Toyota kata
"How any organization in any industry can progress from old-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way.—James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute"One of the stepping stones that will usher in a new era of management thinking.—The Systems ThinkerThis game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines—called kata—that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as:How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization?How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance?How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers?Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata—a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step…
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4recommend
19mentions
6people
2011–2024years
79% recommend21% neutral
Mentions per year
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- For sure. One way I'll talk about this is, "The biggest fantasy novels I've read are project plans." Everybody coalesces around a vision quite detached from reality and then just kind of lives in it for years. It's a weird sort of collective arrogance/faith.
There are alternatives, though! In Rother's "Toyota Kata", he describes a Toyota practice where they pick some far-off goal (which I think is called a "target condition"). That can be something that nobody knows how to do. Then they take one step in that direction and reassess. Over time the path might be somewhat wandering as they learn what works and what doesn't. Or they might revise the goal based on new knowledge. But they keep going, step by step.
That's a lot like short-cycle iterative software processes. Which I know work, because I've used them for many projects. But even software, which is infinitely soft, often gets the same sort of fantasy-driven planning.
I think you're right that the ultimate problem is how authority behaves, and at least in the US there's a terrible managerial culture that this is embedded in. My solution has been to find small pockets of sanity, but I've not figured out how to scale that up. But you might find some hope in this Mary Poppendieck talk, where she explains that it hasn't always been this way: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/tyranny-of-plan/
- Exactly. And if you're curious what this says, I'd recommend reading Spender and Locke's "Confronting Managerialism". It's a great look at the dominant ideology of MBA-style management. And for me Rother's "Toyota Kata" was a good inspiration as to how to think of management not as control layer, but where teaching and support are the most important functions.
- This kind of stuff is all I've been reading recently. I suggest the following, maybe possibly even in the order given.
It's difficult to give a single recommendation, because it's a broad topic that branches off into several important directions. A continuously improving learning organisation takes many interlocking ideas to work, relating to long-term value powered culture, economic and probabilistic reasoning, uncertainty reduction techniques, including running experiments and gathering data on them, and analysing that data. But more important than running experiments are figuring out where the heck you stand and where you want to go. Just knowing that gets you halfway there.
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These first four I would consider mandatory for anyone interested in this kind of stuff.
- Out of the Crisis or The New Economics (I keep confusing these with each other because I read them after each other -- well, you've probably read these already given your comment)
- The Machine That Changed the World (this seminal study introduced the industry to the idea of lean manufacturing, and it tells you exactly how important the ideas of lean/flow are)
- Principles of Product Development Flow (the author is a guru in applying lean/flow ideas to product development and teaches you to not blindly apply lean manufacturing ideas to development, but to adapt them to the economic conditions of development)
- Lean Product and Process Development (an opinionated but very intriguing view on how product development should be done, with focus on building a learning organisation)
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These next ones are a little less mandatory and not necessarily extremely topical, but still interesting.
- How To Measure Anything (before you collect data the most expensive way possible -- with experimentation -- try estimation using proper techniques first; it's really cheap and surprisingly good)
- Understanding Variation (a good introduction to statistical process control, which helps you interpret your operational experience)
- Learning To See (value stream mapping is a way to visualise some wastes in processes)
- Accelerate (huge, impressive study of what high performing development organisations do differently)
- Drive (primer on the psychology of motivation)
- Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments (there are probably better books on experimental design -- I've been eyeing some of Deming's myself -- but this one is probably as good a primer as any)
- The Flaw of Averages (to get more accurate predictions, focus on distributions and ranges, not single numbers)
- Toyota Kata (a rote way to build a culture of continuous improvement)
- Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It (general high-quality exposition on evidence-backed techniques -- maybe not strictly in the scheduling/project management realm)
- Rapid Development (like Making Software except older and thicker)
- Turn the Ship Around (case study in applying some of these principles to completely change the performance of a team)
- Lean Enterprise (more on how to adapt lean ideas to the whole development organisation, with case studies, IIRC)
- Willful Ignorance (what are probabilistic statements, really?)
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I have many more recommendations if you want to go deeper into a specific sub-topic, but this is probably enough for a cursory comment.
- You might enjoy reading "Confronting Managerialism", which looks at the history of the ideology and how it has become basically a caste system. Or read some of the Lean literature on how non-MBA-driven companies approach things. E.g., "Toyota Kata".
As an occasional manager, there's some value to the work that some managers do. But managerialism itself often extractive (that is, part of its function is to justify siphoning a lot of cash into the pockets of managers and execs) and value-destroying (both through optimizing for value-negative things and empowering bad decisions).
A good example is what private equity does to companies: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...
Or the way MBA ideology tends to look at everything through a quarter-by-quarter financial lens, leading to underinvestment in R&D, staff, etc.
- > I now understand it as a gateway to Jung ideas, which I find helpful during my current period of professional questionning.
Jung's ideas are quite attractive, I'll give you that. We all love a good story, especially if feels so full of meaning.
That being said, I would point out that there are stories and good research that might be a lot more helpful. I would suggest: Chris Argyris work on management, especially his ideas around defensive-reasoning vs productive-reasoning. Toyota Kata work by Mike Rother might also be helpful. This is about switching to an evidence backed mode of thinking (scientific thinking).
Next would be Robert Kegan's work on constructive developmental framework and immunity to change. His work presents both a vision about human development and the obstacles we have in the way.
And finally, Carol Dweck's recent work on the foundation of personality. Here is a summary of that work.[1] It might be useful to understand how your own BEATs got entangled in your identity, which of them are useful, which are sabotaging you.
[1] http://www.progressfocused.com/2017/11/carol-dwecks-new-theo... Her
- Seconded. It's such a good portrait. The way the workers talked about the change sticks with me years later.
Adding to the recommendations, I found Rother's Toyota Kata very valuable in understanding how to make Lean approaches work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Kata
For applying it in software, I loved Mary Poppendieck's books, which are listed about half-way down the page here: http://www.poppendieck.com/
And for the math-inclined, Reinertsen's "Principles of Product Development Flow" is very insightful: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-G...
