This is a transcript of episode 342 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 “scientific thinking”.
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
What are the Improvement and Coaching Katas?
Listen to this section at 00:14
Squirrel: Welcome back to Troubleshooting Agile. Hi there Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Hi Squirrel.
Squirrel: So it’s summer, and we’re going to do a series of short episodes here. But gosh Jeffrey, I can’t think of anything to talk about because I’m sure both you and I are just going to go lie on the beach all summer. Are you doing anything interesting in your work right now?
Jeffrey: I am, and maybe this-
Squirrel: Oh good, I figured you would be.
Jeffrey: Yeah, I’m actually working, and I’d say this in a very jargon heavy way, I’m looking to establish the shared doctrine within the company that we’re going to be using the improvement kata and the coaching kata, which are the elements in the book Toyota Kata. So we’re adopting Toyota Kata as shared doctrine. That’s my current project that I’m really excited about.
Squirrel: Wow! Okay! Well, I know some of those words, but not all of them together. And I bet our listeners won’t know everything. So let’s get clear on what those things are in this first episode. And then maybe let’s dive into the two things you talked about. The improvement kata, I know, but I’m not sure that I know about the coaching kata. So you’re going to have to help me and all our listeners out with that. First of all, why? What motivated you to do this? Why do you want to adopt these things? And then we’ll talk about what they are.
Jeffrey: Sure. And we’ve talked about the improvement kata before, a few different times in different episodes, and I was really looking to adopt it for the reason that Mike Rother wrote the book originally. And so it’s maybe worth making a mention of the book, Toyota Kata. Mike Rother went and studied Toyota, and people had studied Toyota before, and what Mike Rother’s takeaway was, was a little bit different. He says, ‘a lot of people go and study Toyota, and they come away with all of the artifacts that they created, like they have the A3 process. They look at value stream maps, they look at andon cords, they look at reducing work in process, they look at Kanban, they look at various different techniques that are out there.’
Squirrel: And his point is that if listeners don’t know what any of those are, it won’t matter, because there’s something else that’s at the core.
Jeffrey: Yeah, it’s not just that. Even if people go and if they go learn that, and they try adopting it, there’s something else. And what he says is there are these artifacts. But more important is the process that generated it and which he says is scientific thinking that the really important thing about Toyota is that they’ve created a culture of scientific thinking, and it’s just absolutely built in to what they do. And so he went to go capture a way that other people could introduce scientific thinking. And he called it the improvement kata and the coaching kata.
Squirrel: We’re going to do those in the next episodes. But tell me, Jeffrey, what motivated you to think your organization needs scientific thinking? What could tell our listeners, ‘hey, wait a minute. I need to pay attention here. This could help me.’
Jeffrey: Yeah, for me, the ‘what’ that I was particularly looking at was how we could have the right mindset of motivation to focus on overcoming specific problems in a structured, repeatable, reliable manner. And really to have a very high level of confidence in our ability to improve over time what we’re doing.
Squirrel: And hey, isn’t that what everyone does? I mean, everyone goes to work to solve some problems and make some money and make happy customers so that that doesn’t sound like it’s saying very much. But what’s different? What were you seeing that was lacking?
Jeffrey: Yeah, I think that a lot of people have those aspirations, but they lack follow through in practice, and particularly they often lack the discipline to be very structured about what they’re doing, to be very methodical. And then that leads to wide variation among individuals. So some people come to this kind of stuff somewhat naturally. They’re naturally disciplined, and they naturally then have better results than others. So I what to have here is a sort of mindset in our approach to solving problems to be a shared and common language, and a common sort of discipline. I think that will help us. It’ll improve individual performance and also improve our collective performance.
Squirrel: I got it. So if listeners are saying to themselves, ‘hey, we’re all trying this. We’re all trying to improve, we’re following Kanban or Scrum, or we’re trying to get to our OKRs or our 4DX or some other thing, but we’re not quite getting there. No one seems to be aligned. We don’t seem to be following a process.’ Then some scientific thinking might help them to execute better. Just like when people moved from sort of alchemy where you’d mix a bunch of stuff together and say some magic incantations, and you hoped it turned into gold, but they moved into chemistry, where you keep a lab notebook, and you record each thing that you do. You try your hypothesis, and when it doesn’t work, you try another one. Is that the shift you have in mind?
Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s very much the shift. And so going from things that are more, you might say bespoke, artisanal, idiosyncratic, different people working differently, to a more formalized, disciplined, structured way to do this as a way of improving the results.
Squirrel: Fantastic. Okay, so scientific thinking, that’s what you’re going to get in the next two episodes in very specific ways. That really paid off for Toyota, who you might have noticed built some really amazing, fantastically high quality cars a while ago. They’re not necessarily as good today, but I think they’ve forgotten some of their scientific thinking. Okay, so you’ve set it up really nicely, Jeffrey, and our next two episodes in the next two weeks, these are extra short little summer episodes in which we’re going to cover these two methods that would get you there. Okay. I hope this has been a good taster for our listeners. If you’re interested in being more of a scientist, and you want to learn more about how to improve, definitely tune in for the next two episodes. And of course, we’d also love to hear from you next week when we’re back for another edition of Troubleshooting Agile. Thanks, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Thanks Squirrel.