GA 282 | Toyota Kata and Scientific Thinking with Mike Rother

If you're not getting pushback, if you're not getting people saying, I don't want to read this card, this feels weird, awkward. I have to think about it. It's slowing me down. Just let me go back to the way I did it before. I'll get the results you want. If you're not getting that pushback, then you ain't practicing something new.

Earlier this year, we attended the Katacon 5 summit in Savannah, Georgia with hundreds of fellow lean thinkers and KATA geeks. We were also fortunate to be able to capture of the keynote presentations on video. One of those keynotes was from the man who started the entire Kata movement, Mike Rother, and today I'm excited to share the audio portion from Mike's main keynote presentation. Now, Mike has also posted his presentation as a free video on his YouTube channel, which we'll link to in the show.

Notes.

You can find those over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 282. And finally, if you'd like to see this video as well as many more hours of copy video footage, including an excellent keynote presentation from Jeffrey Leiker, simply go to gembaacademy.com scroll to the bottom of the homepage where you'll see a button to register for the three day trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

Let's start with a question. So if you're running a race and you pass the person in second place, what place are you in? Your mind says, oh, if I pass the person in second place, I'm in first place. And that's a good cue up for talking about scientific thinking in Toyota Kata. That is not to believe everything we think, but to test it to test those things. And that gets at the scientific thinking idea. So what's Toyota Kata about? Let me get a little bit of an impression here. Number one, a way of working and a way of working together. How advantageous it is if everyone has a somewhat common way of thinking, a somewhat common language, a somewhat common way of working, and that that is a scientific way of thinking. So we don't plop into a new team and start arguing about your idea versus my idea. Instead, we all know that ideas need to be tested, and we know how to test ideas and we know how to test them quickly. And so we have a conversation about what's our next experiment and how can we run that experiment really quickly. Number two, scientific thinking is an ingredient that makes some teams and organizations particularly effective. When the path is unclear, when the conditions are dynamic, and changeable when we just don't know, then just planning is not enough. So scientific thinking actually kind of a vital skill for the conditions we find ourselves in in this early 21st century. And finally, what's Toyotakata about? It's an aspect of your thinking, of your behavior, and even of group thinking and behavior, which would be organizational culture that you can develop through practice. And I think this third one is still a little bit of a theory and a hypothesis. I think that's kind of the ground where we're at. And the Toyota Kata experimentation is kind of at. Can we change what Organizational culture, team culture, family culture, classroom culture. Can we. You know, change is actually the wrong word. I like modify. Can we modify the culture? And you know, if you read the Toyota Kata practice guide, that's a one on one book, that's you coaching me to change my skills, to change my mindset, then the Toyota Kata culture book is one where we're like, okay, how would you do that to scale? But at that point, I think our knowledge is pretty thin on the ground. Experimentation potential. Quick review. Just a quick review of the Toyota Kata research findings. Again, the book came out 10 years ago now, but from 2003 to 2009, we studied specifically Toyota's management approach. We basically went back and said, you know, we know a lot about Toyota, but it doesn't seem to stick when we try it here. So here's what we found. There's all that visible stuff about Toyota, which is their astonishing results, which continue, which is what attracted us to Toyota in the first place. But also, as you know as well as anyone, all the lean tools and practices, just a few examples here. The list could be much longer. Shop floor techniques, U shaped cells, Heijunka, Kanban, Andon and so forth. Gemba Walks is very popular subject. Team leaders, the whole problem solving efforts, that kind of thing, practical problem solving and so forth. All of these things, they're visible and you can go there and you can see them and you can come home and try to implement them in your organization, which is what we tried to do many times. What we found, and this is really what Toyota Kata is about, is underneath that is something that's a little less visible. And it is, number one, there's a systematic, scientific way of thinking and acting that they practice, that they train. They don't want their people to jump to conclusions. At Toyota, if you don't know, they want you to say, I don't know. They don't want you to fake it. I thought working at Toyota would be easy. You know, you're in a meeting and they say, mike, what do you think we should do? I don't know. That was my contribution for the day. All right. Turns out it's not quite so easy. The Toyota manager says, good, I'm glad you said you don't know. Now explain to me how you're going to figure it out. What's your next experiment? Show me. Get an A3 going. What do we know about where we are? And when did you go to the Gemba and see what's actually happening? So a systematic, not jumping to conclusions, scientific way of thinking