GA 312 | Practicing Kata in Secret with Tracy Defoe

I think that there's something to be learned there and maybe if we hear the stories and share the stories, then when something like this comes up, people will have a little bit more thought on how to deal with the obstacle of your culture, not accepting that you may have a piece that would fit well with their improvement culture.

Today. I'm excited to welcome Tracy Defoe to the podcast. Now, last week here we're recording this towards the end of February, and last week we had Katakan in Austin, Texas, and Tracy was one of the keynote presenters and she gave a fantastic presentation talking about how some folks will kata in secret. And it was a really, really interesting discussion and she really just brought to light a lot of issues that I think are important for folks to talk about and to know that these issues exist. And as we talk about throughout the podcast, these issues don't just relate to Toyota Kata, but maybe just continuous improvement in general, how some people need to go and try things in secret because their leadership doesn't support it or whatever it might be. So that's really the emphasis of the show today, is talking about why and how people kata in secret. And we get into pretty interesting discussion, I think, on why this is. And I also tried to try to take the understanding of why would a manager be resistant to something, trying to their perspective and trying to understand where they're coming from. And yeah, so Tracy had a lot of good insight into that. And yeah, so Tracy also runs an organization called the Learning Factor, and this is a Canadian organization that's dedicated to making better business, better decisions, thinking and learning through innovation. And her website is thelearningfactor.com or CA and a lot of good information on there. So lots of links are gonna be talked. We talked about the kata dojo and what that is and how you can practice coaching. And so the show notes page will be full of lots of resources today. So I would definitely go check that one out. So that's going to be GembaPodcast.com and this is episode 312312. So again, GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 312. And as always, if you do want to learn more about Toyota Kata, we've got a tremendous amount of resources on the Gemba Academy website. We have a full course that has been taught by Mark Rosenthal, who's one of the best Toyota Kata practitioners really in the world. We have Mike Rother doing kata in the classroom. So all this is on gendai academy.com so if you, if you want to learn More about. About Toyota Kata and scientific thinking. We definitely have you covered. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Tracy, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm really well today. Thank you, Ron. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. Well, it was great seeing you last week at Katacon 6. And. Well, unfortunately it was for most of the week, Katakan Rainy Austin, Texas, which was a bummer. But yeah, nonetheless, it was great to see you and I really enjoyed your Kata and secret presentation. So great job with that.

Oh, thank you. I'm actually improving that already. You know how we are. Right. So I'm changing the ending up. So I hope if we talk about that today, you'll get the revised ending for sure. I reflected after that, so I decided to go a little further with it.

Good, good, good. All right, well, hey, Tracy, as you know, we like to begin all of our shows with our guest sharing a quote. So you have one that you want to share?

Well, I have three I've written down, but the one I think we'll stick with is about leadership. And it's always attributed to a Chinese. I don't know if he was like a general or a philosopher, Lao Tzu. And it's when the best leaders work is done, the people say we did it ourselves.

What's that mean to you?

Well, I'm an adult educator. Right. I'm not a process engineer or a company or a, you know, a plant manager or something. So as an educator, my primary directive is to turn people into independent learners, independent thinkers and people who can go ahead and be ready to learn new things on their own all the time. So I see my partly. My job is to build enough support and community that people will always, always, always think they did it themselves. And I did almost nothing, in fact, that's happened to me that people have thought they could go on and immediately do what I do by themselves because they really felt they participated and made all the decisions. But in fact, that is the goal, right?

Yeah.

If people are really engaged and involved, they know they did it themselves. And the leader might know they started it off or they guided it or they, you know, coached them through, but they did it. They did it themselves. So for me, that's a real goal that, that everybody's there, has enough agency and competency that they, they know they did it themselves. Because in the end, you can't learn for anybody. They have to learn for themselves.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, players play, coaches coach. Right? Yeah, I love it. Okay, well, TR. Well, you mentioned adult education. But tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff. And then I know you're very, very busy and active in the kata community. So tell us what you're up to these days.

