I asked Pat Boutier, co-author of The 7 Kata: Toyota Kata, TWI, and Lean Training, that question and below was his reply. The book received the Shingo Award for Research and Professional Publications from the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence. It discusses the blend of Training within Industry (TWI) with Kata in a very unique way.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Why and How of the 7 KAta
Joe: Pat, what is that connection between Training Within Industry and the Toyota Kata?
Pat: Well Training Within Industry, the history of that was a program that came to fruition in World War II actually by government consultants to make the industry in the United States extremely productive to meet the war effort. There are articles and papers that talk about it being the largest experiment in the world ever for consulting programs and the most effective one. Most people, when they hear about TWI know about Job Instruction; how to teach people a job so that they learn it and can do it, and that was extremely effective in World War II and many companies talk about how they became very productive and shortening the learning curve. They also then of course used the Job Relations for teaching new people and evolve in the industry how to deal with people issues, how to handle a problem involving people, and then use the job methods to learn how to improve the existing manpower machines and materials available, rather than trying to come up with something that would be extremely costly or not.
All those three major programs were created following the Charles Allen 4-Step Learning Process, and it was very, very effective. All the companies or I shouldn’t say all, but a tremendous amount of companies in the United States used it and it was brought over to the UK and many other countries during the war and after the war. Now it fell out of favor in the United States after the war and there’s a lot of discussions about why and the one that seems to have the most tractions, basically, United States have this huge engine of productivity and could make products that the rest of the world needed. So it didn’t matter how well or how much it was, plus they had a growing workforce because all the military people were coming back into the workforce, so it just absorbed it and it produced like crazy, and in a sense they didn’t really care anymore about the particulars. They could sell everything they could produce, and so they did.
Japan was wondering how the hell America was so successful, and their industry was devastated with the end of the war. MacArthur and other people brought Deming, and a whole bunch of other people, including people that were very much the beginners of TWI in the United States over to Japan, then trained in Job Instruction, Job Relations and Job Methods. There’s a lot of history that goes through it and describes that and talks about different people who, people in the Lean philosophy and Lean organizations will recognize, but the importance was they took it to heart, and they took it as how to make better habits. I think that’s where the connection with the Kata comes in, is we have never thought of TWI as Kata’s. We kind of thought of them as habits but we haven’t really talked about it that way. When Mike Rother shows that really the basics of Lean in Toyota is about habits and repeating them and then that’s how people actually learn, it made sense to us that that’s really what TWI was, is giving people new habits that are in a sense simplistic, in that it’s easy to follow the basic pattern. From that you’re able to easily enlarge it and make it strong and learn from it and adapt it to new things. That’s where Conrad and I saw the connection for us is that the Improvement Kata, the Coaching Kata and what we call a Problem Solving Kata from Toyota Kata, are just like the Kata’s in TWI. They’re all habits. They’re all prescribed or proscribed habits that follow this pattern and repeat this pattern, so you’re doing it by habit, and you can adapt it and make things different, and make a difference.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The Why and How of the 7 KAta
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