Tracy Defoe is the president and chief Education Organizer of The Learning Factor Inc. A Vancouver-based organization dedicated to making business and labor smarter about learning through innovations in workplace education. Tracy does this is a variety of ways and one her favorites is the Toyota Kata. That was our primary discussion point for the upcoming Business901 Podcast.
An excerpt from the podcast:
Tracy Defoe: I think that’s one of the ways that Kata is teaching managers the value of just being supportive and not being critical or too busy or whatever, but just physically being there and asking the questions, being interested, caring about the answers. A lot of people who do their Gemba walk and ask questions in front of the storyboard, look as if they know the answer, and they mentally have checked out and gone on before it is answered. People know that if you’re listening, if you’re helping, if you’re supporting, if you’re criticizing in your head, and Kata doesn’t let you do that, though.
Joe: Reflecting on raising my kids, I probably did not give them enough positive strokes versus what was constructive criticism at the time. I was trying to help them or challenge them to do better. Does Kata help with that appreciative inquiry type thinking?
Tracy: That’s actually part of the basis of it is the coaching Kata puts some constraints on the coach to not tell, and you don’t even have to give positive strokes. You can’t be negative or give ideas, right? it’s funny that you should say that about how it made you think of your family because it makes everyone think of their family, their spouse, their dog, their relationship with their kid’s soccer coach. There’re a million places where we interact with people and offer them our wisdom and our emotion and our whatever, in a maybe not entirely positive or constructive way. If you’ve been reading any of the Kata blogs or looked at things from the Kata summit, you’ll see there are presentations by people who have applied the pattern of the Kata and the habit, the structure of the question to all kinds of things in their own lives.
There’s the Kata Kid Series where you can see how somebody is using that with their kids, and there’s a story of a guy whose family got into a really scary situation with a birth of a baby who they knew was going to need a lot of surgeries and how paralyzing that was for the family, and then they realized, he said he could Kata it. They could pick the thing they can control and work on and just move along that way.
I’m actually really excited about the Kata in the classroom endeavor that Mike Rother has started to try to get the improvement Kata pattern into schools for teachers, because I actually think if kids learned how to break down a problem and take a single step and measure how they’re doing, that could help a lot with anxiety. But that’s just my opinion. I see a lot of people who are anxious and kids who are anxious, who don’t know how to break down the scary parts of the world and say what could I do and what’s in my control, where do I want to be a little bit down the road?
That’s a bit off topic, but I told you, I started out studying culture. People learn their work culture mostly by the direct interactions with the person they report to. Once you introduce the Kata into a work culture, you’re actually changing the way people interact. Even if 90% of the time, they’re interacting in the old way, this little 10% of the week, when they interact in this way, it gives people a different model of how to be a manager, how to be a team member, which is to be interested in the other person, listen to what they’re saying, look at the data together, and don’t give them the idea that’s smarter than theirs, but let them discover the way forward. That’s the place; that’s the magic part, people change their behavior.