GA 244 | How to Teach Kata in the Classroom with Mike Rother

Early in my career, there were a few books that shaped me as a lean thinker. Books like Machine that Change the World and the Toyota Way definitely played an important part of my lean formation. But at least for me, there's one book that stands above them all. And that book is Learning to See, which was written by Mike Rother. Now, as many of you know, Learning to See is all about value stream mapping. And as a young lean thinker, learning how to map value streams was extremely helpful. Later in my career, Mike wrote Toyota Kata, which I'd have to say has also shaped my lean thinking in an incredible way. So, to be sure, I owe a lot to Mike Rother and his work. This is why it's been one of my great honors to get to know Mike over the years. And a few weeks ago at the AME Conference, Mike approached me with a fun idea. He wanted to interview me about the kata and the classroom workshop I conducted for a group of young people. Now, I obviously agreed. So later that day, Mike and I stood at our AME podcast booth and recorded what you're about to hear. Now, we also captured the interview with our 360 degree camera as an experiment to see what we could learn. So come to the show Notes page where you'll be able to check that video out. Now, show notes for this episode will be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 244. Again, Gemba podcast. And look for episode 244. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

Hi, this is Mike Rother. We're at the big 2018AME Conference annual conference in San Diego, and I'm here with Ron Pereira, and I want to ask him a few questions about kata in the classroom. Actually, we may just have a little conversation about Kata in the classroom. Ron, good to see you once again.

You too, Mike. Thank you. This is weird, you know, being interviewed, but that's cool.

Yeah, Yeah, I thought we should turn the tables a little bit, I think. Ron, we've listened to so many interviews by you via Gemba Academy that you've taught all of us, and now we all want to give it a try. So that's what sparked the idea of.

The correction you've taught all of us. And we were just trying to, like, relay your message a little bit, but.

Yeah, but you do the interviews. You're the young man. Yeah. So we have definitely learned from you. So. So Kata in the classroom is an exercise we designed, I don't know, about four years ago. Takes about an hour. And we designed it through K through 12 educators. We saw that we were doing a lot of Toyota Kata work with adults, you know, changing habits in adults. It is possible, supposedly. But at some point you realize, wow, what if we do this with young people? What if we show this to teachers? So we did come with this little exercise that's designed to fit into one class, period. Being used by teachers around the world, mostly in the United States, Italy, Germany and Sweden. We did get at one point a request from a company. They said, hey, have you got something that we could use to introduce our people to the improvement kata? Kind of the four step improvement kata pattern. But my people don't like to sit and listen to PowerPoint. You got anything interactive? And said, well, we've got this kata in the classroom exercise. But you know, it's designed for K through 12. The puzzle we use in the exercise says ages 3 and up. We weren't sure it would be something for adults. Well, fast forward, adults love it. You can't get them to stop playing it. Definitely. Yeah. So it's no longer just a K through 12 thing. It's used by hundreds of companies around the world. Just as an introduction to the quick and easy. Anyone can run it. Introduction to the four steps of the Imprumecata. What intrigued me a little bit is that you've kind of been following what we've been doing with kata in the classroom and you've actually facilitated one yourself. Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, yeah. So I guess it was maybe about a month ago now. I know time flies. It was with actually a group of young people. They were ages 7, I think was the youngest and to 13. So it was a range of kids. They were actually most of these kids are homeschooled. So we met up at a, at the local library and we had a nice room there. And so I just, I broke them up into. There was two teams of, of five. There was ten kids, right? Oh, no, sorry. There was 15 kids. So we had three tables.

Oh, that's perfect.

Yeah, three tables of five.

It works best with three or more teams.

Yep. So I, you know, I had never done it. I had watched as many videos as I could from your website and downloaded the. All the materials, downloaded the PowerPoint I purchased, I think, in fact, I purchased 25 puzzles. I just kind of got ahead of it a little bit. Only needed three for that day. But I have enough now to. To run a much larger class, which I plan to do in December, by the way.

Change the world.

Yeah. With 25 puzzles. I mean, goodness. So anyhow, I followed. I did. I opened a PowerPoint. I thought, well, let's see what I need to change up here. You know, I'll probably need to find some. I didn't change anything.

So you hadn't actually seen it run, is that right?

No, no, I did.

You saw it once?

