Add Scientific-Thinking Practice to Your Improvement Events

Toyota Kata increases the effectiveness of kaizen workshops

Rapid improvement events, also called kaizen workshops, are three- to five-day sessions wherein participants work to improve a process or solve a problem. A kaizen event is about focus and speed. By having a team work on an issue for 3-5 days, you can achieve breakthroughs that quickly lead to process improvements.

In the Lean world, kaizen events are often about having participants develop something like "eyes for waste, eyes for flow." That is, the focus of an improvement event is typically slanted toward technical Lean aspects. Toyota Kata is slanted toward the 'socio' side ... involving practice, over time, to help turn learners into scientific thinkers and thus better problem solvers. Scientific thinking can be applied to any goal.

We've learned that kaizen workshops and Toyota Kata work well together. Specifically, if you add a few TK Starter Kata to an improvement event, it counteracts the shortcoming that after the event ends, focused improvement tends to taper off, and improvements may even backslide. A department might have one or two events per year, and then go back to business as usual. Scientific thinking is a skill you can use every day all year. Toyota Kata is about making scientific thinking business as usual.

A kaizen event typically ends with a to-do list that's intended to take a few weeks to implement. Theoretically that will keep improvement going. In reality, after implementing the first items from such a list, conditions change. Items on the list may no longer be relevant or cannot be implemented as previously thought, and the plan becomes less and less connected to what's happening on the ground. A pre-planned approach to improvement is unscientific and tends to peter out as conditions shift in unpredictable ways.

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We've been noticing organizations counteracting this by integrating elements of Toyota Kata into their events. Most commonly, they add and use the Learner’s Storyboard, the Five Question Card, and the Experimenting Record in the event. (You can find templates for all three on the Toyota Kata website.)

https://public.websites.umich.edu/~mrother/Supporting_Materials.html

Toyota Kata begins with a big goal, a challenge, instead of just looking for wastes. TK then suggests striving for that challenge via a series of shorter-term target conditions, one target condition at a time. A TK-infused kaizen event begins with a focus on the first target condition, which gets approached via a workshop's typical rapid series of experiments; testing ideas and learning from each experiment to define the next thing to be tested. Here's the trick: these intense and rapid cycles are a great way to introduce practice of Starter Kata that you intend to keep using after the event.

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At the end of this kind of TK-infused event you're left with an already-operating Learner Storyboard for each focus process, and with experience using the Five Question Card and Experimenting Record. The participants then continue to use those boards as they did in the workshop, but shift from rapid PDCA to daily PDCA. Each process team keeps going in a slower-paced but still same scientific way, deciding on the next experiment to run today as shown on each storyboard, learning, and then planning the next day's step accordingly. Rinse, repeat.

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What an excellent way to make practice happen! By integrating the three Starter Kata mentioned above there's an easy and natural transition from the event to the ongoing Toyota Kata-like process in your teams. The scientific thinking skills introduced and practiced in the workshop continue getting used every day, which is what leads to more sustainable improvement and bigger results. The kaizen workshop becomes what Beth Carrington calls a “launching event.”

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A kaizen event has a week to deliver an outcome that meets the leaders' expectation and justifies the cost of the event. Toyota Kata is focused on long term habit forming through scientific thinking and acting, to build the muscle you can use to succeed in any process or situation.?You might equate the improvement event to a track meet or competition, and Toyota Kata to the rest of the season of daily practice. It's the same daily-practice vs. performance-event combination we see in sports and music, where we can observe how well these two aspects work in combination.

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