Okay, so background. See if I can do an elevator pitch on that, because it is a long story. So I'm an adult education specialist. My master's is in curriculum and instruction. I'm a Canadian. My bachelor's degree is in French and French literature. You know, artsy and fartsy, I always say. But my job at. And I started out teaching at university, you know, okay, Boomer, your first job was at a university? Yeah, that's right. And I taught esl, so English as a second language and English as a second language methods. So I taught other teachers and also intercultural communication. And the intercultural communication is a piece, I think, that made the transition to workplaces easy for me. So I got 31 years ago, and I know that because I was on a mat leave with a son who's 31 years old. 31 years ago, my department at UBC got called and said, hey, there's this factory in the suburbs, and they have a whole big population of people that, you know, have English as their second language and maybe even don't speak or read English much. They were trying to get a Ford Q1 quality designation, and they'd been struggling to teach the workforce. And they finally decided, maybe we suck at learning, you know, teaching. Maybe we're not good teachers. Maybe we need a teacher. So I. My job at the university had been what's called special program. Special programs. So I designed and implemented programs for groups of students who mostly came from other countries who didn't fit. Didn't fit the university. Sometimes their English wasn't high enough. So anyways, I was home and they said, why don't you go out for lunch with these guys? So I did that. And I ended up doing a designing, doing a research for about three weeks. Designing a program. Designed a program actually for the entire company. So the engineers and managers, as well as the frontline workers and the supervisors on better communication. Long story short, in nine weeks, they had their quality designation. Then they really thought we suck at teaching. And they started to draw me into everything, including almost immediately, they said, will you take all of our continuous improvement courses and make them better? Easier to teach, easier to learn. Then I started co teaching with their continuous improvement manager. That's how I learned CI one day, some. But because I was a teacher, an adult Educator. I don't show people PowerPoint and talk to them about continuous improvement. So I switched it all up. I designed a program to teach the concepts of lean, designed around 15 questions, just questions, and then every time the answer was different. And it just so happened that somebody from the University of. Or from the Michigan area, Jay Van der Zweig, I don't know if you remember Jay Vandersweig, but he came up to teach standard work at that particular factory, and he met me and we talked and he saw what we were doing, and he said, you know, there's this other guy I know, Mike Rother, and he tells people to ask the question but don't give the answer. And that is how I got hooked into meeting Mark Rosenthal and Hal Froelich and up and down the coast here into the Lean community with Julie Simons and all the people there. We went to a meetup actually, around 2009 and got an early copy of the book and stuff like that. So I've been. It's. I believe that the. The improvement cat and the coaching cat together operationalized some pretty good principles of adult learning.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. And that's, you know, that's why I've. That's how I got hooked in. And of course, I love it and I find it, you know, interesting and exciting.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess what I want to. Well, I don't know. How do you want to approach this? I mean, your Caught in Secret presentation was fantastic, and so I. Perhaps we could. I don't want you to just, like, give your talk now here on a podcast, but maybe.

No, but, yeah, let's talk about that.

Yeah, I mean, give. Give us just an overview of what it was about, and then maybe some of the highlights that. Some of the key points, if you will.

Sure. Okay. So like I said, I come from. And even now I actually work part time at Capilano University in their community development outreach department. I'm head of what they call the workplace podcast. We do, you know, we do sort of blue collar workplace education, so lots of literacy and numeracy and stuff like that. But the point being, I've been employed by universities, and I've never had anyone tell me I wasn't allowed to learn something or even pursue a mild curiosity. I might have, you know, so. Because when I became a CAD practitioner, like, I don't have a million people I can coach, and I don't have someone all the time who's coaching me, so I had to go find my coaches and. And then I started you know, once I was really. Once I felt I kind of had it. I was looking for opportunities to practice and one of the. Oh, and then I got after Catacomb one or I actually went to the first Catacomb because the Canadian manufacturers and exporters Atlantic coast department or region asked me to design a Cata intro that they could use. And so I did. I went to Catacomb one, you know, met with Mike, told him I thought he had a really good handle in the beginning on cognition and behavior, but he really needed to look at a fact or feelings. How does the Willard feel? And then I came back and designed my course, which is a one day cat intro. And I'd been giving that course across Canada for a while, like I don't know, six years maybe, I guess because it's Catacomb 6. And so one time I went back to the east coast where I hadn't been for almost a year to redo the course and a woman told me who came to help out because I always let anybody who's ever been who wants to come and help out come back because there's nothing better than that, right? She told me how she had learned the kata and practiced the kata after having been forbidden by her boss to do so. So it's a ripper of a story really.

To set the stage. Now, this particular company and organization, would you say they were practicing some form of continuous improvement? Were they practicing lean something else or what was, what was their state?

