Academy, my, my, my mindset has shifted from, yeah, we have a lot of videos, right, that can teach you A lot of things about whatever it is, various lean tools and concepts and methodologies and even ways of thinking, you know, we have touched on it over the years, but I've come to the realization that it's truly not about the videos. For. In Gembe Academy's case, the videos are there to help you overcome obstacles, they're help to help you overcome problems. But the challenge many of us face and many Gemba Academy customers face is kind of understanding where to get started, how to begin this journey. It can be very daunting. And what we found just in practicing the Toyota Kata methodology here at Gemba Academy and is, it's, it's just a, it's a beautiful way to. I almost hate to say this, but to simplify the kind of the practical problem solving methodology to bring PDCA to life. Like, like, like I've never seen, to be honest with you. Um, so we take that, that big challenge, like where we want to be in a year, and then we, we come back and we look at our current condition, where we're at right now, and then we set that target condition and that, that as Mark Rosenthal, and you're going to hear from Mark here in a little bit, he likes to use the analogy of. Imagine the challenge is the, the goal line. We're trying to score a touchdown in American football. Okay. Or a. Maybe a try, I guess, if you will, for rugby fans. I don't know, I won't go the rugby analogy because I don't know that sport well enough. American football. I know. Trying to score a touchdown. Let's call that the challenge. Well, a good goal for a team that's on offense is, is to get a first down. So that first down, that first 10 yards, we might consider that our target condition. And then you could say what's standing between your actual condition and your target condition? So in a business sense, it might be. Well, you could have, you could brainstorm a list of obstacles. Once we have those obstacles, then Gemba Academy videos can come in. Then the latest lean tool or Six Sigma tool or whatever it might be, that's when those things come into play. And so that's what I'm so excited about this course, because I really do think it's going to be transformative in that it's going to help people, no matter their experience with lean tools, no matter their experience with just continuous improvement. It's our hope that they're going to be able to really start with this course, start to think this way, start to learn how to teach people this way and to coach people this way. And then the things of which video to watch or which tool to use is going to become apparent because we have this obstacle standing in our way of where we are today and our target condition or where we want to get to in, say, two, two to four weeks. So anyhow, that's kind of a long ramble on why I'm so excited about this course. But what I, I would do is obviously we make videos. And so we produced this course in front of a live audience in a live classroom. We had one of GenBank Academy's customers was kind enough to allow us to come into the facility and run this workshop with their employees. And then even better, we got to go out to this particular organization, Gemba, and we got to practice the improvement kata and the coaching kata with real world problems. And so it's a mix of kind of theoretical teaching and Mark Rosenthal, who you're going to again, hear from here in a bit. Mark facilitated this class. And then during the class, there was this really killer dominoes experiment or workshop aspect to the, to the week that Mark led the folks through. That was the, the case study, if you will, in the classroom. And so folks, we got to practice the improvement kata and the coaching kata by using this domino's case study. And you know, Mark said, and you'll hear it in the videos if you watch the full course, it's not about the dominoes. The dominoes were just a vehicle that we use to practice these routines. You know, this kata in this way of thinking. So what I want to do here for the rest of this episode is shared just some snippets from the, from the actual course. So obviously this is just the audio version of the course, but in this first clip, I'm gonna. We're gonna call this, this module what Learning Looks Like. And to set things up, because you didn't see the previous videos, Mark took the students through this marshmallow challenge. Many of us have seen this marshmallow challenge. It's a famous kind of TED Talk, and there's a whole marshmallow challenge website and so forth. But the gist of the story is that when you have a bunch of business school students, you know, or CEOs sit down at a table and they attempt this marshmallow challenge, it's usually a relative disaster. But what's interesting is if you put a group of kindergarteners together at a table, they do much better than the MBAs and the CEOs of these big organizations. And so Mark kind Of explores why that might be.

Okay, so let's talk about what learning looks like. So talk. Think about the various groups, especially the business school students, the little kids, and the engineers. That's who I really want to compare here, because they have three fundamentally different approaches. So what were the core assumptions that each of those teams made? About what? What they already know about this problem. So what was the core assumptions of the little kids about what they already knew about this problem? Basically nothing. Nothing. Okay, this is new. What was the core assumption that the business school students made? That their model would work. That their model would work. That we understand what to do here. We know how to do this. Now, the truth is the same for both of those groups. It's new to both. Neither of them has encountered this before, but the underlying assumption was different. So their approach was different. The business school students made a plan and executed. And so how many cycles of learning did they get? 1. Okay, how many cycles of learning did the kids get? As many as they could. Because one of the key words he says in here, at each iteration, the kids learn, get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. That's what learning is. So let's talk about the business school students versus the engineers. Okay. They both started with the assumption that we know how to do this. What's the difference between those two groups? The engineers have training. Yeah, the engineers did know. Okay, spaghetti's new to them, but fundamental structure is not. And so the engineers are doing stuff they already know how to do. So of all of these groups, which ones learned the most? Yeah, the kids, because they start with a baseline of very little. And they built, like, the second tallest structures as a group. The engineers built taller structures, but they're just doing what they already know how to do. They likely didn't learn very much. They've been building bridges out of popsicle sticks since they were sixth graders.