and acting. And number two, because that way of thinking and acting is not our natural mode, you have to practice it, you have to teach it. You have to practice it almost every day. And if you're going to practice every day, you need a coach. And there's only one person who can coach you, and that's the manager. The lean promotion department can't coach everyone every day. It's physically impossible. And it is a Homer Simpson dope slap moment. You'll sort of look at the lean promotion department, you start figuring out, oh, this is what they're doing. It's a systematic, scientific way of thinking, acting, and they're practicing it every day. Hmm. The lean promotion department can't be out there watching everybody practice. Everyone. There's only one person who can do that, and that's your boss, your manager, your team leader. It also explains a little bit why they have team leaders at Toyota. There are other reasons. Somebody pulls the anon cord, somebody's got to come. You know, if you have 30 people and they're pulling the anon cord all the time, you know, you can't get there. But the other thing is to help inculcate this way of thinking. The other thing that happens is we occasionally get this question. I'm sure you've gotten it. Oh, now there's this kata thing. Do we have to do lean or do we have to do katan? And it's like, oh, that's interesting. It's not either or. It's not the top or the bottom. They go together. And notice that the bottom part is not about Toyota. It's about human beings. It's about capability. That's latent. But there things that human beings can do. And so let me just go back to the first slide. Katakan 5. This was the opening slide. Developing and utilizing human capabilities by practicing scientific thinking. Develop. So what we also found at Toyota was kind of a thinking pattern. Now, this is a model. This is a model made by a researcher. This picture does not hang anywhere at Toyota. And if you follow different Toyota managers around, you'll find different versions of it. There's a lot of variation, but the cool thing is that if you look long enough, you begin to see a pattern. And that's what this is. This is an attempt to write down. This is how they tend to work and this is what they tend to teach. And it's just four basic steps. Get the direction or challenge. Where are we going? What's the big goal we're shooting for? What are you trying to achieve? Where are you trying to go? That's actually an important question. Important enough that they have annual challenges within the company. The second step on the lower corner, grasp the current condition. Where are you now? Maybe relative to that challenge, you know, there's a statement that if you understand the current situation well enough, you'll almost know what you need to do next. The third step is what do we need to get to next? The target condition. Right. Where do we want to be in a week or two or three? And the fourth step is attacking the obstacles and experimenting against the obstacles. And it's a kind of a scientific thinking pattern. The thing is, though, it's a very practical scientific thinking pattern. It's a scientific thinking pattern that you can use in your everyday life. If you look at this, everybody thinks step four is what makes it scientific. Experimenting. It's not just experimenting that makes this scientific. If you look at scientists, they're not just experimenting. They have a research topic they're working on. It's just like a challenge. They do secondary research. What's already been done? What do we know about this subject? They establish a research question very analogous to a target condition. And then they actually have research problems, which are the obstacles, which are the actual. What are you working on right now? Ask a scientist. Let's talk about scientific thinking briefly again, as kind of a background for your participation in the conference. Think of it maybe as an antidote to our natural jump to conclusions, nature. And the word natural there is very important. We come by it honestly and it serves an important function. And we'll talk about that. Number two, it's a process of learning from. I like this word, mismatches. When what we think is going to happen doesn't happen. When something else happens or an error, because the errors reveal what we need to work on, they show us what we need to work on to reach our goal. I think a lot of people still think scientific thinking means you're going to do an experiment to validate your idea and you go, yep, the experiment went just like we thought, Hooray, my idea worked. But that's not really the whole deal. That may even be the smaller part of it. The more interesting part is to do the experiment and go, oh, interesting. What we expected isn't happening. That's telling us what we need to focus in on. That's what we need to focus in on. So again, learning from errors, learning from mismatches, and finally bringing it up a notch from the world of science, it's useful for navigating toward goals. As I mentioned earlier, in complex, dynamic, unpredictable conditions, we can use it. Scientific thinking, maybe you can think of it this way. Basically, what we take in, the information, we take in, whatever matches our existing neural habits is what we see. That's what we pick up at first glance. But if you practice scientific thinking and test things and keep digging and you get things wrong and you say, oh, that's interesting, and you adjust, you begin to dig deeper into objective facts or reality. Reality is out there. We don't see it. We get an interpretation of reality. Our brain only