Well, this particular company supplies parts of the aerospace industry, right? So believe me, they were practicing Lean and Six Sigma and they had a very well established what, how Frohlich in Washington likes to call legacy Lean program. So they knew how to do lean. Like that was not a question. Also a part that I didn't tell at Catacomb was that they had invested many hundreds of thousands of dollars in Lean training for their workforce. So the news that this particular manager, who in my presentation I call Susan, that she had had a blinding flash of light, that this, the coaching and the everyday attention by the person closest to the system, the process, that this was the missing part, right? This is why they couldn't all their Kaizen events and all their action newsletters and all that wasn't having it was stop and go and nobody felt responsible. Like it was no one's job, right? They probably had a CI manager and a quality manager. So when she said that, the actual, you know, the boss actually said to her, never heard of it, we don't need that, please go hold More Kaizens. You know, you can use all the budget you want for the things we know how to do. And she walked away knowing that. What is that? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and. Yeah, so. Right.

Expecting different results.

Different results, yeah, exactly. And so she, and she was the operations manager. I should have said that. So she had considerable power to conceal what she was doing. So she just gathered two other people, set up a board that wasn't completely in view and went at it. And like she said, when they, when they started, they were looking at a problem with part supplied parts, parts from a subcontractor that have to get ordered and sent in. And for some reason the turnaround time on that when they started was 45 days and they had been working on it on and off for five years and the lowest they'd ever got it was 30 days. All of which is really unacceptable. Right, Because a part shortage will. Will halt all of the. Everything going on. Right, yeah, I'm sure everyone listening knows that. So they started in and she's just two, three people. So they did the, the absolute starter kata to the absolute letter. You know, they, they followed every. They made the board exactly like in the book. They used all the questions exactly as they were. And they actually, I think rotated coaching each other because they'd never done it, you know, which is a good way to start. And after 30 days they were down to. After a month they were down to 20 days time. And at that time this came to the attention of the execs. So there was a quarterly meeting or something and she was called in and she reported on the 20 days, you know, and everybody said that was fantastic, you know, best ever kind of thing. And then she told them that she had used the Toyota Kata duo of the improvement CADA and the coaching CADA to do it. And the executive that her boss, whoever he was a VP of some kind of actually yelled at her in front of everyone and said, I told you, you know, I told you not to do that. And all of his peers looked at him and said, well, you can't argue with the results like she's on to something here. Right. So after that she was able to kata in public, if you will, or at least no, they never went up to the execs but, but to cat it in that group. And over the next month they started a second board in purchasing and a third board in shipping. So now we've got three. Three's got nine people involved. And with that much attention paid to that process. They brought it down, you know, 10 days, five days and six months in, they were down to a one to three day average. But the best part, I think of this story is, you know, two years later, they were there at one day and had been holding one day, and now four years later, they're one day or less and have been holding one day or less, which means they've made a. Because anybody can make an improvement. The question is, can you sustain it? Right. So the sustaining means it stuck. And now she's a real advocate for that. Her in that region actually is going to present her story at the AME in Toronto. So there you go.

Wow. So I'm trying to get. I always like to really try to deeply understand why people do what they do. It sounds like there was psychological safety issues at this particular organization where she felt like she needed to go incognito. Right. And be clandestine, you know, if you will, with her, with her approach. So I'm wondering, like, do you think that's the case or like, what was. What's the root cause of that? Of her manager not wanting her to try different. Is it pride? Is it ego? Is it that we spent all this money on this training for program XYZ and now you're telling me you want to do ABC and what do you think was going on there?

Well, I think all of those things. Right. It's an attack on his authority. When your report wants to learn something you've never heard of, it also means he's got to learn it. That person probably has to learn it. It's a threat. And I think if we even get past the individual people, it's sort of a threat to their culture, to their work culture. And that's where after that one and that one person, I actually called a bunch of people and said, oh my go. If you ever heard of this before. And that's when I found out. No one else but me was surprised. But then I started to think about other people I had personally coached who maybe had real positions of authority in a company, but who didn't want everyone to know they were learning this until they had at least, if not mastered it, at least got competent at it. And I could count on my hand, oh, this one, this one, this one. Wow. I think everyone who's ever come to me to be their coach is actually hiding it in their company. And so, yeah, I think you hit culture and the, the unexamined either authority. Like you say ego, but also like Hal Froh would say, if you've got a 20 year, 25 year lean system and you think you are really good at continuous improvement and maybe, you know, you have awards and everything and, and you have the word master in front of your name somewhere. This sort of upstart thinking or especially from someone if it's not your idea is really hard. So I have found in my time in the caddic community there's kind of two groups of people and we mostly meet the ones who have the blinding flash. Wow. This is it. This is what I mean. I don't know if you remember Sigma Point, but you meet people who learn by themselves. Right. Never just read the book and did it and those people see where it fits. And so those people, people like that, there's a lot of them around, but lots and lots of people need outside help. And the reason why this got to me wasn't just that you can't be safe to be a learner at your workplace, which, you know, for me that seems like a tragedy. And I would work hard in that workplace to open up a little space for learning and being. It probably also means you're not safe to be wrong about anything. Right?

