GA 188 | How to Understand the Components of Kata with Brandon Brown

You're listening to episode 188 with Brandon Brown.

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 for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching Arlene and Six Sigma training videos over at GembaCademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Brandon Brown back to the show. Now, we've had Brandon on several times in previous episodes to talk about kind of his experience with different methodologies, in particular TWI and Toyota Kata. And so today, we're going to kind of continue the steam that we've been on for the last week or so, which is Toyota Kata, as we prepare to launch our own Toyota Kata course here in the coming weeks. And so I asked Brandon to come back on, and we kind of got a little technical today. We really got into kind of a review of the improvement kata and the coaching kata, and we spent quite a bit of time talking about the target condition, which we'll explore what that target condition is and the role that it plays in the improvement kata. It's an area where we've seen folks struggle with. And heck, we've had our own. We've wrestled with it. I suppose you could say. I won't. I won't say we struggled with it because we've always learned as we've gone through. So. So I think that's always. It's a good thing to. To remember that even if something's not easy is so long as you're learning, you're moving forward. And that's exactly what our experience has been with Toyota Kata. So now listen, we actually are putting together a page on Gemba Academy's website that's going to link to some free Toyota Kata resources. Um, these are gonna be previous podcasts that we've done. We've done several podcasts over the last few years related to Toyota Kata, and we've got the trailer for our new course up on that page, and we're gonna continue to add free resources so you won't need a subscription for this stuff. And if you ever do stumble on something where you need A subscription you can always sign up for a free three day trial. So there's no, no selling here. This is all we want to just kind of give back to the community and, and help folks understand this Toyota Kata methodology. So that to be gembaacademy.com kata k a t a so gembacademy.com kata so you can go ahead and bookmark that page and check back on it from time to time. And as we get new resources and articles, podcasts, videos, whatever it might be, we're going to kind of put them on that page. Even when a course is live, perhaps that page will live as a, just as a resource for folks who want to learn more. And we'll also link in the show notes to Mike Rothers Toyota Kata website. He's got tons of free resources on that website, so we definitely encourage you to check that out. Heck, we'll link to that from our kata page as well. Now, show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 188 gembapodcast.com, look for episode 188. Now, I will say that today's episode's a little bit longer. It's pushing an hour, but it's full of extremely important information. So listen to it in a few drives to and from work or on the treadmill or whatever it is. But don't give up on it because there's a lot of good stuff. But we don't. We try to keep these episodes around 30, 40 minutes, but this one got a little bit longer. But it's all good stuff. So, so, so hopefully it adds a lot of value to you and helps you better understand this improvement. Kata and coaching K okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Brandon, well, thank you for coming back onto the show. How's it going?

It's going pretty good, Ron. It's going really good. I can't complain better than I deserve. I'll just say that.

All right. All right. Well, we were talking before we hit record that this is the third time that you've been on the show, Brandon. So not many people been on three times. Hey, Mark Graben's been on 15 times, but you know. No, just kidding. But yeah, three times. So the first time you were back, what was that? 109 episode 109. This is 188. So we've had a few in between. And then we sat down with you and skip over there at where were we At. In San Diego. Yeah, San Diego.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Back at episode 152. So we'll link to those in the show notes. So folks, should. Should definitely go back. If you've not listened to those two, go, go check those out. 109 and 152. We'll link to those in the show notes. So if you only want to remember one number, remember 188. That's this episode. So GembaPodcast.com, go to 188 and then we'll link to 109 and 152 there for folks to go catch back up. But yeah, thanks for coming back on, Brandon. I really always enjoy talking to you. Matter of fact, you may have been on another time because I think we turned one of your katakan talk into a podcast. Your. The talk that you gave. So. Well, I can't remember what number that is. We'll have to link that one too, because I don't think it was either of those. So that was a very powerful talk.

Randy, you're like the keynote for the twr.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, brought my mom.

Yeah, like, made me cry, dude. Like, I'm not even joking. So, yeah, so we'll put that one in too. So y' all have a lot to listen to for Brandon, so get used to his voice. All right, well, in case people haven't listened to those ones yet, Brandon, tell everybody a little bit about your background and how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff.

Well, I started out in manufacturing, worked for a couple of different manufacturers. Lincoln Automotive here in Arkansas and Waterloo Industries, also Central States Manufacturing, started to plant and Jasper, Alabama. So been through the Southeast, been through operations management and just decided that it was time to come back to my home state of Arkansas and had an opportunity to actually work for one of the state agencies doing one of the manufacturing extension partnerships here in Little Rock where it was based. But they needed someone in Fayetteville at the university, and that's where I graduated from with my mechanical engineering degree and my industrial masters. So we always liked this area and it's a place where we wanted to call home. And so we had an opportunity to come back here. From there, I was able to connect with some people at the. At the W3 group and Beth Carrington and Jay Vanderswag and Jeff Kane, a lot of other people, Mike Rother and actually was attending a W3 group 3 day workshop. I guess it was more of a skill camp down in Fort Worth. It was at the Carter, I think Carter Blood Care Processing Center. And that's when I first heard Mike speak in person. And after reading his book, he just really kind of turned my thoughts of continuous improvement really upside down. You know, he presented the value stream mapping concept and he started talking about Kaizen events. And that was not a way to. Wasn't an effective strategy to deploy continuous improvement through Kaizen events. And he referred to him many times as we were decades, a couple decades ago, we would refer to them as four days in a pizza party. And when he used that term, I could really relate to what he was talking about. And I think back on some of those early events, and this was in the early 2000s and stuff right after Lean Thinking. And the big movement was coming in the late 90s and out of quality circles and into Kaiser, then the first consultants would come. And that was their way, he said, of coming to the US from Toyota plants. And they only had a week or two weeks here. And that was their method to show us continuous improvement was through an event, an episode, an episodic event where we train for a day and then we go out and we make rapid improvements and generate long action items. And there was a prescription. Start with IE stream mapping and you do 5s and then you do standard work. And he said, of course those consultants had to go back to Japan and they would come back a month later. And it just kept generating action item list after action item list. And as he began to talk, I was like, this guy's been walking around following me for a while or something, because I can relate to exactly what he's saying. But he kind of turned it upside down when he started talking about striving for a target condition and trying to reach that challenge and identifying obstacles and the way our brain works and the way we think, the way we. And just became very interesting and very intrigued with that. And so that's when I was first introduced to. It was directly through Mike Rother.