Yeah, once in Canada. You did it okay in Winnipeg, but that was enough.

And you went. I think actually anyone could go to the website, get the materials.

Yeah.

Because the PowerPoint tells you exactly what to say.

Yeah. I put it into that presenter mode, like the instructions say. So, you know, it was up on the wall for the kids to see. And then I sided my notes down there and literally what to say. I don't know if I read them exactly as it said, but I followed it pretty closely and I just did it exactly as the. As the instructions say.

So how did it go? How did the young people you went with?

That was fantastic. Yeah, fantastic. I mean, the now it was interesting. You know, I've watched and I watched you do one earlier here Ame with, you know, hundred some people or whatever.

Yeah, we're doing four sessions.

I know, it's crazy. So. And I would say what was interesting with the kids versus the adults, for the kids, at least with this group of kids, they were very competitive with one another.

Right.

You know, in fact, you know, the boys were at the table and the girls were at a table and there was a. Well, they just. They split themselves up. You know, I wasn't going to tell them where to sit. And then there was another table, had an older boy and then some younger boys and then. And so. So those were the three teams. And so, yeah, the boys wanted to beat the girls and didn't actually work out that way. That's great, girls.

You know, that's funny.

Yeah. So, but yeah, they. We went through.

We had.

I think I had two hours. I budgeted two hours just because we had it at the time.

Yeah, that's quite a bit of time.

Yeah, it was quite a bit of time. And so we were. Oh, definitely. In fact, we didn't take the whole two hours. I think we probably took an hour and a half. And I was going at a very. Not slow, but, you know, relaxed about.

How long it takes. Me too. Hour, 15, hour and a half. Yeah, Teachers are amazing. They can do it in 50 minutes, 60 minutes.

Yeah.

But they have classroom control that I can only dream of.

Yeah, well, yeah, I was telling the boys to be quiet. More than I was, you know. You know, teaching and improvement.

So one of the things that's a little bit difficult is that the exercise is building a puzzle. And you experiment with building a puzzle. But of course, what we're really trying to teach is a scientific thinking pattern. Right. And if you're not careful, it's all about the puzzle. Exactly. The students would go home and go, we worked on this puzzle today. So any experience with that? Were you able to convey, like we have in the exercise, a poster of the improvement, how the pattern goes on the wall, which we have a reflection card. They use a form. Right. Which has them plan and then review their last experiment, plan their experiments and review their last one. All those things are designed to kind of keep that scientific thinking pattern in front of them a little bit. How did that go, even though you've only done it once?

Well, towards the end of the presentation, the formal presentation, there, There was a slide that asked them, you know, can you see of other ways in which this could be used? And, you know, the kids, the older kids in particular, you know, were. Some of them are. There's some really sharp kids in that room. And there was a young lady was talking about how she thought she could use it to, you know, prepare for, you know, eventually taking the act. You know, she could see how she could.

Yeah.

How she could take it.

So she made the leap to the pattern. You were practicing and applying other things immediately.

Now, she was the. One of the older girls in the room, you know, another one was talking about she was a cheerleader and she's working on her flexibility. And she says, he wants to be able to do the splits. And she says, that's my challenge. And so she was going to practice breaking that down into target conditions and obstacles.

Those are great examples. And we often tell the teachers to run the exercise again, but not using the puzzle, using something else. Lego or I think you've got an idea with playing cards. And the more times you go through the pattern with different content, it's often called interleaving in the education world. More and more students will start to see, aha. We're using the same pattern, this scientific thinking pattern, but we're applying it to different things. Yeah. Okay. I should say, by the way, we've mentioned the website a couple times, everything you need to run the kata in a classroom Exercise is at Kata to grow. Kata 2 Grow all one word. Katadagrow.com don't look too closely. It's a homebrew website, but it is all there it actually looks nice.

I like it.

Does it looks okay. Easy to use? Well, it's a wix website, works great.

Easy to navigate.

Yeah. So the stuff is there. We update it every now and then. But it's free for anyone to use. Yeah. Okay. So you ran the exercise. Do you have any thoughts about the exercise itself and its usefulness or do you like it and if so, what do you like about it?

No, I really do. I mean I do like it and I'm excited to run it again. I think I can do a better job facilitating it, you know.

Sure. The next thing.