Now, from here, Mark goes on to explain or he kind of elaborates on what happens when you place incentives, monetary incentives, on top of this game. And I don't won't spoil the surprise. So you'll have to kind of check out the whole course for that. But it is truly interesting stuff. So. So Mark kind of begins the day just with the. The way that we think and the way that we learn as human beings. Now I want to kind of fast forward a little bit. There were some more, you know, kind of introductory type stuff that Mark explores. Then I want to jump right into. Into where Mark kind of talks about the. The improvement kata side of things.

So let's talk about this improvement kata thing, okay? Because it's a model. So there's four steps, and you're going to have them memorized by the time we're done. The first is to understand the direction or challenge. Now, the verb here is to understand, because we're talking from the perspective of the person who's doing the improvement, who we're going to call the learner. Understand what the bigger picture is. Why am I working on this? Okay, what problem am I trying to solve? What am I trying to learn about? Then grasp the current condition. Where am I now in relation to that? What do I know? What do I not know? What is my threshold of knowledge? Where's the boundary? What do we actually understand about this and be able to articulate it at a much lower level of detail than we're typically used to with evidence? Then we say, okay, where am I going to go first? Because the challenge typically, typically is pretty big. So where am I trying? Where's my first major milestone? What would that look like after I'm there? That's your target condition. Where am I striving to go next? And then what are the obstacles I'm going to have to overcome in order to get there? What will I need to learn? Make sense. And then we get to actually work on trying stuff. And we run experiments against those obstacles one by one, iteratively to try to solve the problems. We're running experiments with the purpose of deliberate learning rather than just throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks. So it's a little bit different than a lot of the times you're not just brainstorming ideas, building up a Kaizen newspaper and implementing them. That's what the business school student instead.

Now let's go ahead and fast forward an hour or so from. From that improvement kata discussion and transition into the. The. The coaching kata discussion.