Good stuff. Well, I got a lot of questions and obviously the theme of today's episode is going to be the Toyota Cotta approach to learning, but let's go ahead and jump in. Brandon, I know you're a big, big quote guy, so do you have a quote that you want to share with folks this morning?

I have a couple of them that I'm going to be using actually here in a couple of weeks. I'm keynoting the first Katakan Summit in Prague, Czech Republic. They're releasing the book in their language. I'm not sure if that's the 16th or 17th language. It's how I'm going to wrap up. I think it's two quotes from Albert Einstein. One is, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to when we created them. And the next one is, if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes about the problem and five minutes thinking about the solution. Those two really, I think, summarize what I've been looking, researching, studying, watching people for about the past year or two, especially when it comes to obstacles and how they lay out their storyboards and how they think. And you've probably seen Skips talked about it on the bottom of the blue brains at the Baptist Workshops. He gives it says, show me your thinking. And those are two quotes that I really like that I think apply.

All right, well, let's jump right back into it, though. Where I want to go first is maybe let's just kind of an overview of the improvement kata and just walk us through that. And you know, as it relates to that storyboard, Brandon, talk about those four steps.

Well, you, you first got the organizational vision. Everybody, every company has one. And I've went online, I've challenged people to go online and, and read several of them and, and after you've read about eight or 10 of them, they all sound about the same. You know, they're, they want, they're the number one in their market. They exceed customer expectation. They do all these things, but, you know, that's a distant. That's where we want to be way out in the future. You bring it back to something more relative. And kind of a formula I've used is take a strategic deployment plan, a Hoshin plan, or strategic A3 combined with gold deployment or what your KPIs are for your organization. And then if you're in manufacturing, you value stream map. You try and do that for the current state and then set the future state where you want to be. And I just kind of use all of those to funnel into developing a challenge. And I have groups go through exercises that, that say it would be. And then I'll draw a blank line and then buy. And then I'll draw a blank line and then I'll just, on a dry erase board, just draw four or five long lines and then write so we can achieve outcome metrics of. And ask them to think about in the middle of that if they take all of those things. I just talked about their strategy, their goals, and everything in the area that we're looking at for Improvement, whether it's healthcare or whether it's manufacturing. What's the how and the why between these lines here? What do we see if we go into the future, six months, one year into the future, and what does the operation look like, what does the process look like? Describe what it is, don't solve it, don't write solutions. But then set yourself that challenge outcome metric. If you're able to describe or word what that process looks like a year from now or 52 weeks from now. What gives you that nervous upset stomach feeling of studying that big hairy, audacious goal? Reaching a performance level that Mike talks about in the book, a higher level of performance that you've never achieved before. And what's that strategic imperative? And then you know, from that challenge statement we'll come back in. The second step is to grasp the current condition. You know, where are you now? You know, what are your, what's your current working pattern? And I have them draw the block diagram step by step. You know, it starts here and it ends here. I even have a couple of worksheets to get people thinking about where does it begin, where does it end, what are the triggers, what are the inputs, what are the outputs? And we put that working pattern together and just go through that and the process characteristics and then what are the process metrics, you know, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. How do we measure success today and where are we at? Where have we been over the last six months?

Let me, let me jump in with a question, Brandon. So as it relates to that, let's go back to the challenge for a second before we go to the current condition. Are you a fan of, for folks kind of just getting started out, looking at is about like a 12 month horizon. Is that what you want to look at for your challenge or is it shorter or just does it depend?

Well, you know, it does depend. I go into organizations that have been trying and been practicing and so they know a little bit, They've gone online, they've read the book, they've either went through a one day class or a one day workshop or something. And so they at least know the card and they know the mechanics. And for them, I may say, six months out for others that were just starting, that first three months is going to be really getting over that fear of failure when they're doing PDSAs and they're learning and how does the card work? And getting the mechanics of the kata routine down takes the first two to three months. So I usually will tell them 52 weeks or a year out. Where do you want to be? I've had some other organizations where we come in kind of mid budget cycle, and maybe it's 18 months or 15 months, they want to complete their current year, and then where do they want to be at the end of the next fiscal accounting year?

Got it.

So those are a couple of different questions that I ask or try to assess as far as setting the length of the challenge.

Okay.

And then one of the things I'll do is, it's kind of a funny thing I'll tell people. I say, you know, we're going to use this date as a. Like a potentiometer, you know, adjusting resistance, and we're gonna put the numbers down, and then I'm gonna pull it back six months. And if it feels like you just had the nachos and chili dogs and you're about to get on the roller coaster and it comes right up about, you know, here in the neck, that's. That's where we want it to be. But we don't want any of it coming out on any of the passengers on the ride or anything. So I'll move it out another, you know, a year. And they're like, okay, we feel a little more comfortable with that, but it's. It's still up in our throat.

Okay, good stuff.

All right.

Okay. Sorry. Okay, let's go back. You're on the current condition then, right?