gets electrical impulses. There's not a glass tube between your brain and your eyeball. There's a wire. Ah, that's interesting. The light is not shining onto your brain like a projector, you know, upside down, but you know, there's a wire and the brain is getting little impulses, right? And the brain is taking those impulses and deciding what that means. He's wearing a blue shirt. I'm 99.9% confident that I'm correct there. But there are other things. It makes interpretations. So if you start digging, you're going to see more and more and more of reality and that's going to help you navigate. I like this diagram. I also like the fact that the green never fully fills the reality. We don't get to see full reality. So it's like navigating with a compass, not a map. It may be the best means we currently have for navigating through complex, dynamic, unpredictable territory toward challenging goals. And here's an interesting corollary. You can establish challenging goals for people if the people have practiced an effective way of navigating their way there. This is different than the empty empowerment we had in the 1990s where he said, you're a self directed work team, go forth, Right? And then that didn't work. We backed away from that pretty quickly. What Toyota is doing is teaching its people an effective way of navigating. A kind of a scientific thinking way of navigating, which means people are more able to handle bigger challenges. In other words, this may be teaching a form of scientific thinking may be a prerequisite for empowerment. It gets even more interesting these days. You can read articles about, boy, you know, with conditions as unpredictable and dynamic and we need adaptation, we need innovation, we need to get more people involved. A few people in the organization can't make all the decisions. So if you need to distribute the power, the empowerment in the organization to get more adaptation, you want experiments happening over here. They're working on this little piece of our overall strategy. They're working on this little piece of our overall strategy, and they're working on this piece. And they're all working on different experiments and learning. We don't want them jumping to conclusions and going forth based on their beliefs. We want them to try things and adjust and beat the competition. Because we're adjusting, we're getting to our goal. Well, you have to teach them how to do that. So this really is about teaching your team leaders and your supervisors and your managers how to make their people work in a way that's adaptive, innovative and so forth. So that's what we found at Toyota. They've got more entrepreneurial spark than other organizations that are that age. So it's a mature company that for some reason is able to maintain a little bit of entrepreneurial spark through what we're talking about at this conference. What do we mean by entrepreneurial spark? Not assuming that the current situation is permanent. People are able to welcome a challenge even though the answers are unknown. I'm not saying people at Toyota go, yay, wow, another challenge. We have no idea how we're going to get there. I love it. You know, that's not Toyota. But people are a little more open to, okay, we've done this before. We don't know how we're going to get there. My boss can't tell me. One of the things we heard a lot in the early Toyota Cotta research was if you set a challenge or even a target condition and you don't know how you're going to get there, people say, why don't you tell me how that's supposed to be possible? Why don't you tell me how we're going to do that? And we would try to answer that question, come up with ideas, right? And we realized the best answer for the manager is, I have no idea. All I know is how to work in order to get there. And if we already knew the answer, then somebody else would already be doing it. So my job here is not to tell you how to get to someplace we both don't know how we're going to get to. My job here is to train you in a way of thinking and acting that will allow us to get there as a team. We're back to culture again. Being okay with some uncertainty, able to move forward in the face of uncertain and ambiguous circumstances. Not necessarily needing the answer to, well, I'm not going to do anything until you tell me how this is supposed to be possible. And viewing barriers more as obstacles. I love the word obstacles. This is from Henrik Knieberg. It just kind of shows you that if what you need to deliver or how you want to deliver it, the less clear and stable it is, the less appropriate a predictive process is, the more you need an adaptive process. So if you can see in the lower left hand corner, things are pretty clear and stable. Any process is going to get you where you want to go, but the less stable those become, the more you need some kind of adaptive process. And the point he's trying to make is the world is moving this way, at least currently. We're in kind of a dynamic condition. But the problem is our brain makes assumptions. And why don't we prove that? Our brain sees that, jumps right over the knowledge threshold. You should all have a card that looks like this in your lanyard. How many have seen this? Okay, who wants to do it with me? Julie, you want to. You don't want to co facilitate? Michael, are you here? Is Michael Lombard here? Do you want to. It's no good if I do it because I've done it 100 times. So get your card out and Michael, come on up and we'll do this together. It's a trick called a teach back. Michael Lombard, everybody. All right, what are they supposed to do with this card?

