This is a transcript of episode 344 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel.

Boost team results by measuring carefully and using consistent methods to move toward your goal–with “the Coaching Kata”.

Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.

The Coaching Kata

Listen to this section at 00:14

Squirrel: Welcome back to Troubleshooting Agile. Hi there, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Hi, Squirrel.

Squirrel: We’re being scientists again, I think.

Jeffrey: We are! And actually this is even maybe a different role now. We’re like a science coach.

Squirrel: Oh, okay.

Jeffrey: Coaching is really interesting because it’s very different. How do you imagine a coach for a scientist works? Where do people learn to be scientists?

Squirrel: I think of that sort of as like a professor at university. You know, you have a lab, and you have some funding, and you have the professor, but the professor doesn’t get her hands dirty by, you know, mixing up the chemicals and stuff. The professor is sort of getting all the material together for the people doing the work. Is that how our friend, Mike Rother with the Toyota Kata, is that how he proposes that we do it or some other way?

Jeffrey: Well, I mean, yes and no. One of the important things about that scenario describing is that professor has previously done research. So even though they’re not doing research now, they’ve done it in the past. And that’s true here of the coaches as well in the improvement kata and Toyota kata is, you should have done improvement kata to be a coach.

Squirrel: And that’s what we talked about, just to refresh from last week, we said the improvement kata is a series of four steps you can follow to rigorously and carefully test hypotheses in a particular direction. After first grasping your current condition, go back to the previous episode if you want to hear all about how that works. But what we’re going to hear today is how do you sort of set up your lab? How do you get the whole group, the whole organization working in this new way? How do we go about that?

Jeffrey: Yeah, and the important part is that you need someone who will be the coach. Now, I’ll say from my own experience, we had to kind of bootstrap this. We read the book, we wanted to apply it, so we kind of collectively acted as a coach. But the coach is there playing a very important role in the kata, which is to go through and help the person learning the improvement kata to learn it properly. And you do that by going through a number of steps. And I think we’ll walk through those steps today.

Jeffrey: And the important part here is that the goal here is not just the output of the improvement, but it’s helping people learn the kata itself, helping them learn scientific thinking. You want this. Most of the coaching takes place in the form of questions. You’re not directing people so much. You’re kind of helping them to understand what they should do next. So maybe that’ll come through as we walk through the questions. Usually it’s called The Five Questions, but a little bit like our four Rs, where there’s actually six of them, in the five questions, there’s actually nine.

Squirrel: Oh, wonderful, okay. I know we’re trying for a short episode today, so we’ll have the questions linked in our show notes. I don’t know if we’ll get to all nine, but Jeffrey, can you give us a sort of quick summary, a quick direction through those so that we can help our listeners to ask them well.

Jeffrey: Yeah, we’ll go through it real quick. There’s a couple of things here that are kind of framing of the improvement kata. Have you done the steps? And the current thing is like to help the person orient as you go into the coaching session. The coaching session itself should only take 5 to 10 minutes. So, you know, I think that will fit well with our episode.

The Questions

Listen to this section at 03:31

Jeffrey: So you’d ask someone, what’s the target condition like? Where are you trying to get? Cool. Do you know that? Great.

Jeffrey: So two— already we’re on the second question —what’s the actual condition now? Do you know where you are? And notice this is different. Before we talked about learning the current condition at the start. But as you’ve gone through in the process, you’re not necessarily where you started. You’ve made some progress at some point. So what’s your actual condition? So you’re trying to get? Where are you now? Great.

Jeffrey: And now we’re going to talk about your experimental record. And this is kind of where we have the four extra questions, you’re going to ask specifically about the lab notebook.

Jeffrey: Tell me about the last experiment you did. What did you expect? What actually happened, and what did you learn? That’s it. That kind of like aside looking back at your last experiment, that was that part.

Jeffrey: And when we come back to now is what you’re planning next, the next thing is: what’s the obstacle that you are planning to address next? Of your set of obstacles, which one are you going to be looking at? And then, what’s the next experiment? And do you have your expectations?

Jeffrey: These are back to your lab notebook. You’re filling in your lab notebook. Here’s the obstacle that I’m going to work on. Here’s the experiment we’re going to run. And now the final question, and I mentioned last time like this is a quickly iterative step.

Jeffrey: This is my favorite question right now, which is: how quickly can we go and see what we’ve learned from taking that step? In the book there’s a great phrase which is: today is not too soon.

Squirrel: I heard you say that many times.