So in the current condition, you're just grasping where you're at. That outcome metric that you. That you're currently measuring success at the. Usually at the end of the month, something you don't directly impact is what the outcome metric is. And I just talk through the relationship between that working pattern. What are the process characteristics that are either making us successful or unsuccessful? Maybe they're keys that are broken in the process. And then what's that daily process metric, that hour by hour process metric, and how is it driving the outcome metric? Because we can't really affect the outcome metric. We can affect the working pattern, we can change the characteristics, and we can start to see how that affects the process metrics day by day. And what obstacles are out there that we need to be measuring. But before we get to obstacles, obviously the third step is to set that first target condition. And that first target condition, I usually start groups out is about two weeks in nature. If it's a little more experienced group or they've been practicing for a little while, we may go four weeks. But most groups that I work with and most teams are Comfortable with about two weeks because they learned that they have first set the target condition too big, usually, is what they find out first. And so then they come back and they narrow their focus, and then they get a little bit of. A little bit of success and a little bit of momentum, and then they'll set it a little bit bigger. And they kind of go back and forth the first month or two with how much of the elephant they're going to bite off, you know, how much of that challenge, which is the elephant are they going to bite off. And then, of course, once we have that target condition and we have that current condition, the gap there is. You asked the question, what obstacles are preventing our operators or our people that own the process from achieving this target condition working pattern.

Now I want to jump in at this point, Brandon. So it's been my experience just in practicing kata, myself and with our team here at Gamma Academy for our own, you know, improvement as a company, it's been my experience that the hardest part of this process is that target condition and really honing that incorrectly. And we've actually had several hiccups along the way to where we, in hindsight, realized and learned. So it was a good thing. I wouldn't call it a failure, but we didn't have it quite right. And so it took a few iterations to kind of adjust that target condition. So I'm wondering if you talk a little bit about how you go about helping folks grasp that. That first target condition. And even if you have an example, and I don't want you to share names or, you know, you know, you know, any secrets or anything like that, but if, or even if you had some general examples where you can share, I think that would be fantastic. Because it's been my experience this target condition is especially for folks, getting started is really difficult.

It is one of the more difficult parts of the improvement kata coaching kata process. And I've watched groups that have struggled. They'll go to the board, they'll look at the target condition that's just exp. And they'll stare at it for a while, and they'll say, well, we don't want to do this. And they'll erase part of the working pattern or they'll erase a few of the metrics they were trying to reach. And sometimes they'll even just step back and erase the date and write a new date down. It's just two more weeks out. Let's just give ourselves two more weeks. And in a lot of the materials and what I coach Too is. Is to stop and grasp your current condition as it is right now. Repeat the process. Repeat the process of going back to step two of the current condition and where are you at now? And once you've done that, I've noticed groups then can start to picture and get in their mind's eye. I tell them, get in the DeLorean with Marty McFly and Doc Brown and let's go two weeks in the future and tell me what it looks like. And that's evolved over the course of my study of KATA and how groups do this. And actually worked with a company a couple years ago by the name of Cloyes Gear that we were helping. And that became one of the first things that we noticed is that there was some difficulty setting that target condition. And I worked with one of their second coaches and advanced group members, and we just said, you know, what are the. What are the things according to the materials that Mike encourages us to do, which when one, make a reflection, reflect on what you've done. So we just got out the PDSAs, the last 10 that we did for the last 10 cycles. And we read through our learnings. What did we learn when we did this? And what did we learn when we did this experiment? And we started to see some patterns. We started to see. Well, we did, you know, four go and see experiments which were really watching the process before we ever tried anything experimental. And then we would read on through and we would ask ourselves. We really never developed a hypothesis of what would work. And so when we started doing that, that was our true reflection. It became an aha moment for. I think you met him out at Katacon 3, Glenn Inman. He gave a talk about setting target conditions. And we created a form and a document where you regress your current condition, you review your PDSAs, you envision, then what is your thinking pattern? Where do you think you're headed? And write out that next working pattern. If we're still trying to strive for that same working pattern, it may not change for two or three or four target conditions. That block diagram working pattern may stay the same, but there are cases where we know this isn't working. We've been trying to get to this point, but the third and fourth step just don't seem to go together. And so we try and envision what we've learned and reflect and build a new working pattern and then just follow the flow of the storyboard from working pattern, block diagram to process characteristics. And then a lot of things we would do was examine our obstacle parking lot and see how we had overcome certain obstacles and how we still had other ones that were out there. A practice we started was reading over it briefly and then turning it face down. That gave us a refresh of maybe things that worked well that we wanted to keep, including in the target condition. And then it sort of wiped the slate clean. And once we step back from the board and we say, where's the gap now? We would write down one or two new obstacles and we actually turned it into a form, a target condition. We call it a target condition planning and record form. And I've done a couple of webinars on that. I've got a couple recordings of that. It's a little tedious to go through, but it's get your thoughts down on an Excel spreadsheet or a piece of paper on what that target condition looks like step by step and then go to the board and dry erase and start to take what you put down on paper on the board. Because I've seen too many groups just stand there and stare at the board. And after 20 or 30 minutes I got to go to this meeting and they're out the door and they'll come back 30 minutes later or an hour later and they'll stare at it for 20 or 30 minutes and write a little more and it's time to go home for the day. And they come back and it takes two to three days sometimes for groups that are struggling to, to reset that target condition.

Yeah, got it. Okay, well, thank you for that. So we're at the point now where we've got that target condition. We understand the current condition. And then you were just beginning to kind of talk about those obstacles that are, that are in our way to achieving that target condition. So I'll let you kind of take it back from there.