Okay, I think you are supposed to hold it out like this. This with. I'm using this side first.

With the dot on the left.

With the dot on the left. Cross on the right.

Yep.

Hold it out like that.

Uh huh.

And then start bringing it. Close your right eye.

Close your left eye.

Close your left eye.

So dots on the left.

Dot's on the left.

And you close your left eye.

Close your left eye. Pay attention to the cross on the right.

No, stare at the dot. Stare at the dot. Sorry.

My first time doing this.

This is it. This is it. Right? He's figuring out what he needs to work on. So.

All right, so dot on the left, close left eye. Pay attention to the dot on the.

Left and slowly, slowly move it towards.

Your face and then back out and out a few times at about 8.

Inches or something, right?

Something happens about like this around 8 inches.

Something happening? Anybody seeing what's happening? Okay, so some of you have the car out pretty far. So again, stare at the dot with your right eye. Left eye's closed, dots on the left. What happens? Stick around. We're going to do the other side. All right, what happens? The cross disappears. How come? Very strange. Very strange. How come the cross disappears? What's that? Blind spot. It's your blind spot, right? How come we have a blind spot? I've learned this. That's where the wires go in. Literally, the wires on your eye wall are there, and they can't put any sensors there. Our evolution hasn't figured that out yet. So it's called your lacuna. You have no visual receptors in your eyeball there. That is, you physically cannot see the cross. Now, if you have both eyes open. Right. We've lost Michael. Yeah, yeah. If you have both eyes open, the other eye sees it and your brain picks it up. Right? But if you close it and you find that blind spot, we've established now that you physically cannot see the cross. Okay? So lead on.

There's instructions.

There's instructions. Yeah. I cheated you. Yeah. It's not fair. Okay, what should they do now?

Card in front of you with dot on the left side. I'm using this side now the side with the line. I'm gonna put the dot on the left.

Okay.

And then you again, close your left eye. Start at the dot with the. With your right eye. Stare at the dot with your right eye.

Okay.

Just like we did before.

Yeah.

Move the card in and out until the cross disappears.