So I, I think it's only as, you know, it's only probably as good as the, you know, the facilitator. If you're botching it up then they're going to struggle to learn. So I think I can do better myself. I think the, I think the, the mechanics of the, of the, the routine, if you will, of the, of the exercise is perfect. You know, obviously we remove the, the, the obstacles part from the card. You know, the, the normal Toyota Kata 5 question card.

That's right. Yeah.

And so, and I think that's wise. I don't think you would, I think it would be clunky if you tried to have them think about it didn't.

Work in the classroom.

Yeah.

So what Ron's talking about right now is that if you look at the Toyota Kata website, we have a five question card. It's the coaching kata card that's used all over the world. Yeah, yeah. I mean thousands and thousands of times probably every day as a practice routine just for learning a pattern. And that always has you experimenting against obstacles. But to do an exercise in a one hour class period, it slows it down too much. So we drop the obstacles for that. People should know that. But you know, I guess what I'm getting at, Ron, is you seem interested and excited about the exercise. So why, what is it about the exercise or scientific thinking? Is it affecting you personally?

Oh no, it's changed. Scientific, just not the exercise itself. Scientific thinking, yes. You know, just being fully transparent with you. I remember I read the book when it first came out and I thought, oh yeah, it's nice, that's interesting. But for whatever reason I didn't fully jump on board with it, with scientific thinking. I was too busy with other things. I don't know, just my phase in life, whatever it was. Fast forward. Till a few years ago, we had a lot of customers again by academy saying where's your Toyota Kata stuff? Where's your Toyota Kata stuff. So voice of the customer. Right. Running a business is very important. Right. So I'm like, listen, I'm not gonna go create a course or whatever it is if we aren't practicing it ourselves. You know, we try to practice what we're teaching. And so we committed at Gemba Academy to begin practicing it. My sales team, these folks, we're all practicing it. And I'll say, it has truly changed the way that I approach continuous improvement. And I'm not just saying that because you wrote the book.

Well, I had the same experience. Changes how you look at problems. It changes how you look at goals. You get more relaxed. You're like, boy, I don't know how I'm going to achieve that. But I've done this before. I know how to navigate.

Yeah. There's no more stress anymore because it's all about that next target condition and the obstacles on our way towards that target condition. Right. Instead of stressing about the challenge, now we're worried and focused on that. And it's all about learning. I like to say, now I'm telling people, stop trying to solve so many problems. Just learn faster. And the faster you learn the problems, they're going to go away.

And so there's a certain delight in, Gosh, I don't know how we're going to get there. And this discovery process along the way, I think when I was younger, having things be uncertain or unknown was more difficult for me. It was like, no, no, I want to know. I want to make the plan. I want someone to tell me how we're going to do this. And it made me uncomfortable if we didn't have that. Now it's gotten to be sort of the opposite, where I kind of look forward to this discovery process, and I look forward to being surprised. And it's really kind of a neat way to enjoy life, considering that so much of the world is just unpredictable. Yeah. Yeah. So you can actually learn to enjoy that. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and then, you know, just as, you know, I facilitated a lot of training classes over the years and whatever it might be. And what I appreciate about cut in a classroom is it's. It is compact. Yeah, right, Absolutely. It's in a box.

It literally can be in a box in your briefcase. Yeah. And it takes an hour.

And the puzzles are easy to get a few bucks, so it's affordable.

Right, right.

And definitely encourage people to do the puzzles first. I would encourage you to don't deviate at all from what's on the plan.

For the first One or two times.

One or two times, right. Yeah. You know, I have ideas down the road to where might. I think I might experiment my next time doing it with the folks, I might provide some more. And this is in the instructions. And I didn't follow these instructions. You know, some masking tape or maybe some cardboard, some scissors, some things like that. I think that might help with the experimentation side. You know, the kids, they had nothing, you know, they had the puzzle in their brains and was good and they still experimented standing up, sitting down. You work on the bottom, I'll work on the top, you know, so that was beautiful what they were doing. But I think if I could have had them, you know, maybe just a few more things to experiment with, perhaps the experiments would have been even richer and the learning would have been even greater.

So I think it's like any kata, you know, you practice it once or twice or at the beginning kind of exactly the way it's designed. And once you've internalized that, you can build on that any way you like. Yep, yep, that's really true. We should shout out at this point to Ravensburger Games, which is the company that makes the puzzle. Funny story, we contacted them because could not find a simple 15 piece puzzle. If you use too many piece puzzles, it takes too long.

