Kata Culture

Toyota’s Kata strategy emphasizes using structured thinking to achieve a consistent approach to problem solving and continual organizational improvement. “Cascading” the simple Kata methodology up and down an organization’s hierarchy creates a culture of constant coaching and learning. This fortifies all stages of operations and enables substantial gains in productivity.

“Kata and Coaching Kata are about teaching a systematic and scientific way of working throughout an organization, to get better at reaching difficult goals. It’s a culture-modification process that involves developing new skills and a new mind-set through deliberate, coached practice.”

“Kata,” a Japanese term for a routine or pattern that improves your practice, aligns a company around common goals. Kata also means “a way of keeping two things in alignment.” From the top, leaders develop strategic objectives that they communicate organization-wide.

This prompts managers (“coaches”) and employees (“learners”) at all levels to devise their own goals in support of organizational objectives. Senior leaders describe their strategy in terms of a 12- to 36-month challenge around which employee-learners and manager-coaches set cascading next-targets. The resulting “connected challenges” provide a common purpose for the workforce and gives meaning to its work.

“Teams share a way of thinking and working (a ‘meta skill’) that helps them successfully navigate unpredictable paths.”

Coaches and learners use the scientific method to set their goals: Each pair constructs a hypothesis, devises an experiment to test it, adjusts and repeats. Normally, the coach and learner go through several iterations of an experiment to achieve a goal.

Along the way, learners gain knowledge, identify obstacles and communicate what they’ve learned to their coaches. Those managers coach their learners and then, in turn, they themselves become the learners in a subsequent coaching session with a manager-coach one level higher up. This daily process runs all the way to the top of the organization. Over time, coaches gain skills, the Kata culture emerges and the organization enjoys continual improvement.

“The Improvement Kata Model”

Think of the “planning phase” not only as something that precedes action, but as the first achievement in the two-part Improvement Kata process. The “executing phase” is the second part. Start the Kata approach by identifying the problem, situation or goal you want to address. Fully assess your company’s present condition before setting a goal and determining your first step toward a solution. In Kata terms, your next step is called the “next-target condition.” These conditions cascade up the organization from lower levels to higher ones. Senior leaders at the top set strategy based on meeting customer needs. Having the strategy enables them to identify the firm’s overall next target. Learners and coaches plan their level’s next-target conditions to align with and support these overarching organizational goals.

Level by Level

Managers at each level coach their learners toward meeting the overall challenge as it manifests at that level. The individual learners at each level connect their discrete challenges to the next higher level up as well as supporting the overall organizational challenge. At each level, employees calculate the goals they must set and meet to support the objectives that depend on them one stage higher in the organization. Each next-target condition or challenge aligns with the one above it to ensure that it accomplishes what it must in a timely way, so that the level above can achieve what it must, all in a time frame that’s compatible with the level above it, and so on. Kata calls this interconnectedness the “value stream.” Diagrammed, it is a top-to-bottom spiral of messages about the overarching corporate strategic goals and a bottom-up spiral of micro-goals, which – taken together – execute the strategy.

“Coaching cycles are scheduled ‘bottom up’ to ensure fast upward communication of learnings. This means that process-level coaching cycles are done first each day.”

At each level, leaders engage in Kata coaching. They help employees run experiments that move them toward meeting their individual next-target conditions. For example, if a firm’s strategic overall next-target condition requires getting its customized product to customers in a week rather than the current 30 days, each level in the organization must determine its capabilities for moving more quickly with no loss of quality, including identifying the needed equipment, resources and staffing as well as the obstacles on the way to that goal. These calculations lead to targets and schedules at each stage or level in the process. Individuals devise next-target conditions and delivery dates as incremental steps toward what they must achieve in support of the overarching goal – dramatically reducing time to product delivery. This process results in a deep and wide understanding of the situation and what has to occur to meet the goals.

“When a coaching chain is established and running – with regular coaching cycles going on at every level – learnings and the resulting small adjustments can be communicated quickly.”

In each session, the coach and learner reach a consensus on the next step and the reasons for it. The coach consolidates the team’s next target conditions into the value stream’s bigger picture and shares it with the whole team so members can see where their contributions fit. The coach shares the team’s value stream with his or her higher-up coach. In turn, that coach consolidates his or her staff members’ value stream and shares it with the next coach, one more level up.

“The coach’s job is to provide corrective procedural inputs, to ensure that the learner is proceeding (practicing) according to the scientific pattern of the Improvement Kata.”

Coaches don’t tell their team learners how to achieve their next target conditions. They practice coaching using the Kata steps. First, the manager learns what a team member discovered in examining the current condition. The coach asks the learner to describe the next-target condition based on current conditions and then accepts it or makes suggestions. Together, the coach and learner agree on the next-target condition and the time frame for achieving it. Again, the coach’s value stream rolls up the team’s consolidated goals to form part of the next value stream up the hierarchy – and so on, up the chain.

“You can’t really expand further and faster than your managers’ coaching ability.”

Each Kata coaching session cascades up from the lowest to the highest levels. Thus leadership learns everything important in each cycle, every day. These planning stages, from the bottom up, set the stage for the next phase of Kata: execution.

Executing the Plan

With planning complete, learners and their teams work to achieve their next-target condition. This process starts with devising an experiment to test how to overcome an obstacle. Each experiment results in learning – discussed with the coach in daily 20-minute sessions. These sessions result in adjustments and in designing a new experiment to continue the cycle.