Something that same spot. Right to that blind spot. Find your blind spot again. Okay. Is something happening? What happens? The vertical line disappears, but the horizontal line stays contiguous. Wow, Michael. Thank you. That was beautiful. Did you. Did you notice that by doing it wrong, he learned how to do it right? And that Michael has seen me do this. How many times he seen me do this, Michael. Too many times. Yeah, too many times. Wait a minute. So just telling people what to do, Right? Practice, coach. Okay, so the horizontal line continues, but yet we have proven that you physically can't see what's there. Ooh, that's weird. What's going on? What's going on? The brain is filling it in as a service. The brain, you know, now, look, none of us. Maybe there's a brain scientist here. I'm not a brain scientist, so beware, okay? But we think what's happening is the brain sees the line on the left and the right of the hole. And the brain knows you got a hole there in the back of your eye, says, you know, I think that line continues. I'll fill that in for you. Don't you worry yourself. You go on driving your car or whatever, I'm going to fill in that line for you, right? So the brain is not showing us unfiltered reality. It's showing us an interpretation, a quick explanation of reality. Now, that sounds kind of negative, right? Jumping to conclusions is actually a negative phrase. But look, I'm here to say, really important that we have this mechanism. There are neuroscientists who say it's the reason we're still here. You know, the prehistoric humans who said, gee, I wonder what that rustling in the bushes is. We didn't get those genes, you know, and the ones who imagined all sorts of horrible things because of the rustling in the bushes and ran away, those are the genes we got. They jumped to conclusions. Thank you very much. Imagine trying to navigate traffic and your brain would say, you know, that car might be coming into your lane. But don't worry, we gotta get some more data, we gotta test that some more. We gotta be scientific about this. Don't jump to conclusions. You know, you're just not going to get to work that day, right? You're going to get to the hospital. So it's a better safe than sorry cognitive mechanism. I think it's beneficial when fast reaction is more valuable than deep understanding. And there are lots of situations like that. So I think, on balance, for our survival as humans, it's really good to have that mechanism. But it causes some problems, right? So what does your brain see here? For a moment, your brain says, she's floating. And then it takes you a while, a little bit of experimentation to go, oh, okay. It's just a shadow from a flag, right? So your brain quickly, you can't turn it off. So an antidote to the dangerous side of our useful jumping conclusions mechanism is scientific thinking. So I said earlier, it's knowing that any idea needs to be tested, right? But we can say a little bit more about scientific thinking. It's learning. I highlighted the word learning on purpose. It's learning to compare. Compare what you think will happen with what actually happens and learning to adjust based on what you discover from the difference. You laughed when Michael struggled with the card. But that's exactly what's supposed to happen. That's the learning process. You make a prediction, reality happens, and if there's a difference, you learn from it. This is kind of a visual of that scientific thinking process moving toward your target condition. What you learn in one step may indicate, influence what you do in the next step. And you sort of iterate your way to your goal. Now do it fast. Right? These experiments, if you're doing one experiment every two weeks, you're not going to beat the competition. You need to be doing experiments every day. Some take longer. You can cue those up and then do them, but you need to be experimenting rapidly. Excuse me. So, interestingly, here's that improvement kata pattern. Here's where we generally make the plan. So we're back here at our current condition. We know where we want to go, so we make a plan for how to get there. What's fascinating about this, where that person with the binoculars is standing before they embark on their journey, that is the point of maximum uncertainty about how that trip will actually go. You will never be more uncertain than you are at that point. And that's where we make the plan. And this was hard to square with what we saw at Toyota, because Toyota plans like crazy. They won't let you go. Go again. Your plan isn't detailed enough. Look again. Make a plan. Make a more detailed plan. It was hard to square with scientific thinking which says, you can make a plan, but life ain't going to roll out that way. And what we learned was that they make a plan, but they use the plan as a prediction, and they use it as a yardstick. They say, this is how we think it's going to go, but then they adjust along the way based on what they learn. So the improvement kata is a different approach. You can see that threshold of knowledge moving forward. As we experiment, it moves closer and closer. So that's our discussion about scientific thinking to prepare you for this conference. But there's another discussion. How do you acquire this way of thinking? We've been saying it's not our natural way of thinking. And kind of a corollary to that is, what should managers and supervisors do? We're talking about the business world. So if I want my team or my organization to acquire this way of thinking and this way of working, what do I need my managers and supervisors to do? The little guy at the bottom here, a model alone is not enough. Just showing someone how to use the blind spot card is not enough. You got to get them to do it. You got to give them Some