Yeah. I feel like the root cause of this is a lack of, of, of, of psychological safety. And I have, I'm sure it manifests itself. This, this was an example where it manifested in hiding some improvement methodology or, or a way of thinking. Right. And learning. But I'm sure there's many other, you know, many other examples in that company or other companies where there's lack of psychological, say people, the nurse is afraid to speak up. Doctor, you're about to work on the wrong arm or I don't know and they don't say anything and next thing you know, they worked arm, you know. So, yeah, I'm just, I'm always fascinated with these types of stories, but I'm also quick to, you know, I want to try to understand the other person's perspective. Not that they're right, but you know, try to at least appreciate where they're coming from and then how to help that particular organization come out of that culture to where that manager feels so threatened by some other approach that might. Goodness, you know, that's just a terrible way to live, you know.

I know, yeah, I always say that just the sheer oppression of it suffocates me when I think about it. But then here's what, here's where I kind of ended up. I want to, I want to have compassion for the manager who's threatened by someone learning something they don't know. And then I want to help them get to the point where they see that they can learn it. Right? Yep. So that's. That's kind of my mission. I always say that my actual mission is to be smarter about learning and to help you be smarter about learning, too. So there's always a lot of. There's lots of bad teaching and bad instruction and bad learning in the work world particularly. And so I'm like, okay, like, what would we do to help that guy? But what. But what really interested me about it was how common it was, and then how it kind of runs contrary. And nobody has really talked about it, much like, say, at Catacon or written about it. But last year we started, we put it on LinkedIn. Hey, have you had it in secret? Tell me your story. I'm collecting stories. I want to understand it. And guess what? Nobody will write on LinkedIn that they have done this. Yeah, but they will DM the heck out of you. Yeah, right. Oh, yeah, right. Of course. But they will send you direct messages, and then they will never put it in writing. But I had phone interviews with lots of people at Catacon. I put up a survey, like a monkey survey monkey. And only maybe 8 or 10 people filled out the survey. But probably 25 or 30 people stopped me to tell me their story. Right. So it's something you tell. You tell in trust to someone. And then this year at Catacon, after I told that I probably had another eight or 10 people, I am carrying cards of people who want to tell me their story, and they're from every kind of workplace you can imagine. Right. So it's. It's. So here's what I think that I have. I am now interested in about that, now that we know it's a phenomena. If you don't have the support of your CEO or your company to learn this, something new, a new way to approach continuous improvement. Or even, like we all know the improvement kata and the coaching kata play well with every single tool in the lean toolbox. Right. So it isn't. We're not throwing anything out. We're saying, yeah, we're saying, add this. This is the salt, or this is the. You know, this will make it sweet. This will make it stick. This will make it work. Also, this will mean you don't have to do everything all by yourself all the time. And I think we get a lot of people who are trying to push the improvement rock uphill all the time. But the part that interests me is we have a Kind of idea that the best way and the. The good way, the easy way, I don't know what the adjective is there, but the way to learn kata is to get your CEO on board and then get the executives to do it for a while and then cascade it fractally down the value streams and the value stream managers, whatever, to the front lines. And you'll build from the top. And this will really get your culture aligned with this. Right. And implement. It'll roll out really well. And there's. I love the culture book, right. The yellow book, which basically lays out a roadmap to that. But we don't have the roadmap for when some people who aren't the boss want to do this and then they start. And what we have. I have story after story now where once you have proof, proof of. It's not really proof of concept, but once you've proved that you can get traction on a really hard problem or really that you can do this, it isn't upsetting to the workflow, you're not wasting time or whatever, but that you're having actual traction on things that have been really stubborn or hard to do, then what do you do? So I'm interested in that. I'm interested in this one because we don't have the roadmap, but it's a trail lots of people have tried to blaze. Not all of them have. Susan, the plant manager I told you about, she actually got promoted, of course, because she did work for a good place. Right. Once they got past the initial don't do that, and they saw the success. Now I think she manages two or three plants. So she got moved up. So that happens a lot. Either you move up or often you move out. So people think, I can't deal with this. I'm doing it. I'm showing that it works. Not getting recognition, not getting uptake. I'm still hiding at lunchtime to do this. And then they change jobs. Right. So I think that there's something to be learned there. And maybe if we hear the stories and share the stories, then when something like this comes up, people will have a little bit more thought on how to deal with the obstacle of your culture. Not accepting that you may have a piece that would fit well with their improvement culture.

