by Jim Huntzinger, Lean Frontiers
The Continuous Improvement Obstacle
Have you, your team, and your organization been working to create a culture of continuous improvement, perhaps been trying for years? Are you having a hard time finding your way, whether achieving desired results or sustaining the results gained? Do you need fresh perspective and inspiration on your continuous improvement (CI) journey?
Perhaps your organization is missing the foundational skills that underpin a continuous improvement culture and continuous improvement success. These skills need more than just learning; they require consistent practice. Practice on problems, obstacles, processes, and organizational needs is critical to successful learning, application, and competency. We typically call this learning by doing.
Mastering these foundational skills through daily practice in scientific thinking and guided by coaching routines empowers your organization, utilizing the collective capabilities of all its members to cultivate systems that align with organizational objectives, as depicted in the Shingo Model.
Moreover, as evidenced by the Shingo Model, these skills serve as the vital force driving the creation of necessary tools to attain outcomes that uphold your company’s values, objectives, and guiding principles. Simply put, these foundational skills form the bedrock that strengthens and enriches the essential systems and tools, delivering results that resonate with your organizational principles and objectives, thereby fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
The Foundational Skills
If you, your team, and your organization aim to create a culture of continuous improvement, then what are the skills needed?
The foundational skills of Training Within Industry (TWI) - Job Instruction, Job Methods, and Job Relations - lay the groundwork for fostering behaviors centered around scientific thinking and practice in performing tasks, driving improvements, and nurturing leadership development.
Toyota Kata’s Improvement Kata (IK) and Coaching Kata (CK) are the practice routines that create the habits needed to solve problems, achieve goals, and reframe how you improve your business with scientific thinking. These skills keep work, projects, and improvements aligned and progressing forward toward business objectives and results.
Good coaching habits are essential for transmitting and refining good skills and routines throughout an organization with a true culture of continuous improvement. Good coaching habits strengthen the above skills (TWI & Kata) to improve the velocity and magnitude of the impact these skills have throughout your organization.
Deliberate practice is crucial to success and means practicing daily to make these skills a habit of applying scientific thinking and behavior. Deliberate practice of all these skills, routines, and habits in conjunction with each other is essential to successfully build a continuous improvement culture for daily practice and long-term culture change. Deliberate and continuous practice of these skills and application of this framework can change your behavior and your thinking to that of scientific thinking.
Deliberate Practice
Deliberate practice is key to developing your people, essentially your culture, to think and behave in a scientific method pattern. You cannot think your way to different behavior, but you can behave (practice) your way to different thinking. These skills, JI, JM, JR, IK, CK, and good coaching habits, all must be practiced repeatedly and deliberately, and in conjunction with each other, to develop the needed behaviors of continuous improvement.
To learn the J-skills, deliberate practice is key. Practicing repeatedly solidifies the behavior, not only for the effectiveness of each individual skill but also for deeper daily continuous improvement. It creates the habit of knowing and using these skills for a broader use on obstacles that present themselves during work, projects, and problems. It builds the habit of approaching everything with a scientific mind and action. This is exactly why the Kata community puts so much emphasis on practice.
Just as it is to be successful with the TWI skills, the Kata skills (the Improvement Kata and the Coaching Kata) are learned and solidified through deliberate practice. For example, the use of the storyboard, first coach, and second coach are all methods to practice creating habits, that is, behaviors of scientific thinking and behavior.
Without Standards, There Can Be No Improvement
Developing and executing standard work is key to creating a stable baseline from which improvements can be made. If there is no standard work, then a process will most likely be unstable. Making improvements to that process will be difficult at best but, more likely, impossible.
Creating a stable work environment gives you the needed baseline of existing work for developing a better or improved version of the standard work. The skills of JI, JM, JR, IK, and CK underlie the ability to establish standard work, improve standard work, and then solidify the new standard work. They also allow you to stabilize an unstable process to give the initial baseline of standard work and begin the improvement process.
Through deliberate practice, you naturally internalize these skills, transforming them into habits that can be applied to address any problem, obstacle, goal, challenge, or requirement your organization encounters.
Traversing the Unclear Territory
Mr. Kato, known as the father of standard work within Toyota, noted that without the J skills, there can be no standard work. They are specific practice routines of scientific method behaviors based on the four steps of the scientific method.
How can scientific thinking and behavior be applied when looking at a larger view, such as the value stream, projects, problems, or other obstacles to reaching future states, target conditions, challenges, or organizational objectives? Answer: Toyota Kata!
Mike Rother notes, “Using the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata practice routines to teach and learn scientific thinking…forms habits that help you solve problems, achieve goals, and reframe how you look at and deal with the world. But it is not about learning problem-solving. It’s about learning a mindset that makes you better at problem-solving.”
Using IK and CK allows your organization to successfully and confidently traverse the unclear territory of incrementally learning and improving processes. The Kata skills allow your people to thrive on making incremental progress to meet your organization’s objectives and needs. As your people gain experience with the Kata skills (and TWI skills), there is an increase in the velocity and magnitude of overall and individual ability to succeed in improvements on all fronts of your organization’s systems and needed tools.
If you, your team, and your organization desire to create a culture of continuous improvement, the path is clear. Learning, practicing, and becoming competent in the foundational skills of TWI and Toyota Kata are requirements to succeed.
Where to Learn
Lean Frontiers helps organizations develop their people with the above foundational skills through a real-life simulator, which allows multiple practice rounds combined with the 10-hour sessions developed by the original TWI program. This learn by doing approach is very immersive and gives practice under near-real working conditions without the interruption of being at your organization. Skillpoint for Job Instruction or Toyota Kata and Skills Lab gives the opportunity to learn and practice under the supervision of deeply experienced facilitators. Learn more at www.leanfrontiers.com.
[1] Mike Rother, 2018, The Toyota Katas Practice Guide, (McGraw-Hill Education: New York, NY), p. 2.