Yeah, that's one thing that for the last, I would say year and a half to two years, I've probably studied different groups at Baptist Memorial Healthcare. I mentioned Cloyes gear. Nice pack. They sponsored the last katakan different ways that people ride obstacles and they come right out of a one day class, a Domino's class or a Legos class, and they want to write just two or three words and they know in their mind what those two or three words mean. But the coach doesn't and the learner will turn away from the board and start to try and explain what the obstacle is and they'll talk for two to three minutes and the coach, a novice coach, won't turn them back to the board and Ask them to start writing. So I started out just saying, okay, let's write it in the form of a question. What do we not know? Or what is not working right now? And then we would start to write, we don't know this part of the target condition, or we don't know how to measure this particular characteristic. And from there we also saw another method of stating answer the question, we can't reach the target condition. And then whatever part of it, whatever part of the target condition, because blank.

Yeah.

And then fill in that blank with what you've exactly written on that obstacle, parking lot. And if it doesn't make a coherent sentence, grammatically coherent and structurally correct, it probably needs a little bit more thought put into it. And so as I started working with groups doing that, that evolved into, well, we don't know this information. So we would do a go and see. Well, we come back and we say, okay, now we know this information. Here are the facts, here's the data, and what's the negative outcome on the target condition? How is this keeping us from closing the gap? And we would have them just continue to write out. And I know I frustrated probably some of the first groups I worked with because I'd say, keep writing, keep writing. And they would be two to three sentences long. But before they got to the end of that second or third sentence about writing facts, data and what the negative outcome or why they weren't able to reach the target condition. And then we went a step further. Mike suggested we add a column called how will you measure that? They started to think about different ways and they would find out we don't have a way of measuring this. It was really interesting to see the thought process of people looking at obstacles and riding them in that fashion. They would start to generate how they would measure it and then that would start to generate new thoughts of, hey, let's try this. And it specifically addressed that obstacle. And so we were driving out vagueness. We were finding ways of measuring them. And by the way, by measuring those obstacles, those became process metrics. Most of the time they were things we weren't measuring, that we should have been measuring. There's something about that thought process of going through that that just leads someone to thinking about an exploratory experiment or thinking of a hypothesis that might work. And so that's really what I've been focusing on. And Baptist Management Systems YouTube site's got a 44 minute YouTube that anybody can go out to and go to the Baptist management system on YouTube and look at Improving the way we write obstacles. And we're not. We're not saying there's any one right way to write them, but here's some examples of ways of writing them. And I just noticed that groups that started doing that really started making advancement toward the target condition. They would achieve more, they would reach their challenges. Earlier, I had one year challenges at some of the Baptist locations that we reached in seven months or eight months. I had some at Cloyes Gear and Ice Pack that they were reaching them, you know, within the. Within the year and resetting before the expiration date. And just really, I think that's a. You'll see in the video if you watch that webinar. It's really the heart of the coda. Mike put that question there, I think. I don't know if he agrees with me or not, but it's right in the middle of the page. It's right in the middle. It's the third question, if you don't count the four on the back, the reflective questions. But it's right there in the middle. It's right there in the center. And so I'd say, I say that that's at the heart or the core of the entire kata, the entire improvement kata that's going on.

What obstacles are now keeping you from reaching your target condition?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. All right. So, yeah, I want to go. Let's go, I guess on to the next steps here. But I do want to circle back to that, reflect on the last step. Assuming that we are in the process of. After question two, you know, we would reflect on the last step. We haven't done that yet, but so I guess we're kind of assuming we're doing it for the very first time and we don't have a last step yet. Okay, so we've got some obstacles identified. And then I assume the next question you're going to ask is, which one of those obstacles are you going to go after? Is that right?

Right. Which one are you addressing now? And the learner picks that. We try and encourage coaches to allow the learner the freedom to fail forward, so to speak. And I always say it's okay if the learner has selected an obstacle and then begins the fourth step of writing the PDCA experiment, it's okay if they fail forward because there was an obstacle we didn't see or there's something that was out there that we weren't aware of that derailed the experiment. But it's not okay for us to leave the board as a coach knowing that there could be a potential flaw or there could be a potential obstacle, a potential place where the experiment could derail and the coach not speak up and say that, hey, I've tried something like that before and this is what happened. Or maybe they. They phrase it in the form of have you thought about this? Or tell me more about your understanding of that obstacle and get the learner to think and get the learner and coach on the same level, but getting them to pick that one and then decide what type of experiment they're going to run. And I've went into organizations that they don't. They don't know or realize that there are various types of experiments that Mike gives us in his online handbook for PDCAs.

Got it, got it. All right.