Yeah, I mean, this continuous improvement world of ours is really fickle, you know, because you'll even see. I see it all. I mean, I've been doing this for quite a while. And, you know, you'll see the people on, like, let's say the lean person. And then they'll start the same, will say, I don't have anything against Six Sigma, but, you know, and then they commence to bash some company for practicing Six Sigma or then Six Sigma. Oh, yeah. I don't have anything against, like, Lean, but, you know, it's not like it's. So I don't know what it is about this community. Sometimes it can be very, very fragmented, very prideful maybe. I don't know, like, my way is better than your way, you know, and. And I'm smarter than you. I don't know. What do you. I mean, it sounds like we're seeing a very focused example of this within kata and Kata. Kata and secret. Right. So I don't know what your thoughts are on that. Like just continuous improvement world in general. Do you find it's a. Do you find there's pride or there's ego?

You're talking to a literacy lady. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I did. I've done a whole bunch of qualifications in LEED because I was trying to understand them. You know, I was the SME certificate system when they were setting up. I helped with the curriculum part, and then I did the. Did the courses so that I could understand how it worked. And then I used to teach the course. And yet I'm sure my. Lots of people who know me would think I. Even people who know me from Lean would say that, oh, Tracy's a teacher. Right. Like, no one says I'm a lean sensei. Like, that doesn't happen even when people. But people do hire me to fix their lean all the time, because I have a different. I have a. What did one of my clients tell me the other day? Was it oblique? Yeah, like, I have an oblique angle on this thing. I don't, you know, I don't come straight at it. But I also think. And this is this. This, I would say is one of my hopeful parts is that there's enough to go around. Like, I think some. Some of the. The rivalry or the. Trying to come up with the best Japanese name or whatever or American name for what you do is. Is a way that people are trying to carve off a piece of expertise of the market or whatever for themselves. And I always think there's plenty to go around.

Yeah.

In fact, most. If and maybe I. This would be a nice follow up to the Cat and Secret. So most of the employers here in. Well, in Canada and I'm sure in America, too, are actually small businesses who don't have intact legacy lien Programs. Right. Maybe never heard the word. So the way that Hal and I are going to move on or kind of keep going with, besides trying to tell it's okay if you're catting in secret. There's a community. We need a secret handshake or something. But there's a community. But is to think about the DIY side. Right. Because the coaching cat and the improvement kata are a way of do it yourself. Continuous improvement.

Yeah.

Right. So if you. So if you're small, if you're a company business with, I don't know, 30 people, 14 people, you could just start a board in the office and start to learn about what you don't know and what your processes actually are. And we know and just kind of start chipping away every day. And you'd be surprised how far along they get because most people never think about it at all. So we're interested in where the learning from people who've had to do this without basically organizational support. And remember, if you're in secret, you don't get to go to Catacomb. Right. You don't get to probably expense the book. You don't get an outside coach like everybody knows. I mean, if you can get an expert outside coach, you're off to the races. But you don't have budget for that if you are incognito. So that whole how do you do this yourself and what's not in the book, in the Toyota Caddo workbook or even on the websites, which are getting really, I mean, Mike Rother recently, I think, simplified the website, but still there's so much on the website, it's almost its own rabbit hole. Right. You get down there, you're never coming back. Right. And then, and then also we've seen over and over, sometimes the people with the least background in lean can be coached the furthest because they have nothing to unlearn.

I wanted. I know you're very involved in the. The kata dojo for maximizing the number of Japanese words we can use.

Well, Tila will tell you he used the dojo to make it appeal to lean people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk a little bit about what that is and why you're so passionate about it.