coaching, feedback. We have lots of models. Design thinking, solution, focused practice, system thinking. Look, we're not hurting for scientific thinking models. There are tons of them out there. And the fact that we still don't really think scientifically in the broad population tells me that it's not just a model we need. How do you actually transition to what the model depicts? And that's the other side of the coin of what this conference is about. It's about. About a practical approach of scientific thinking and working, but it's also about how do you acquire that way of thinking through deliberate practice. So scientific thinking is not something we're born with little kids kind of explore like scientists, but we lose that the more we build up our neural library of experiences. We then see the world through those experiences, like that green zone in that one slide that says you basically see whatever resonates with your existing pathways. So adults are bad at scientific thinking due to our many learned neural paths. That's the end of the conference, and we wish you a safe trip home. It's not quite that bad. We can change. So it's something you learn, and you learn it through practice. So here's an answer to the question. And this is what Toyota COD is about. This is what this conference is about. Number one, a scientific thinking pattern, which is what we've been talking about. And combining that with techniques of deliberate progress, practice. And Professor Anders Erickson in Florida has probably been the name associated with the concept of deliberate practice. How many have been reading about deliberate practice? Fascinating topic. It's funny, in sports and music, deliberate practice is totally accepted. If you were going to learn a new instrument or a sport, you want to learn how to ride a BMX bike, you know you're going to have to practice. But somehow in the business world, you know, you come in and they send you over to work with Bob or Mary, the supervisor, and you'll figure it out as you go. No deliberate practice. So Toyodakata brings these two things together. Scientific thinking pattern, a practical one, and techniques of deliberate practice. Let's talk about deliberate practice. What does it take to learn new skills and modify our thinking? You guys know this one? Fold your arms. And now you know what's coming. Please fold your arms the other way. All right. And of course, the question is, how did it feel the second time compared to the first? Awkward. Unnatural. Strange. What was it? Uncomfortable. Had to think how to do it. I had to think about how to do it. And I think that is kind of the point. Right? You've seen this Before. Here are some words from groups. Awkward. Slow. Awkward comes up first. Almost always unnatural. Stiff. Uncomfortable. Difficult. Feels wrong. Had to think about it. By the way, these are the same words that you get with any change, effort, anything you introduce new in your family, in your team, in your company, you're going to get the same exact words. So the same thing's happening. It's important for us to know what's happening. Why does it feel so odd the second time? It's wired in. It's wired in, Right. So our thinking patterns are in kind of a loop. You've practiced folding your arms one way for decades. Check out this diagram. It's sobering. Neuroscientists say every time you think or do something, you're more likely to do it that way again. So you think or do something, and that lays down a little track in your brain. You're recruiting some neurons to think more that way. If you do it again and again, it's recruiting more and more neurons. So the more neurons you recruit, the more you're likely to do it that way again. Your brain doesn't want to think about how to fold its arms because your cognitive capacity is limited. Right. When you drive a car for the first time, where are you driving? Parking lot. Parking lot. Why? So you don't hit anybody. Because your brain is occupied. We think we've got this big cognitive capacity. We have very limited cognitive capacity. And if you're worried about where the brake pedal is and the mirror and the head check, don't forget to turn signal. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, you're done. You're not seeing what's going on outside the car. But after a while of this process, your brain puts those things into automatic behavior. So now you can concentrate on what's going on out on the road. Mark Rosenthal is in the back. You've got to watch his video about coaching. He says, yeah, the first time I started doing coaching, kata, I'm standing there, right, Mark, with the five question card. All I can do is to read the five questions. Oh, there's a learner here. But after you practice those scientific thinking fundamentals and they get ingrained in your brain, you can throw the card away and you know the questions you have to ask. And you might ask them in a different way, you might ask them in a different order, but you know what information you're trying to get. So your brain doesn't want to think about folding its arms. It doesn't want to waste neural capacity on it. Imagine you're at a party Right. You stand there like this. We're talking. Can we stop talking for a minute? I got to fold my arms the other way. You know? Just not good. You know? Could we stop driving everybody? Because I got to look for where the brake pedal is. Okay? You know, 60 miles an hour, right? It's not going to work. So the second time feels different because anyone reading Kahneman stuff. System one. System two. Thinking getting very popular. The brain is getting popular. It's fascinating stuff. It's the owner's manual. We didn't come with. The brain favors those practice neural pathways to conserve energy and for safety. You know that car may be