What'S next fourth step would be the PDCA or PDSA. Sometimes some groups call them plan, do, study, act, or Plan, do, check, act. And that's the four questions really, as the we talked about. If you've done a last step, you would reflect. You would go back to the back of the card and reflect on what was the last step, what was your plan there, what did you expect would happen? And we want people to make a prediction of two things. I always coach to make a prediction of what you expect to happen, both in a narrative or sentence form and also numerically. What do you expect the numbers and the process metric to be moving toward? And then the last thing I ask to write in that box of what do you expect? Is what do you expect to learn by doing that experiment? A lot of times I've had coaches and learners change their step, change their experiment when they really start to ask those detailed questions, those aren't on the card. Those are in some of the materials that, that are online that are available, but we have them as watermarks on a lot of our PDSA forms. They're kind of watermarks to kind of prompt the person along. And then, of course, what happened once you go and do the experiment? What are the facts and data? Put that in that box. And then that fourth question there of the PDCA is, what did you learn? And an interesting thing I'll mention there, Ron, is that I've noticed in the last year or so of coaching is at first people want to write what they were made aware of that they didn't know before, and that's okay, that's okay to get started. But really, I think a better interpretation of what did you learn is basically reflecting on, okay, these are the facts and data of the results of the experiment. And now that I'm aware of that, what am I going to do with it? What's my thinking pattern now? Where am I going to go next if it failed, if it blew up on me, what would I do differently if I tried this again and put those type of statements in that box? And that's really the deep learning. When you get into deep practice with individuals practicing the improvement kata is reflecting on what they're learning is not just what they were made aware of, not just the facts and data that I've seen groups write the facts in data. We decreased scrap by half a percent or scrap went the other way by half a percent. What did you learn? I learned that by doing this experiment, we increased the scrap a half a percent or decreased it a half a percent, restate it, and that's what you were made aware of. That's part of the third box. I want you to tell me what you're thinking now. Now that you have this information, reflect on it and where are you going with it? Have you found a new obstacle? The best learners I've coached are ones that are obstacle oriented. They are out there trying to find the true obstacle, keeping them from the target condition. And their understanding is that they're not trying to PDCA to achieve a solution, they're trying to PDCA against an obstacle or to reveal an obstacle that's keeping them from the target condition. And so I kind of call them obstacle hunters. Are some of the best learners that are out there?

Yeah, Got it, Got it. Okay, so we've, we've experimented or. Well, we've identified our next step or experience or experiment and we've kind of answered the question, what do we expect? And then what's the next thing that you want to, to understand, Brandon?

So I tell coaches and learners, you know, that what is your next step? It's okay to, for that coach to have information and bring that forward as to how that step may not be complete or it may not be have enough information or enough planning and communication. Maybe it's going to be run on a second shift and you need to run it for the full 24 hours. And the learner hasn't outlined their communication plan from shift to shift. That's one of the areas I see of they come back the next day and the step didn't get completed correct completely or correctly. And it's because we didn't set a good communication plan in place. Well, a good coach should probably see that and bring that up as a clarifying question and maybe even ask do you see any way that this experiment, this step you're about to take, could not go off without a hitch? And so it's okay again for an experiment to not work or to fail as long as we learn something because we're learning about an obstacle we didn't know about. But it's not okay to leave the board with a plan that's not completely rock solid. At least we have the mindset that we believe in our heart of hearts that it's going to work. And then the follow up question to that is, what do you expect? And again, I want learners to put what in a narrative form what they expect to happen as far as in words. I want them to put some type of numerical number on how it's going to affect the metrics and then I want them to put what they learn, what they expect to learn from doing that experiment.

Yeah, well, you know what you just said, it's something that I've learned as I've been on this journey with, with Kata. Matter of fact, it was, I've had several emails back and forth with, with Mike Rather himself and, and realizing that this whole process that we're following isn't about solving problems, it's about learning. And that's the paradigm shift that most of us lean thinkers have to.

Have.

To grasp is it's not about solving problems, it's about learning. And when you learn and learn and continue to learn, the problem solving is going to happen. But you don't go into it trying to solve the problem, you go into it trying to learn. And I think that's just a, it's a big paradigm shift. Many of us who have grown up on Kaizen events and you know what? Not we've got to, we've got to make it, but once we do make that, and you have that mind of the obstacle as you talked about earlier, the world to lean is really turned upside down. It's been my experience.

Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's what the first two quotes I was talking about with Einstein. You know, we can't solve problems with the same thinking we used to create them. And if he had an hour to solve a problem, he'd spend 55 minutes thinking about it. Well, he's explaining right there that he's not solution driven. He's trying to understand the obstacles, he's trying to understand the variables, he's trying to understand what's going on with the process. And then he says, I'll spend five minutes thinking about the solution. So a lot of learners are solution driven. They're not obstacle oriented driven. In one of your podcasts you had a book by Ryan Holiday. I listened to the Obstacle Is the Way. That was a good, that was a good podcast. That's a book I want to, I want to pick up did a Reader's Digest version of it or a Cliff Notes version of it Summary and it sounds very interesting.

Yeah, no, it's a, it's a beautiful way. It's what book there is about kind of stoicism and handling your emotions and controlling what you can control. But there's lots to learn from a lean perspective and from a, from a, from a learning perspective like we trying to do here with, with Kata because Kata is kind of a, you know, just pull the emotions out and just, just get after it, you know, from a, from an obstacle perspective.

So.

Alright, well good. So we've talked about the next step or experiment then I guess we want to kind of ask that question. When can we go and see what we've learned from taking that, that last step? Is that kind of where you want to go next, Brandon?

Yeah, that last question and I believe the most current card has how quickly can we go and see?

How quickly can we go and see?

Yep. There was some debate amongst some the Codda community on whether we needed to change that or not. And some on the one side you had the camp that said well we want to try and push rapid PDCA experiments. We don't want three, four, five day experiments. So how quickly. And the coach is trying to urge them to quickly. Can we go and see right now? Can we go observe the process now? Or could we go run 30 pieces of that or could we go watch and follow the nurse through that process and see how the transporter discharges that patient from the hospital. And then there was another camp that said, well now you know, some of these are plan do study acts and we really need to run it across a couple of days before we have all the facts and data. And so I think we ended up changing the card or Mike changed the card to how quickly can we go and see? And I'm one of those that I lean toward the how quickly version of the question because I do want the learner to be giving me a date and time. And you're really saying this is the date and time we're going to come back to the board. I'll have my step finished, I'll have updated my obstacle parking lot. I'll have all the current condition information up to date and I Have a next step and an expectation. Now I'm ready for the next coaching cycle. That's really the most important part of that last question is when you execute the pdsa, when, when you have all those things I just said done and completed and we can come back to the board and move forward. So I'm a person who tries to encourage the quickly, the rapid PDSA because the more PDSAs we do, the more learnings we have, the more rapid we learn about the process. But there have been a few occasions where I've said, well, this one looks like it's a two or three day and I'll actually ask them to say, okay, if you can't get that done in 24 to if it's going to move into 48 hours or more, let's put that to the side of the board and we'll actually tape it on the wall and we'll come back to the obstacle parking lot and say, okay, let's get that long term PDSA going and it may take two to three days. And now let's come back to the obstacle parking lot and let's pick something maybe it's a little small that we don't know enough about or maybe we could change a little bit about the working pattern that might overcome that one obstacle and can we get that done in 24 hours? And you know, I don't want groups doing 5, 6 PDSAs or PDCAs all at the same time because then it becomes unmanageable and it's more of a shotgun approach. But I usually will allow some groups one long term and then come back and let's get something that we can come back to the board and talk about tomorrow. As far as your experiment, yeah, you.