“For an experiment to be scientific, the learner’s prediction needs to be refutable, which also means it must be measurable in some way.”

In each coaching session, learners describe their past experiments, their progress toward the next-target condition, the current state of affairs, what they learned so far and what they expect to learn from the next experiment. Coaching sessions help learners progress incrementally. Each session leads to, identifies and corrects dead ends before the learner invests time in them. In each session, coaches ask five questions to emphasize and reinforce the Kata method and to establish a structure for the sessions. The five questions are:

1. “What is the target condition?”
2. “What is the actual condition now?”
3. “What obstacles…are preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now?”
4. “What is your next step? What are you expecting?”
5. “How quickly can we…see what we have learned from that step?”

“The experimenting record is the learner’s main practice routine for communicating their…reflections on the last experiment and…plan for the next experiment.”

The learners’ answers give coaches insight into how they think and how they approach their challenges. After going through the five questions, the coach and learner discuss the learner’s most recent experiment to reflect on and solidify its learning. They discuss the next planned experiment – always aligning it to addressing an obstacle on the way to the firm’s overall goal. Learners keep records of each experiment. They plan future experiments with their coaches, targeting a current, unresolved obstacle or the next identified obstacle from the “obstacles parking lot.” The learner predicts the outcome of the next experiment and identifies a means of measurement. The cycle repeats with each new experiment. Finally, each coach receives the coaching technique from the next coach up the ladder. A coach’s own coach can observe his or her coaching sessions.

“Expanding Upward”

Each coach becomes a learner all the way up the organization, and every coach asks the five questions in each session. This daily process of multiple 20-minute conversations helps people enhance their coaching skills and drives pertinent information up the Kata “coaching chain.” This keeps leaders informed about obstacles and progress.

“In our zeal to get going, we jump to conclusions and start ‘implementing’ preconceived ideas too quickly.”

As coaching sessions cascade up the hierarchy, more goals, obstacles and experiments enter the discussions between learners and coaches. Further up the chain, coaches may have to limit the number of experiments and next steps they can manage to discuss each day. Or they can ask their learners for summaries. Such a coaching summary would list all the sessions cascading below the learner and flag them “green or red” to indicate which ones are on track and which ones need attention. Coaches summarize the learner’s progress and then describe their next-target condition, obstacles, next experiment and expectations. The summary process repeats all the way up the coaching chain.

“Expanding Sideways”

Organizational strategy and overarching goals cascade down the organization. Employee execution of subordinate goals meant to achieve the overarching goals spirals up the organization. The process sounds elegant and simple, but problems inevitably arise. When problems surface in the daily coaching sessions, coaches help get them solved directly at the learner level. As the complexity of the process grows, teams coordinate where goals and next-target conditions overlap. They hold brief team or group coaching meetings daily or as required to identify and address this overlap.

“When done right, the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata unburden managers by replacing some of the reactive, ad hoc activities they normally do.”

A group coaching session is helpful when obstacles fall outside the scope of an individual learner and coach and overlap with other team’s next-target conditions and broader goals. Team sessions help avoid unintended consequences when solving an obstacle at one level might create new problems elsewhere. As complexity and interdependencies mount, coaches might have to increase the coaching time they spend with learners to prevent them from falling so far behind that they delay other teams’ schedules further up the chain. In some cases, a coach should hold a group session to address the problem with his or her learner, the coach’s higher-up coach and, if necessary, any other parties affected by the obstacle. Coaches should red-flag these situations in summaries and address them in learner-coach sessions every day.

Your Next Steps

Kata is an alternative to top-heavy, command-and-control leadership. By distributing decision making aligned to common goals throughout the company, firms address the need for creative solutions, constant improvement and fast adaptation to new conditions. The “scientific thinking” that Kata demands forces a structured, creative process that overcomes complexity and contends with multiple, ongoing challenges.

“Meeting target condition achieve-by dates becomes ever more important as improvement efforts involve more people and bigger challenges.”

In many organizations, teams brainstorm solutions and argue about which to pursue. Using Kata methods, teams work toward a defined goal and perform rapid experiments, gain empirical evidence and experiment again, iterating their way to success. The achievement of multiple micro goals comes together to fulfill the overarching strategic objective.

“The upward flow of information…is an equally vital element of a policy deployment system.”

No two Kata cultures evolve identically or look the same. Adapt Kata methods to your existing culture and create your own style. Most successful Kata cultures make a habit of the “starter routines” – brief, daily coaching sessions based on the five questions.

Don’t expect your transition to go smoothly. Anticipate challenges, and experiment continually to find the right Kata deployment for your firm. Assign a team to take responsibility for that deployment. Continue to develop Kata coaching capabilities and capacity; that capacity determines the speed and scope of your deployment. Daily coaching and learning sessions, though brief, might seem a burden to already busy schedules. Yet by replacing ad hoc, unstructured processes, meetings and decisions with a structured, scientific approach, learners, coaches and leaders save time and achieve better results.

Bentley Moore Executive

We hope that you found this summary both insightful and of use.

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About the Authors

Mike Rother, who works with people and organizations on scientific thinking skills, also wrote Toyota Kata, The Toyota Kata Practice Guide, Creating Continuous Flow, and, with John Shook, Learning to See. Gerd Aulinger advises organizations on improving people and customer value.