coming to your lane. Move. Don't even think about it. So System one. Thinking. The brain throws a lot of stuff. The stuff that we repeat, the stuff that we do again and again and again. It throws that into habits and systems 2. Thinking is slow and conscious. Anytime you learn something new, Crossing your arms the other way is the picture on the right. It's like hacking your way through the jungle. You don't have very many neurons recruited for that activity. So here is advice from neuroscience on changing or modifying or transforming your culture. Don't fight existing neural highways. You cannot win that game. They are so strong. You can tell people all day what Toyota does. You can tell people all day how to use a blind spot card. Whatever. Just explaining a different way doesn't work. The learners will almost always stick with or revert back to their established habits. It has nothing to do with being hostile. It's those established strong neural habits. They're always going to win. What the neuroscientists say. Don't bother fighting those explaining different ways. Develop new ones. And if you practice new habits over time, the old ones will fade a little bit. What would happen if you practice folding your arms the other way? Signing your name with the other hand, Brushing your teeth with the other hand? What if you practice that every day for a month? What would happen? You'd get it. So what can work is deliberately practicing new neural pathways and they replace the old ones. So here's what practicing Toyota Kata is about. What you're doing is you're moving some scientific thinking fundamentals. Like, I need to test the idea to system one so that you can react more scientifically and cognitive capacity is freed up to focus on the things that are situational. We're never going to make grasping the current condition automatic. That is never going to be automatic because every current condition is different. You're going to have to go and see. You're going to have to put on your thinking cap, you're going to have to deliberately look, you're going to have to make run charts, you're going to have to measure times. That's just the way it is. You're going to have to get on a plane and go to the sales department in Omaha and see what's going on there. You're never going to get away from that. But the idea that you have to grasp the current condition, yes, that becomes automatic. That's what Toyota Cod is about. So basically, you're practicing with system two, your slow mind to put some scientific thinking fundamentals into system one. When you read the five question card for the first time, you're in system two. What is your target condition? What's a target condition? Where are you now? You know, what did you do on your last step? I mean, it goes literally like that. You're in system two, very deliberate, but you're trying to turn that into system one. So that's practice, which turns into performance. And performance is actually just being able to do those things off the cuff. So this is where starter kata come in. What the heck is kata? Kata are just practice routines. You practice at the the beginning. It's like playing scales in music. So we change the name, we call it starter kata. Did that about two years ago. And so there's that perpetual loop. Every time you do something, it recruits more neurons and that makes you more likely to do it again. This is the worst screwed loop. And this right here is the way to free will. That is you inject a starter kata with coaching. Coach says, play these scales. I want you to learn the fingering of the instrument you're trying to learn learn. So starter kata are just things you do at the beginning. They get you going. They're not something you implement. The five question card is a starter kata to introduce. It's a practice routine to introduce a pattern into your head. Once you got that fundamental pattern, then you can build on that and develop your own style. So what we have is not just a scientific thinking model. The four steps of the improvement kata, which is based on what we observed at Toyota, we have starter cut for each step. And that's a big experiment that you are part of to try to make scientific thinking something that's learnable, teachable, transferable in any group, your team, your family, your organization. And there's also a kata for coaching because coaching is a skill you have to learn like any other starter kata. Again, very common in sports and music. See the dance steps at the Beginning. You actually have painted steps on the floor. Why are they on the floor? What are those painted steps for? Get the basic pattern in your head, then you don't need them anymore. Do the dancers who are accomplished, do they go like this? They don't. They have their own style. But they started with this. That's a starter cod. He can't implement starter cotta. It's just to get something going. Check out this swimming pool here. The learners on the left, very structured, okay? I want you to learn how to kick and so forth, right? And they're all doing exactly the same thing. And the coach is very instructive. This is the starter catazone down on the left end of the pool to internalize the basics of swimming. But after a while, the coach doesn't even need to be in the water. They're out here. They're still given some instructions, right? And this is where we're trying to get to. Everybody's swimming in their own way and they're having a good time and they're able to swim. And the coach is just watching two errors that we see all the time with kata number one. People practice the kata to start a kata. You come back two years later, they're still reading the card like, oh, I'm sorry, that wasn't really the point. The card, they're all still down the left end of the pool. And everyone