Okay, so the second practice routine. Because, like, where do the coaches come from? Right? So what Mike did was he dissected. Here's what his research did. Was he dissected? He parsed hundreds of. And hundreds of coaching conversations at Toyota. And he said, okay, it's just a conversation there. It really is. But what are the key elements that are always covered? And that's what he extracted, that he calls the five questions, which we'll go through in a bit. Okay, so it's a routine for learning how to coach the improvement kata. And that's the way to think about it. If you follow this routine and you do it with deliberate Learning, meaning you're going to get it wrong and you're okay with getting it wrong and reflecting and correcting. Then you become a better and better coach. So a lot of words there. But fundamentally the whole point here is your daily work of a leader in this organization is developing the improvement skill of the people who work for them. Now think about this from an organizational standpoint. Who's doing the heavy lifting of improvement at Toyota? Anybody know? Actually the heavy lifting happens at that first level of leadership. The heavy lifting happens in supervisors somewhat with team leaders, manufacturing engineers who are down very close to the work. They're the ones doing most of the heavy lifting. They probably create 80, 85% of the actual improvements there. Okay, so what's this? Why are we engaging the workers so hard? Because there's a lot of time and energy spent to give them the opportunity to engage. What's the roi? That's the farm team. Who are my next team leaders? Who is willing to step up and try to become a better improver. And the minute you do that, team leader is going to latch onto you and start coaching. Okay, that's what happens. So if you're interested in more of that, Jeff Leiker's book the Toyota Way to Lean Leadership is a really good read on how all that mechanism works. So together the improvement kata and the coaching kata to help you teach and develop essentially a system of managing your way through problems and managing your way through the unknown. Okay, so sound scientific thinking. Another, another picture of the same thing we've got here. Just to help you understand this long term vision here. That's perfection, that's perfect. One by one, flow exactly at the cadence of your customer demand. Waste free the stuff you'll never get to. But anything that moves you in that direction is the right way to go. Next piece we have is we've got a challenge is from the organization. This is where we need to be performing typically a year to three years from now. That is a lot of mechanisms for doing that. One of them is Hoshin planning, if you ever heard of that. We call it policy deployment. Sometimes it's normally not done particularly well, but that's where that comes from. Then you have your current condition. This is where you're at right now. You set the next target condition, which is typically one to three weeks, I'm going to say, or one week to three months, I'm going to say, for just starting two weeks as your default. Unless you have a really good reason to do something else. Okay, you got all these nasty things Called problems and obstacles. Now look at those obstacles. Anybody here have a shortage of problems to deal with? Okay. I never, never have a. Never have somebody raise their hand when I ask that. There's all kinds of issues out there, and the purpose of this structure is so you have permission not to try to fix them all at once. The only ones I'm concerned about are the ones that are stopping me from getting from here to here. And it's just enough of them to get here. I don't need to even deal with everything on the list sometimes. So that's kind of what we call the improvement corridor. We're going to use this model a couple of times. And. And the coach's job is to keep the improver between those guardrails and to stop the improver from going and chasing stuff that isn't relevant because that wastes time because it's not moving in a coherent direction. And we're going to go through this a couple of times. I'm going to be a little bit repetitive about it because this is some of the core stuff. Okay? So that's what good practicing is. As I'm between the guardrails. So same model. This is just Mike Rother's picture. Where's my improver? Where's my learner? Is my learner between those rails or is my learner outside in a teachable moment to ask them, okay, what are you working on right now? Is that contributing to getting to the target condition? Please explain. And sometimes it does, and I just don't get it. But I want that learner to be able to articulate it to me. That's my job is to learn what they're thinking. That makes sense. Okay, so you want to learn anything? Okay, here are the keys. You got to have first is you got to practice frequently. You can't do this once a week. Can't do this once, twice a year. Ideally, it's for a short period of time every day. Even masters will tell you they can handle this. What? The very, very best people practice maybe a few hours a day, but even then they need to take breaks. It requires a tremendous amount of concentration. How did Dustin do it? Five minutes a day. Right. Practicing the guitar for an hour a day or even less than that will get you much further than trying to practice all day. Okay. Because you gotta give so a little every day is the best way. A structured routine. Why? So that you know the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong. Because if you don't know the difference, you never correct. So you just, you just build in what you already know. So implied in that then is coaching. Because the coach is often in a better position to give you not only the corrective feedback, but tell you why it went wrong. Wrong. This is what you need to do to fix that. That's what the coach can bring to the table. You might know that you're not getting the outcome you wanted, but you don't know why. So the coach helps with that. And then the learner has to bring self efficacy to the table because the learner motivation has to come from inside. There's no other way. It does not work. You can't force anybody to learn something they've never done before before. Okay, so that's the basic model. So here's the model of the Cochin Kata. A lot of people think this is Toyota Kata because it's the most visible artifact. It's what we call the five questions. And in reality there's about 12. It evolved over time as over tens of thousands of experiments as people dialed in and contributed to what's the best order and the best follow up questions to ask. So that's going to go. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go through the questions. You'll be hearing them many, many times. I'm going to go through them. I want to show a video of a actual coaching cycle. And I'm going to tell you right now there's a lot to learn from it because there's a lot of stuff that I would change. So it'll be your challenge to, to see what you can spot. And then we're going to kind of be prepared to move on to the next phase. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. So what is your target condition? So what am I curious about here? I'm curious about whether the learner knows where they're trying to go and when they need to get there. Okay. And they can state it as a description of what the future will look like. Again, we'll get into this in excruciating detail this afternoon then. Okay, where are you trying to go then? Where are you now? So what's the gap? And I'd like to see apples and apples here. Can I make a direct comparison between one and the other? Then my cards will be a little different because everything's on the front. But that's fine. You can use whatever card you like. You can download Mike's cards from the web. Then he flips it over and we do a delete. Deliberate Reflection, because this is what drives learning. Okay. The back of the car. The reflection questions are the most important. And I want to bring something. Think about this for a second. In terms of how different would an action item be in a staff meeting is if the next week we ask these questions about the action item. Okay. What did you plan as your last step? So we're kind of reviewing what we intend to do. To do. What did you expect as an outcome of taking that step? So, Nan. Okay, so what actually happened? That's what we never ask. And what we never, ever ask is what did we learn? And that is the most important question in here. By asking that question deliberately, we cause people to pause and reflect. That'll be a harder than you think. Okay. Because it's really easy to get sarcastic here. Okay. Then we turn the card back over. Okay, so what obstacles do you think it's your opinion learner are right now preventing you from reaching your target? So Mike used the word obstacle instead of problem. Toyota will use the word problem. But to move most of us, the word problem has a lot of social baggage because problems are things we try to avoid rather than solve. So he's being really clear. And so we use the word obstacles in here. Which one are you addressing now? Now think about why is that a critical question to ask right now? You got to pick something to work on. What's the alternative? Doing nothing. Which is the same as trying to solve a bunch of problems with one solution. Okay, so I've been in these meetings, maybe you have, where there's a lot of debate about what to do, but everybody's really advocating solving a different problem. And once somebody says, wait a minute, what problem are we trying to solve? Then the thing thing comes together. Ever been into that meeting like that? Okay, that's what's going on. Okay. You can't solve everything at once. We're just working on one thing at a time because that's how you get there. Okay. If that methodical step by step will get you there a lot quicker. So you go fast by going slow here. Okay, so what do you plan as your next step or your next experiment and predict what you're going to learn or what you think is going to happen, what do you expect? You're either going to cause something to happen. You think you are, or you expect to learn something. So we're going to make you write those things down ahead of time. Then how quickly can we go and see and what am I trying to do here? First? I don't want to Read the whole question. This sounds a little awkward, but every word's careful. How quickly can we go and see what we have learned? Why do I ask that as a coach and I even fall into it? I say what you have learned, but I don't know either. We're moving into new territory. Nobody knows what we're going to learn. So we're going to learn together here, now, how quickly. The whole point of that question is to drive that to a short time horizon like tomorrow or even this afternoon. How quickly can we try something to learn whether this idea is worth pursuing or not? That's the whole idea here. So that's the five questions, and here's the model behind it. Is that the right process produces the right result. That's okay. If we're following a good process and we're getting the outcome we want, that's great. If we don't get the outcome we want. Want. We need to go back and look at the process we followed. What did we actually do? And either we did what we thought and it didn't work, or we didn't do what we thought, in which case we need to go back and do what we meant to. So that's kind of a model. So here's my model. If I have a good coaching process, then I will teach people to have good improvement, thinking and development, develop their capability. And it is those capable people who deliver the process improvement that we all want. So, you know, what's the alternative? There isn't one. So think about this. The alternative is that the leader up here is the one with all the answers and goes around everybody and does all the improvements herself. Well, that's only one brain doesn't work that well. Better be everywhere at once and better be right. Okay, we're back to General Bosquet at that point. So think of a sports metaphor here. Coach, who's responsible for wins and losses on a. On a sports team, especially at the collegiate or the professional level? Who gets fired if the team does really, really badly? Coach. Coach is responsible for the outcome. That's no different here in business. The coach is responsible. Responsible. Okay, Coach is the boss. Can the coach play? No. The only lever the coach can pull is player development. And to make sure they have fundamentals down and that they're thinking the right way in those dynamic situations and that their habits are good, that's all. The only lever the coach can pull. He certainly cannot call. He can't. He cannot during the play, predict what's going to happen. I can't have A baseball coach say, okay, I want you, we're gonna, we're gonna have a double play next. You know, you got gotta be ready for the opportunity.