Know, we've done that here at Gemba Academy. We've got some teams where it might be we need to make a tweak on our website or something that's going to be going to take our IT guys, you know, some time, you know, because it's not just you can't just change the website, right. I mean there's a lot of things that go into that. So yeah, we might have that longer term and then we. Look, what's one thing that you can do now, you yourself while you're waiting on on Tony to make that change on a website.

Right.

And so yeah, exactly. Because I think it's also easy for folks to be like, well, yeah, here's experiment. I need you, Brandon, to go do this, this and that. Holler at me when you're done, Brandon, you know, like, okay, well, that's fine. That Brandon can do some stuff, but what about you? What. What can you control in the way that you work?

Right.

Yeah.

And I see groups that. Ron, I'll just add to what you're saying there. I'll see groups that do that and they get caught or stuck in this cycle of monitor and track, monitor and track, monitor and track, and they'll. And they'll literally have that written on their PDCA or PDSA sheet over and over for three or four days. And I try and draw their attention to them and say, what type of experiment was that? And they'll look at it and they'll say, well, it started out as a go and see, and the second one's still a go and see. And we're still going and seeing, and we're still monitoring, tracking. We need to move off of that and we need to move more toward exploring something that's new or some new idea to overcome the obstacle.

The last thing I want to say on this, on this fifth question, Brandon, it's always struck me, especially on the new version of the card, again, how quickly can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step? The word that always pops out to me is we.

Exactly.

And that it's the learner and the coach both learning because neither of them know for sure. I have some ideas, some hunches, but we don't know for sure. So we're both learning. And that's a big. That's another paradigm shift that it's not the coach that's all knowing, you know, because he or she is not all knowing. They're just there to learn along with the learner, so.

Exactly. And we struggle sometimes with those alpha types or a types that they want to. They want to write the experiment for them almost and say, now when can you have it done? I've actually, I've actually been second coaching or reserving and. And had a coach one time that said that they had the card in their hand, but they said, okay, when will you have that done? And I went, wait a minute, what's the question? And they read it. How quickly can we go and see what we will learn from taking that step? I said, do you know what the key word in that is? And they'll say, learning. I said, yes, it's learning, but it's we. It's you and the learner. You're not telling them what to do. You're. You're coaching them and you're guiding them. Yep.

All right, so I want to. I want to. You've mentioned this second coach several times. I want to. I want to explore that in a second. But let's just have a quick review for a folks that are. That are following along, and we'll just review these five questions. I'm just going to read them from my card I got in my hand here. So, number one, what is the target condition? Number two, what is the actual condition Now? Now, assuming that we are in a cycle of experimentation, then we would flip the card over and we would ask the question, what did you plan as your last step? What did you expect? What actually happened? What did you learn? And we're going to flip back over now to the first side of the card. Question three, what obstacles are now keeping you from reaching a target condition? In which one obstacle are you addressing now? Step four. Number four, what is your next experiment or next step or experiment? What is. What do you expect? And then number five, how quickly can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step? So, okay, so that's the improvement. The improvement kata. Let's talk a little bit about the role of the coach now. I think it's kind of obvious. The first coach, if you will, is the person who's asking these questions of the learner. But what about this second coach? Who is he or she and what is their role?