Well, first of all, what it is is it's a real place or a virtual place, but it's a place where you go to hone your coaching skills and in particular, getting past the kind of which sometimes we call the starter count up. But just basically getting from beginner coach to becoming a more masterful, more competent Coach and more breadth of coaching. Because if you are somebody like me who doesn't have one organization. If, when I get to coach people I've coached supervisors and CEOs and people who were making stuff and people who were in HR and you know, like I get a wide breadth of people, but if you're actually just coaching your reports who are all making something similar, you just may not ever have the chance to meet a bunch of different learners. So the coaching dojo says, what are the, what are the second questions? So it focuses a lot on this. What, what would you say if you get a bad answer?

Yeah, what's the target condition? I don't know. Yeah, right.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or, or, you know, so it teaches you how to narrow in, so don't go a little narrower and not give answers and how to guide the right, the thinking through the questions of the improver or the learner so that they can. So the coach. So what we're doing there is we're becoming a better coach. And it really appeals to me because I think I mentioned off the top, I actually started out as a teacher, as an instructor to adults of English language and learning and writing. And so that's writing, speaking, listening, presenting, you know, maybe doing your PhD thesis. Like that's the sort of stuff I was working on at the university. And we get deep in the sub skills when we help somebody make their accent understandable or we look at body language cross culturally. So I was always one to say, you know, simple things like when you point at the board because Mike used to tell people, well, if you have to look at the board, but I would say, well, don't point with your finger like you're pointing. You know, point with your palm up because that's a non accusatory open way to point. So I can get deep into the details of the things we would teach a teacher or an instructor. And so what Tilo has done is he's got the, and he's really, really, really experienced. Right. Like he was from one of the pilot sites and he saw over time where coaches didn't progress or where they struggled and he thought we can make it easier. We can learn these sub skills at every phase of the coaching cycle, the coaching kata, and also not work on everything at once. So the other cool thing about the dojo is you can just work on how do you deal with understanding your current condition. Right. Or how do you go deeper on the obstacles, how do you set up your learner for success with the target condition or with Their next step by making sure the obstacle and the target make sense, are aligned. Right. Or are specific enough that you can actually know if you're moving that obstacle. So the coaching dojo is so up my alley. Actually I was been working for a while. I used to do something with student teachers or peers that I used to call find out how you teach. And I would have like a checklist and you know, a peer observation thing. And so I actually think in the, in the lean world, we need to find out how you coach either a course or a bunch of questions and checklists because people don't know what to look for necessarily. Like we say, oh, have a second coach. But as you know, that's the least defined of the roles and people are working on that too. So that's why I love it. It's specific. People often blow their mind. So you bring in somebody who thinks they're a really great coach and then they can't handle the first wrong answer from, you know, from the learner. And then there's a lot of subtleties that we've been getting into about not inserting yourself into the. Like, don't say, can you show me how, you know, can you diagram for me how this process works? Yeah.

As if it's about them, Right?

Yes, exactly. Yeah. So you've been to the dojo. So and the other thing is that they are just in time learning. You can take those back and you wouldn't go through the dojo. You know, all I think it's 21 or 28 question set things exercises that Tilo has laid out. You wouldn't do them sequentially. You do them when you need them. And whenever you can get your practice or your practice down to a manageable, do this when you need it. You're in a really good position to learn from it.

Yeah, fantastic.

One by one, customizable and just in time. Really, really work. In adult education, adults will not follow you very far on trust down a, down a learning road. They need to know.

Yeah, certainty. Right. Is very important for us.

Yes. And plus I love community. Like I love bringing people together to learn. And the dojo, the world dojo team, you know, that's finding people who want to share and learn and help other people necessarily not necessarily for money and stuff. So that has been a really cool part of being a categoek is being part of the dojo.

So if folks want to, want to learn more about that, about the kata dojo, what advice do you have for them?

Well, I think the kata dojo button is on the Toyota Kata website. Now. Tilo runs a. He runs a website called kata-dojo.com where he just keeps track of events and has a lot of free stuff you can download from there. But the best part about the tour he did across North America late 2019 and early 2020, is there's a bunch of people now probably in your area, if you're in North America, who could either introduce you and are going to run one or, you know, could help you just do it one on one. Which is something that we do sometimes on Fridays on our Catadojo phone call where we get together and then the other thing is to watch for events. So I know they mentioned last week there's an event coming up in Michigan. There's an event coming up somewhere in the south of the United States, and we're hoping to have one here in the Pacific Northwest. We're just looking at dates, but there will be, excuse me, a cata intro. And there will be a dojo, a first dojo, probably a more advanced one coming up for sure here because we need to practice and we want to introduce other people. Because if you have to do it yourself, you're going to need the dojo.