Yeah, yeah.

So we have this simple 15 piece puzzle, but it wasn't available nationwide. So we called them up and we said, hey, would you be willing to make this puzzle available on Amazon? And they told us to go away, that kind of thing. So we sent them pictures of K through 12 students. We kind of played it up a little bit and said, here are some students in class using your puzzle to practice scientific thinking. We got an email from them the next day. They said, we're going to make it available on our website and they offer a 40% discount on the puzzle to any educator. And the code for the discount is@the cottagerow.com website. So shout out to Ravensburger for the support.

And they're great puzzles. They're very high quality.

Yeah, they last a long time. Well, they're German. You know, stuff lasts. It's the BMW of three and up puzzles. And I should add, nobody's making any money. Maybe Ravensburger is, we don't know. But none of that passes through us. So everything you get on the website is free and the puzzle is from Ravensburger. So I guess in closing I just have a suggestion or a question about a suggestion. You kind of already made a suggestion in saying just do the exercise once or twice as designed and then evolve it however you like. Whether you want to use the puzzle some more. Use playing cards. We do have the instructions for using playing cards once you've done it a couple times.

Melissa Perry.

Melissa Perry, our colleague. Yeah. Who has a new book out, by the way. So what's the book?

I've not read it, but we'll put.

It in something trap. Okay. Yeah, we'll find it. Melissa wrote a book. You got to read it anyway. We can also get those instructions online or something, so people can use them if they want. But I guess my last question is more. Do you have any recommendations for others who want to try kata in the classroom as an exercise?

Well, first of all, I would say do your research and try it. You know, don't be afraid to learn.

Just do it. Right.

Just, I mean, literally do it and see what you learn. Yeah, right. Right down. What you do a kata. Kata. You're a kata in the classroom. Right. You know, what do you think is going to happen? What actually happened? What did you learn?

Right. So one thing, you can actually get a group of people together. It works best with three or more teams. The smallest team size you should probably use is three people. So that's nine.

Yeah.

A good team size is five, and that's 15. So get three. Get nine, 15. Something like people to go to the lunchroom. We've run it in our dining room at home with teachers. Just find 9, 10, 15 people and just run it.

Yeah.

And the instructions, or I should say, what you should say is in the presenter mode. I think you mentioned that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you can literally just read it. There's not a whole lot of prep required.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you did it yesterday. I saw you. You wrote it.

You were.

I mean, you didn't read it.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I always read. But you always read it off. Well, I want to show that it's pretty easy to do. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Well, great.

Ron, you know, I really appreciate your interest because it's a way we learn. When you try something like this, like we're recommending that other people do, and then you give feedback and we learn from that. Yeah. And that's how the whole Toyota Kata thing has gone. It's a new subject. It's only nine years old. We like to say it's not only a young subject, it's an open system. Once you practice the starter kata, you can take it anywhere you want to. And so what happens is there are hundreds of people around the world practicing and. And doing things like what we were just talking about, and we learn from them.

Well, I think we should give a shout out to our friends at Lean Frontiers and Katakan.

Yeah.

Coming up in February in Savannah, Georgia. What is it? Katasummit.com.

That'S right.

Yeah. So I think everyone that has any interest at all in this movement, you really have to be at that conference.

That's the annual gathering in North America of kata geeks and kata practitioners. And it turns out it's the fifth annual. Who would have thought?

Yeah.

This will be the fifth year, next year for.

Well, it's a pretty big occasion for you and your friend, Mr. Leiker.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it's. What is it, 10 years for Toyota Kata.

That's right.

15 years for the Toyota way. 20 years for my favorite book of all time, Learning to See.

That's right. It'll be 20 years for learning to See. Yep.

Yeah. That book changed my life, by the way. Well, that's why I got me in this career. I literally would not be standing here without that book.

That book changed our lives, too. That's why you wrote it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that's very cool, Ron. I appreciate you taking the time. It's really nice to be talking with you guys here at the Gemba Academy stand at the big annual AME conference in San Diego where the sun is shining. It is beautiful out there.

Yeah.

Thanks, Ron. Great to see you.

Good job. Thanks.

Ciao.

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