So normally the second coach is someone experienced in kata. They've been a learner before, and we hope they've been a learner for at least, probably at least six months. And they've done their own experiments, they've overcome obstacles, they've reached target conditions, they fell short on target conditions. They've moved into the coach's position. They've been on the other side of the card asking the cards questions and guiding the learner, teaching how to reset target conditions. They teach how to write obstacles. They're teaching effective PDSAs. And so we want them to move up that Dreyfus scale. As we start to evaluate their coaching skills, from novice to an advanced beginner to a competent coach. And once we're into a deployment model where we've gone through that first three to six months and people are really grasping the concept, making some momentum, we then want to move away. I say we myself, as an external coach, I want to step back and master coach those second coaches and get them to look at the conversation that's going on and make sure that we are staying true to the card number one and two, that we are holding to those fundamental Principles by asking clarifying questions. You know, those five questions or the. And the four on the back are just the foundation of the starter kata, I think Mike called it in the last katakan. There's a lot of clarifying questions and it's that point where you, you can watch the first coach and the second coach. It's almost like a teeter totter on the, on the playground. You know, the learners at one level of thinking, the coaches at another level. And then at some point in the convers, conversation, the question, the dialogues there they get equal, there's equilibrium, and the second coach is there to watch that also. Not only that we're following the pattern, but that there's an understanding between them. And then we actually have a second coach routine based off of one of Mike's slides. We put a card together and we put a notebook together, a second coaching notebook. And it's soon to be out on the Baptist Mansion System website. So we've been practicing the second coach, first coach routine for about a year and a half now. I practiced it with Baptist and we're about to put a YouTube out on that, practice it with other manufacturers. And it's really an important part of the coaching process. And as the coach is moving from that novice level to advanced beginner to competent level in their skill level. So what we ask usually is we take the card and the questions and the notebook. And at first I like to have the learner present for that first two weeks or so, maybe three weeks. We want the learner to understand that we're not that first, you didn't do anything wrong. This isn't directed toward you. It doesn't mean anything negative. There's just some things that the second coach has observed that aren't in the pattern of the improvement kata coaching, kata way of thinking. And it's not that the coach did anything wrong, the coach is in a learning mode. But after we've had a couple of weeks where we've had that second coach to first coach dialogue, asking them, you know, what were you wanting to pay attention to going into this coaching cycle? On this next PDSA experiment, do you think that the learner's at that knowledge threshold and if so, tell me what's indicating that and then other questions, you know, the second coach will give their observations and then just ask them a few clarifying questions about what do you want to pay attention to next and what do you expect the learner to benefit from that as far as skill level? So it's just a second coaching routine. And once the learner is comfortable that you know, this is for the first coach, this isn't as much for me. We explain, okay, we want to either have you go on about your day, go on about your experiment, go do the pdca, or I've even sometimes at organizations asked the learner to can you step out into a side office for about 10 minutes? Again, you didn't do anything wrong. But if you hear what the second coach, first coach are saying, you'll know the answers to what the second coach is trying to get the first coach to see. And so he would actually be, or she would actually be coaching you, the learner. And that's not really the benefit that we're wanting to get here. So I've asked them to step out sometimes and they'll have that dialogue. That second coaching caught a cycle. And there's one or two things usually that the second coach has picked up on. Maybe it's the vagueness of the obstacle, maybe it's the type of pdsa. I've had second coaches that say, let's look back at, review the last four or five PDCAs. Can you see their thinking pattern? Can you, can you see them? Are they staying in a go and see mode? Are they staying in an observation mode? Or are they truly changing the process? And then ask a question maybe of how could we turn this, go and see where they're going to go and observe the process. How could we change it into an experiment where we're actually changing something and we're going to see and learn from that changed process or that new process? And so the learners not heard this, the learners left the room. Sometimes when we do this thinking that they're going to continue with a go and see experiment, then we bring them back in and I tell the second coach before they come in, be absolutely quiet and just take notes in your notebook. Don't interrupt. Let the first coach ask the questions from what they heard from you in their own words. See if they can lead that learner down that line of thinking, maybe coming out of the go and see mode into exploratory or maybe clarifying an obstacle a little bit more. Or it could be even the structure of the storyboard, if it's a novice learner needs a little bit of improvement to follow the pattern and then let that first coach have their chance at it. And usually we'll finish up with the learner going on and doing the experiment and having a little follow up dialogue with how that went.

Fantastic. All right, well, golly, we've been going coming up on an hour here. But one question I definitely want to explore with you, Brandon. We kind of poked at Kaizen events a little bit earlier in the show and we've all done them and I think it's been an important part of all of our journey. So I think it's important. I don't want to just throw out and say Kaizen events are horrible, stop doing them. But what I want to hear from you is what do you think? Is there a relationship between that Kaizen event and kata and if so, how can they work in harmony?

Well, I'm glad you asked that question Ron, because we're experimenting at Baptist Memorial Healthcare with what we're calling a Get Better jumpstart. It's something I mentioned to Skip probably in 2014. I wasn't even working and helping Baptists at that time. I was at a TWI conference and the question came from the audience just like that. I made this statement about the Kaizen four day and a pizza party thing and they said so what should we do? Should we just throw that out? And I said well I think what I'm trying to explain and what Mike was trying to explain is Kaizen Blitz or Kaizen Event is a tool. It's in the lean tool bag and there's a place for it. You may go into an area that we really need to shut down for three days and completely relay this out or go through 5s or whatever, all the tools that we want to. So we're doing a get better jump start. We call it kind of a Kaizen Kata style. I kind of call it on our continuous coaching commitment website, the Kaizen Kata Skill Camp. And what we want to do is we do some pre work, we grasp the current condition and we start day one with the current condition is already laid out. It's our and we already have a board and it's a cross functional team just like a traditional Kaizen event. They go out and we'll do rapid PDSAs and we'll do experiments, do go and seize and we'll come back and we will try by the end of that first day or start of the second day to have a target condition for two weeks out. And then we're going to do as many rapid PDSAs and PDCAs as we can against the obstacles that we're seeing. And the difference is at the end of the three days or four days or however long we're spending doing it, we want to end with an obstacle parking lot and a fully functioning kata storyboard. With a learner and a coach and a second coach that are going to carry this on as the ongoing team. And so we're not going to end with an action item list and we're not going to end with just a single report out to management. And everybody feels warm and fuzzy. We've. We've launched or catapulted, I like to say we've catapulted this storyboard two months farther than we would if we would have just started this from ground zero. And so we're experimenting with that. The first few have been pretty successful. And that's. That. That was an idea back In, I think 2014, 15, that I actually at the answer the person in the audience that asked that question. I'd like to see them work together in that manner.

Yeah, you know, we have a similar thing here. Gamba Academy folks will call up and say, you know, what video do I watch first? Like, oh, golly, you know, it's impossible to say, you know, what video you should watch first. And kind of what we've gravitated to over this last few years is that, you know what, I know this sounds odd, but. But it's not about the videos, right? And it's not about the Kaizen event, if you will. It's about that obstacle and it's about what do you need to overcome that obstacle. And that's where some of these lean tools may come in, or in our case, some of these videos might come in, but they only come in until you identified, you know, that obstacle and you're striving towards that target condition. That's when these tools, right. And they're important, you need them, you.