Yeah, exactly.

Right. Yeah.

So what we'll do is, I know, you know, organizations like Zingerman's and all these awesome places, they're a very, very, very involved. And I see T. Lo's got a bunch of stuff up on Twitter as well. So we'll, we'll, we'll link to some stuff here in the show notes so we can work offline, Tracy, to get all the right correct links and whatnot. So the show notes for this episode are going to be GembaPodcast.com and this is episode 312312. So go there and we'll, we'll link everything up and. Yeah, because I, I totally agree. I mean, not only are you going to get better at being a coach, but you're going to build a community and have, have friends that you can call on. Right. When, when things get tough and, and, and you do have issues with psychological safety from time to time. You know, you have someone else that you can, you can talk to because I think that's, you know, for the survival, if you will, of the continuous improvement, humanity. We have to have each other and we got to help each other because it's too hard to do alone.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. And the dojo also gives you almost the permission to really, really pay attention to what you're doing and not just rush through the cards because somebody can do it in seven minutes and you take 12. Right?

Yeah. How fast can I get to question four? Okay, good. Hey Tracy, so if folks want to connect with you directly, what's the best way?

Well, because I, I guess, I mean I'm everywhere, right. So I'm on LinkedIn. I have a website I call my, my consulting work, my non university work is the learning factor. So I'm thelearningfactor.com or CA. Both of those are the same place. I'm on Twitter with my real name, Tracy Defoe and it's no E. And Tracy, my mom was a minimalist. So it's T, R, A, C, Y. Yeah. And D, E, F, O, E. So that's, that's a good place to find me. And of course you know, I'm, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on Twitter, I'm on Instagram even. But Instagram I keep more for personal stuff because that's where you know, my, my kids and family and nieces and nephews all are now.

So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm pretty easy to get. And, and I'm also one of those people who actually answers her phone. So I will phone.

What's that?

I know, but I actually have a little stack of cards I'm following up from catacomb of people who said I'm looking for a coach or I need to know about this or I want to join the Pacific Northwest group or something like that. And I'm also in the women in lean group because I think that's a really important thing, that women support each other, especially those of us who've been around a long time to help the youngins come along. I think that's really great and I'm super enriched and happy and proud to be in that group that I know you've talked about with Karen. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. And I also am starting because I felt the need for people to be in touch with each other and maybe ask questions or tell stories or even find info that isn't necessarily easy to find. Inspired by the European Kata website, which is KataEurope Euro, where they do a nice job of congregating both other people's blog posts or articles or YouTube's or even Mike's Twitter and events, I started Catag.com, which right now is just sitting on my website. And one of the things I want to be able to do is offer resources to people who are either in secret or in a do it yourself like first, only one cares right now at my place. And I've had pretty good luck before hooking up people, like matching people who are looking for a coach and people who are, you know, they're not advanced, but they're at the point where they could coach. And so it's a really great learning experience both ways. And I would like to be able to do that to help people find their coaching buddy.

Nice. So when do you. Not to put you on the spot, but when do you think katageek.com will go live?

Well, it's currently just a placeholder and my web person is bugging me almost every day that if you just finish that so real soon, I would think, in fact it would be good for me to have a date. So.

Yeah. What's your next step? Maybe, you know, do you have any obstacles in your way?

Yes, I am my biggest obstacle. I think by March 8, maybe that's about a week out, a week and a half.

Well, listen, this episode's not going to go up. Let me double check here. This is 3:12. Oh, hold on, let me do some quick math in my head here. Well, 3:12 and let's see, 307, 308 will go out this Thursday. So you got a month before this, at least over a month before this episode goes live. So maybe that could be your short term next step or your challenge, however you want to look at it. Get this done.

Challenge accepted. Challenge accepted.

And so Everybody go flood cotigeeks.com and.