Okay, so those are just two snippets from the actual course, the audio portions of the course. And hopefully they added some value and gave you a little context on, on what Toyota Kata is all about. The improvement kata, the coaching katana. There's obviously a lot more to learn and to know and we cover a great deal more throughout the rest of the course. What I would, I'll say in closing is if you've not studied the Toyota Kata methodology or you're not, you know, really familiar with it, or perhaps you got the book, but yeah, you haven't, you know, read it all the way through. I would definitely encourage you at a minimum, if you are practicing lean or you're practicing continuous improvement, you owe it to yourself to read the Toyota Kata book. Read the first one, the original one, and then immediately read the Toyota Kata culture. Now really, if you want to start with Toyota Kata Culture, I don't think there's any major harm in that. I'm not sure. It's obviously not the order in which Mike Rother intended, folks. I don't think to do it, but it's a shorter read, it's maybe even a little easier to kind of get through. It's more of a workbook style. But Toyota Kata Culture, the orange book, and then Toyota Kata to start there. And then Mike Rather shared a bunch of free resources on his website and I don't have the URL memorized. It's associated, I believe with University of Michigan. So I will link to that in the show notes. So just go over to gemba podcast.com and then look for episode 187 and, and we'll link to, to Mr. Rother's website there. Again, he's got all kinds of free resources, downloadable templates and cards and so forth. And there's tons of videos. I think they link out to YouTube where you can see people kind of practicing the improvement kata and the coaching kata. So definitely encourage you to check those things out. And then obviously once we have the course up and running on Gemba Academy, we would invite you to come check that out. You can obviously always sign up for a three day trial and, and take a test drive. Even today you can test drive what we've got to offer. That's kind of our sales approach. We'd let you look at it and see if it's a good fit for you and if it is, we'd love to have you as part of the family. So that's what I got for this particular episode. We'll get back to our normal show here next week, but again, gambellpodcast.com, look for episode 187 for the for the show notes and an additional study material material for you. All right, thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next week.

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