Know, I mean, absolutely.

You can't just run around talking about target conditions and you don't to have any idea of some methodologies of how to go about doing it. Right. I mean, not everything's a. Just do it right. Exactly. Yeah.

So that.

That's been a big. Another eye opener for me as well as I've learned here. So good stuff.

I had a. I had just to add on to that, if you don't mind. I had a client come back to me after practicing kata for about a year and they said, you know, I've spent five years learning the tools and had various consultants in here teaching us the tools. I wish we would have started with kata and they would have brought the tools along as we needed. Because he said, I kind of think we started backwards. If we understood the coaching and we understood striving for a target condition and Reaching a challenge, we understood that purpose rather than just random waste elimination. He said, I think we would have applied the tools better. And so I thought that was a good quote. Yeah.

I almost wondered, next time we see Mike, we could ask him the question, if you could go back and do it over again, would you write Toyota Kata before learning to see? You know, that'll be an interesting question for him to reflect on.

Or. Or did he learn Toyota Kata once he exactly learned to see?

Yeah. See, I think it's real easy for us to always beat ourselves up and say, oh, we should have done this, we should have done that. But, golly, it's part of our journey, and we are where we are because of our past, you know, and because of the things that we've learned in the past. So that's what's kind of exciting about this whole movement, is that we're always pushing ourselves, we're always trying to get better, and that's, in the end, what it's all about, so.

Yep, exactly.

Beautiful. All right, well, hey, Brandon, thanks for taking time. Golly, I love talking to you. I learned so much every time we. We sit down together. What, What? Wrap the show up with maybe you sharing just maybe some final words of wisdom, Brandon, for the folks listening, and then be sure to tell folks how they can connect with you.

Well, you usually ask what book we've recently read or what we are reading, so I'll just let you know. The one that I completed most recently, I found it in a drawer where I was going through organizing.

It's called 5S, right?

Yeah, 5S organization. And it was in with some Father's Day cards, but it made an impact on me. It's called the Name of the Game by Steve Shaw, the Forward by Dennis Rainey. And Steve Shaw is a former Arkansas Razorback basketball player under Eddie Sutton. And it's about parenting. It's about the time you spend with your kids. And one of the things at the beginning of the book that really just grabs you if you're out there in the coaching world or if you're an operations person and you're traveling all the time and. And you don't have a lot of time at home with the family. He said he caught a late night talk show host one time, and William Bennett was on there, and he's been Secretary of Education and the drug czar. He said. The talk show host said, what should I address you by Your highest title, Mr. Secretary of Education, Mr. Drug Czar? And he said, well, if you want to introduce me by the highest title I've ever held. Then you're going to have to call me dad. Mm. And I just latched onto that. Read. Read the rest of that book and. And really started to reevaluate my time and. And not only the quantity, but the quality of time that's been with the family to spend with my. My children and. And just try to control my own schedule a little bit better, hopefully, than I have maybe in the past. So that's one that.

What was it called again?

The Name of the Game by Steve Shaw. It's a very short, short book, Easy read, a lot of pictures.

Okay.

So it's good for me. But then one more that's related to Toradocata Mike recommends is called the Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. And I thought that was fascinating about the brain studies that have been done in that book and the. The hotbeds of talent and how those talents grew up out of certain areas. And he's explored all. All over the globe, various talent hotbeds. And they all have the same thing in common as far as coaching and learning and overcoming obstacles. And it's the process that develops the talent. You know, you can have innate abilities, you can have certain talents, but if you don't have that growth mindset and you're not able to take feedback and take it in the right way, don't take it as criticism, then you can be successful.

Yeah. All right. Well, we actually just had a little bit of an audio glitch. We're doing our own PDCA here as we record the Skype interview.

So, Brandon, our own obstacles.

Yes. So we can reflect and see what we can learn from this experience. But another book that I wanted to plug, Brandon, I know that either you've read it or I know you're almost. You're reading it, is Mike's newest book, Toyota Kata Culture, the Orange book, as I call it in. Fantastic. It's more. In the. I guess you describe it as more of the workbook style, kind of learning to see style, kind of workbook, but it's a really great addition to the kata movement there, so. So I think folks should definitely pick that up.

Yeah, that's definitely a read.

I'm in the middle of that.

And he talks about really up and down vertically in the organization, horizontally and how to deploy. And he and Gerd did an excellent job on that from what I've read so far. And your ideas in the style of the value stream mapping, Learning to see style of workbook or handbook, and definitely A recommended read for those that are interested in taking that next step and taking kata even further.

Yes.

Organization.

Yes. Yes. Fantastic. All right. Well, Brandon, how can people connect with you? LinkedIn, Twitter, everything. Snapchat. You Snapchat or. I don't know.

Yep, yep.

They can connect with me on. They see. Most people see me on LinkedIn and see Brandon Brown, my first initial see. You can search for me on LinkedIn. You can go to our website. Continuous coaching commitment all strung together. Continuouscoachingcommitment.com Our phone number is listed there. You can look at our Meet the team page and meet any of our coaches and read about bio and some of the things that we're doing.

Yeah, yeah, I know Skip's listening to this and I, we. I still have a date to make with y' all out there at Baptist. We've got to come out there and, and visit with you and have you folks. I know you guys got a lot of videos out on YouTube, but I want to see it with my own eyes as well because you guys are doing some great work out there.

We'd love to have you, Ron.

It'd be a great opportunity for us to share and learn and grow together.

Yes, sir. All right, well, thanks again, Brandon. Keep up the great work, my friend. And I look forward to chatting with you again soon.

Thanks for the opportunity, Ron.

All right, bye.

Bye.

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