Jeffrey: Many times, exactly. What are you going to do? When can we see the result? And to be clear, I don’t mean like next week. Like, can we do it today? And if not today, well, when? And asking people, you know could it be this afternoon? Could it be in an hour? How much time do you think it would take to do this?

Jeffrey: And a lot of times these steps are that short, potentially. And it really is very helpful to step back. Now all of these questions are very helpful in the learner. Both by reinforcing the discipline but also by helping people reinforce the lessons they’ve actually learned.

Why Use the Coaching Kata?

Listen to this section at 05:55

Jeffrey: I actually took someone through a coaching kata cycle yesterday, and they found it extremely helpful! In part, they had been doing it kind of informally, and we were trying to get the structure in there more explicitly. And it became much clearer to them exactly what they learned from the different steps. And also, the next experiment they’re going to run, they realized that they had made a mistake as far as not setting expectations with someone else about the timeliness. So I’m asking them, when can we know? When would you expect to hear back from this person? And they realized that while they were working towards a short time frame, they hadn’t communicated that time frame.

Squirrel: Oh man! The operations folks aren’t ready to release! The customer service people aren’t going to be ready with the survey, so we won’t actually know. And discovering that is exactly what you get when you get disciplined when you use a checklist just like a pilot does, right? A pilot says, ‘oh yeah, I kind of know how to do this,’ but they go through every one of the steps anyway, so they don’t say, ‘oh yeah, you know, I forgot to trim the wings,’ and then they crash the plane. So it’s very helpful to avoid it in that way.

Jeffrey: That’s a great analogy when you learn that checklist, by the way, as a pilot… When I learned that checklist as a glider pilot, it was with my grandfather there as an instructor, and he would coach me through doing it. So, I would walk around the plane and I would be running the checklist, and he would be monitoring what I did to make sure I learned it correctly. And if I missed something or made a mistake, he was there to correct it. And that’s kind of what’s happening here in the coaching kata. We’re not just letting people go off and do things on their own, where they might make mistakes. We’re helping to reinforce the discipline and give them fast feedback, so they can develop their intuition rapidly. And that I think, the real value of the coaching kata.

Squirrel: Indeed. The pilot example is a really good one to use if people say, ‘oh, you know, I can figure it out. You don’t need to follow me around.’ You say, ‘actually, you know what? Real pilots who have flown for 20,000 hours take a checklist, and they go through each item, so they don’t forget, because humans aren’t that good at being disciplined in this way. Being scientific means that you write down your hypotheses, that you identify your next step, that you tell what your next experiment is going to be, and learn from it very quickly. We’re going to make sure that we all together do that.’.

Squirrel: And of course, what happens if you do that as a leader with your technology organization is, people learn these things themselves, and they start going through the checklists themselves, so they can coach themselves, but they shouldn’t drop the checklist! The checklist is what helps them make sure that they stick to the discipline, and the discipline is what gives them the really clear output and results that bring a lot of clarity to processes that you might be following today that you find very confusing. And that’s the scientific thinking that we’re encouraging our listeners to try today.

Jeffrey: Yes. That’s right.

Squirrel: Fantastic. Okay, well, listeners, now you have everything together. If you haven’t listened to the previous two episodes, go back and listen to those! We talked about why you would need scientific thinking. We talked about how you would implement it day to day, how you would make it happen with the improvement kata. And today we’ve talked about how you can make that happen in your organization through the coaching kata.

Squirrel: I hope that’s been helpful to all of you, especially if you’re feeling a bit lost or feeling undisciplined. If your team isn’t making the progress that you expect, try out the Toyota Kata method. You might be very surprised by how disciplined your team can get very quickly.

Squirrel: And if you disagree about that, and you think something else would work better, or you think we should add something to it, or Mike Rother was all wet. We like hearing from you about that too, so please get in touch with us. The best way to do that is agileconversations.com, where you’ll find not only free videos from us, our book material on how to improve your conversations, all kinds of stuff that’s all free from us as well as our Twitter, email, LinkedIn. We’d sure love to hear from you.

Squirrel: I’m introducing a new podcast called the Insanely Profitable Tech Podcast. I can let you know my first guest is going to be Johanna Rothman on the 15th of August, and I do the recordings live, so you can actually participate. So if you’re interested in more podcasts and more material, especially for some really insightful guests, drop me a line at agileconversations.com. I will invite you to that and help you learn even more from us.

Squirrel: But don’t worry, Jeffrey and I are not going anywhere. We have loads more exciting material for you, and we’ll be back again next week on the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Thanks, Squirrel.