in the pool is going, I just wanted to swim, you know, I'm still reading this damn card, you know, so that's an error. Don't practice, start a kata forever. But the other error, you get off the kata too soon. They immediately ad lib, they immediately change the questions. They want to be on the right end of the pool right away. If you try to get to the right end of the pool too quickly and you're not willing to practice your starter kata, you're not going to get anywhere. You're going to be a beginner forever. And we have Tim Hall. Tim, are you here from Nicepak? I don't know if he's going to talk about it, but if he doesn't, then you should basically corner him with a cup of coffee. Because, Tim, what do you say? You've moved on from the start of Cotta, right? You've moved off quite a bit and developed your own style. And if you have a new learner, what do you do? Start over again? They go back to the left side of the pool. Read these questions. You know, I don't want to. You're not going to do that forever. You know, I want to play with the other guys on the other end of the pool. That's where we're heading, right? I love this picture. I think this picture describes it better than I ever did. So, again, starter kata only take you so far. Over time, you have to develop your own style, building on top of the fundamental patterns you learned with the starter kata. The fundamental patterns are supposed to get automatic. Now, here is a cool trick. Starter kata are especially useful when you want to create a shared culture, because everybody starts with the same basics. Now, look, your style may be different. I want that. I want my team to have different styles of testing. I want you to have a better idea than me about how we could test this idea, but I want both of us to say we need to test this idea. That's fundamental. So everybody starts with the same fundamentals and you can build on top of that. And I think this slide essentially is what Toyota is doing on that less visible part on the slide I showed earlier. And they don't even use starter kata because they have the team leaders and the managers who have the pattern in their head. So they're able to have quite a bit of variety. But if you don't have that, starter kata are helpful. One thing, of course, we talked about this. I'll skip over it. It needs to be daily practice. Don't fool yourself. If you're practicing something every now and then and the rest of the time it's business as usual, the neuroscientist would basically look at you and say, you're practicing business as usual. Whatever you practice daily is what you're creating. That's your habit, that's your culture. Early practice does require a coach, as I've said a couple times now, so I don't need to dwell on this. Otherwise you're going to practice your existing habits. They're much more powerful. So you need the coach to say, hold on, you're doing it wrong. Let me show you a different way to do that. It's very normal. And then you can go on to be a master. And it's daily with practice, with a coach. So who's the coach? The manager is the coach because they're the only ones who can be there every day. So we are, in a way, modifying the role of the manager. So here's a Homer Simpson dope slap moment. You know those ways of the second time, folding your arms felt. That's what you're supposed to hear if you're working with a team or anyone learning something New. If they don't say these things, they're probably not learning something new. It's supposed to feel awkward. It's supposed to feel like the other way of folding your arms. If you're not getting pushback, if you're not getting people saying, I don't want to read this card. This feels weird, awkward. I have to think about it. It's slowing me down. Just let me go back to the way I did it before. I'll get the results you want. If you're not getting that pushback, then you ain't practicing something new. And I find that interesting because as a coach, I always stood in front of people and when they were saying these things, it's like, oh, I'm doing something wrong. No, you're doing something right. And you can tell them that, say, hey, that's how it's supposed to feel. It feels weird. You're on the right path. So Toyota Kata combines two things. A practical scientific improvement pattern. We call it the improvement Kata. And with techniques to deliberate practice to make scientific thinking a skill that can be learned by anyone. Here's a question I got recently and I think it's good. Conclude someone literally asked me, said, mike, will implementing Toyota Kata improve our profit? And that's kind of where we've been in the lean world. We're going to implement these things and it's going to improve our profit. And the only answer, the answer is no, not directly. Toyota Kata is a way of developing scientific thinking skills that will make you better at moving toward whatever your goal is. But just implementing Toyota Kata a, you can't implement it. It's practice, but is not going to improve your profit. If you want to improve profit, it'll make you better at pursuing that. So knowing isn't the same as doing. Benchmarking other companies is not enough to make change happen. Just showing someone how to do something isn't enough. Scientific thinking is a great way to navigate, but it's not our default mode. Skills, habits and mindset are wired in our brain. You can practice starter kata with some coaching to help wire your brain for scientific thinking. That's what we're about. And the last bullet here, which is a little bit the experimenting ground right now, you can also modify an organization's culture this way with the managers as the coaches. And we think that's kind of what Toyota's doing. So thank you.

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