I skipped a podcast session this week because of the holidays. However, I will be back next week with Shingo Prize winning author, Conrad Soltero. Conrad won the Shingo Prize as the principal author of The 7 Kata: Toyota Kata, TWI, and Lean Training. It was published in 2012 by Productivity Press.
An excerpt from the upcoming podcast:
Joe: How do you think Kata helps in spreading knowledge through an organization?
Conrad Soltero: It’s really about two things here. We’re talking about really tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. For you to get your big bang for the buck is on the tacit knowledge side, we’re very good in the industry at documenting all that explicit knowledge. What we’re very poor at is really understanding the constraints of our colleagues in management. If I’m an engineer, understanding HR’s, the HR Manager’s constraints or accounting constraints or any other area in the company’s constraints. It’s really important for me in order to make proper decisions and knowledgeable decision. What Improvement Kata does is create a mechanism so the dissemination of this tacit knowledge through the understanding of other people’s constraints and I think that’s really important in how it really affects the behavioral mechanics or as I like to say the organizational dynamics within that organization.
Joe: How do I actually capture that? What would be examples of how to take that knowledge and make it visible or usable?
Conrad: We really haven’t nailed it down because Tacit knowledge by definition isn’t something that you’re really going to document. What it does is gives appreciation. The way it is done is when you’re doing your Kata, your 15-minute daily Kata as a manager, you have this target condition and instead of going and making a decision on how to get to the target decision, you run experiments. These experiments may actually be an implementation, you’re trying something or maybe just speaking with other people. What I found in coaching this is that by going out and talking with other people and just asking them why they do things a certain way and how what I do affects them and that kind of interaction really gives me a deep sense of what’s going on in the organization. I always hear, “You know, I didn’t realize that” or “I didn’t know that until I spoke to the person specifically about that and without telling them what I wanted.” Because, once you tell someone what you want, they’ll respond in sometimes a negative way by putting up a wall and saying, “Well, this person just wants this and wants that.” When they really believe you’re interested in what they’re doing and what their constraints are, that’s when they really open up to you and I think that’s the dynamic that we’ve been missing so long.
What I like to say is this. You’re Kaizen event or your rapid improvement event is about improvement and, oh, by the way, you may learn something. What I like to say about the Kata is, Kata is about learning something and , oh, by the way, you may make an improvement and you eventually will make that improvement. It’s really about learning and it’s not so much about improvement. What you learn is just incredible, and again, it’s on the tacit knowledge side.
If you want to talk about the documentation, I would go back to Job Instruction and actually producing that job breakdown sheet. That carries a lot of explicit information that everyone needs to know in order to perform those jobs correctly.
Toyota Kata was popularized by Mike Rother
Related Podcast and Transcription with Conrad’s co-author Pat Boutier: Why and How of the 7 Kata
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