Then ask me to get them a coach. Yeah. Thank you. But I did feel the need, especially when I was listening to those stories that everybody is. Some people are not part of a community yet. And I really personally love the idea of I can't read every tweet, I can't read every blog post. But if they could be in one place, that would be really helpful. So we're just going to try it. It may be too much work to do or it may be that no one cares. But what I've learned from that. So ever since the Seattle Catadojo, we've been talking for 30 minutes every Friday, 12:30 to 1, sort of at lunch. Sometimes we get 15 people on the call and sometimes it's just six or seven. But everybody wants to talk to people and connect with people. And sometimes people get together offline. Or sometimes somebody will share a slide set from an old catacomb or from something they do. Or you might say to me, how do you do the Puzzle now, because everybody who's learned. Here's how I know if you've really learned and adopted the kata into your practice, have you changed all the lean training you've ever done? Like, the first thing I did was Change my Lean 101 to include the kata, right? Yeah. And just like I was talking to the people from Baptist Health, you know, I also did a. I don't call it jumpstart, but when the next time somebody asked me for a Kaizen event, I said, well, I'll do, I'll come with you and we'll do something. But it's going to be a cata infused kaizen, you know, which is more of a foodie kind of way to talk about it. Right. So I went, I talked to them a month ahead. I went for a whole day two weeks before to make sure that everybody had. Knew what they had to do. So that when we hit the ground with the whole team on the day that we were pulling, we were pulling a production cell onto a line. So we were taking something that made two versions of a product and we're adding a third, which, you know, meant another 200 bins and a whole bunch of new standard work. And we had to rebalance the line. So they thought we got to take all these people down to do it. Let's do a Kaizen. So I said, okay, great. But what we're going to do is we're going to be set up to learn and practice the katana. And that means all we left in place was a board. Right. For the next day and for the. We probably did, I don't know, 15, 12, 15 iterations in two days or maybe more steps. And then they left with a coach and a learner. And for the next 20 days, I phoned in a second coach to make sure they were on track. And, you know, that's how they jump started their Kaizen and their company. That's how they learned it.

Love it, love it.

Now, now they have a whole bunch including I think in the finance department now has a board.

Yeah. Beautiful. Awesome. Well, Tracy, thank you so much for coming on. It's been really fun and I have a million other questions that I would love to ask you, but for the sake of time and our listeners.

Sure, absolutely.

We will do a. You know, Karen's only been on 200 times, so, you know, come on and try to catch up with her, you know, But I love to chat with you. You know, I'm actually a book that I'm. That I had never read Shame on me. I should have read it a long time ago. Was. Was Peak, you know, by. By Anders Erickson. You know, the deliberate practice guy.

Right.

And it's really interesting, you know, are you. I assume you're familiar with that book. Not to put you on the spot. Have you read that?

Yes, but not recently.

Yeah, yeah, it's 2016, I think, when it first came out. I mean, goodness. But. But it's really interesting, you know, the way he talks about deliberate practice and. And contrasting deliberate practice with purposeful practice. Right. And I think maybe a lot of times what we lean folks and kata folks are talking about deliberate practice. I'm not so sure that sometimes we might be doing purposeful practice and, you know, but it also could be deliberate. So I would love to maybe talk to you, and that could be a roundtable. You know, we could get a bunch of kata folks on and do a. Do a mashup of different folks take on what is really. What is deliberate practice. Right. Because it's really interesting. The more you know, the more you think you don't maybe know so much after all.

Well, maybe the reason Tilo and I got together, partly. Well, yes, we have complementary, I think, talents and approaches, but he was really inspired by a book called Practice Perfect, which is an education book by a guy named Lemon. I think it's David Lemon. But anyway, Practice Perfect, and it's about how to teach teachers to the micro skills of teaching, like how to ask a cold question, you know, Ron, do you have any, you know, you know, how to break down questions so that people are following you, how to give instruction? And so that book is sitting for me because I'm trying to read through that. But those are all the basics of, you know, being a good facilitator and coach, if you will, and instructor. Right. Awesome. So that's a great book, too. So I would love to come back, actually, and share some education knowledge that might be of interest to the lean community, including the one I said to you in my email, which is how to get the most out of online learning if you're watching a video or if you are doing a course. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Well, it's very applicable to a lot of Gamba Academy because. So that'd be fantastic.

Okay, well, thank you for the opportunity. I really enjoyed the conversation. I'd be happy to talk to you anytime. I'm a fan, actually. I'm a fan.

Well, thank you. All right, Tracy, great chatting with you.

Okay, thank you. Bye. Bye.

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