Toyota Kata

Goal

Toyota kata takes a process to a target condition along a path that nobody knows yet. It produces no artifact of its own. Its deliverable is a process brought to a dated target condition and a team accustomed to reasoning through short experiments. The learner's board keeps the record.

On Rother's diagram a break separates the next target condition from the challenge: the ground beyond that condition is not mapped. So the technique asks for one intermediate target condition at a time, within reach but outside what the team already knows how to do. The team then reaches it through short steps whose outcome is uncertain.

Usage

When to use it

• Goal held to be reachable while the path stays unknown: the pattern applies to the gap that nobody knows how to cross in advance.
• Long-term challenge set by management: the kata gives the cadence that brings the team closer to it, one target condition after another.
• Process the team itself observes and measures: the current condition is taken on the floor, never from a monthly report.
• Manager willing to sustain twenty minutes a day: Liker gives that duration as the right order of magnitude.
• Climate where a failed experiment is reported without consequence: the outcome of a step is unknown in advance.
• Improvement training that left nothing behind: twenty minutes a day over several months regain the ground a one-off session lost.
• Intent to build a way of reasoning: the coaching kata advances the learner as much as the process.
• Distributed team with a shared surface: the learner's board works online when it is revised at the pace of the cycles.

When not to use it

• Bounded problem, to be handled in one pass and closed: take A3 problem solving, which carries a question from background to followup on a single sheet.

Description

The four-step pattern

Rother states the improvement kata in this order. The team keeps a challenge in view, which gives the long-term direction. It grasps the current condition of the process. It sets the next target condition. It moves toward that condition through PDCA cycles, which bring out the obstacles to work on.

The order carries the meaning. The current condition comes before the target, or the target fixes on an idea of the situation instead of the situation. And the steps come before the list of obstacles, because the steps expose the real obstacles: the ones predicted from a desk often fall away, and others appear.

Reaching a target condition does not stop the pattern: that condition becomes the current condition, the team sets the next target condition and the sequence starts again. Rother writes that a sizeable result demands many successive target conditions and a great many PDCA cycles. The challenge itself is set before the practice begins: with no long-term direction owned by management, the target condition has nothing to point toward.

A pattern that prescribes no content

Rother writes that the improvement kata carries no content. It names no Lean tool, no problem, no process and no goal. These are the inputs to the same pattern. A kanban pull system, a cell or production levelling are solutions that the practice of the kata keeps or discards.

A neighbouring technique produces an artifact it has decided in advance. The kata produces a way of reaching a target condition, whatever content it is given.

The target condition: a description, a measure, a date

The target condition describes how the process must work on a given date. It does not describe a wanted result. The learner's board gives it two date fields: the date it is set and the date it must be reached. The current condition carries the date of its last update. A current condition ages, and the template says so through its date field alone.

In The Toyota Kata Practice Guide (2017) Rother adds the threshold of knowledge: the limit of what the learner knows today and the place to aim the next experiment. The terms have moved with the editions. The 2009 book and the 2011 deck write Current Condition and Vision, where the 2017 guide and the Lean Enterprise Institute board write Actual Condition Now and Challenge.

One step, one written expectation, one lesson

A step is an experiment: the learner writes down what they will do and what they expect from it, before acting. They then look at what happened, and the gap between the expected and the observed is the lesson.

The coaching card warns that the outcome of a step is unknown in advance, since this is an experiment. A step that fails has therefore delivered what was asked of it, provided the expectation was written down first.

A3 problem solving carries one structured pass from background to followup, and it can record the outcome of a series of kata cycles. The daily repetition stays proper to the kata.

The coaching kata: five questions

Rother published the manager's routine in 2012 under the title The Five Coaching Kata Questions. The coach asks the learner the five questions in order, in front of the learner's board.

1. What is the target condition?
2. What is the actual condition now?
3. What obstacles do you think are preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now?
4. What is your next step, your next experiment? What do you expect?
5. How quickly can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?

The pocket card reproduced by the Lean Institute South Africa carries the first two questions on the front and the other three on the back. The cut is deliberate: nobody talks about the next step until the target and the situation are on the table.

When the learner has already taken a step, a second card opens the coaching session with a four-part reflection on that step: what did you plan, what did you expect, what happened, what did you learn? The sequence then returns to question 3, and the cycle starts again. This reflection completes the five questions without replacing them.

The learner's board

The Lean Enterprise Institute publishes a blank board, the Improvement Kata Learner's Storyboard, in its revision 2.0. Its head carries the kata being worked, the learner, the coach and a second coach. Then comes a band naming the subject and the challenge, with the date the challenge was set. The body reads in three parts: the target condition with its two dates, the current condition with its update date and, on the right, a column stacking the record of PDCA cycles, the list of obstacles waiting and the practice tracking. The template names its fields Challenge, Target Condition, Actual Condition Now, Obstacles Parking Lot, PDCA Cycles Record and Kata Practice Tracking.

The dates do the work there. A target condition with no date to reach binds nobody. A current condition with no update date does not say whether it describes today's process. The practice tracking measures how regular the coaching is.

Twenty minutes a day, rather than a week per quarter

Jeffrey Liker gives the cadence in an article the Lean Enterprise Institute published in 2022: twenty minutes appears to be the right order of magnitude. A short practice, repeated every day over several months, counts for more than sessions run from morning to night. The subtitle of Rother's practice guide announces the same duration.

Liker gives the mechanism: a way of thinking changes through spaced repetition, which an intense but isolated session does not supply. He argues that the Toyota Way risks staying at the level of principles without the kata or an equivalent practice. The kata is still not a substitute for it.

The kata parts company with the one-week kaizen event and the executive immersion course, the two formats Liker sets against it. Those formats deliver a result. The kata aims at the result and at the habit that will reproduce it, and it obtains neither in one pass.

The mistakes that hollow out the exercise

The target condition written as a wish is the commonest. "Reduce lead times" does not describe how the process must work and gives neither a measure nor a date, so nothing will say whether it was reached.

The current condition deduced at a desk is its twin. Taken once at the launch and never updated, it describes a process that no longer exists, and the target it was used to set misses the mark.

Addressing every obstacle at once undoes the pattern. The coach's third question says so in two parts: what obstacles are preventing you from reaching the target, and which one are you addressing now? Only one. The others wait in the list, and that wait keeps the cycles short.

The coach who gives the answer removes the learning. The mistake costs dearly because it does not show: the target condition may well be reached, without anyone on the team having learned how to go about it.

The step taken with no written expectation yields nothing. Without the answer to "what do you expect?", noted before the action, the comparison that follows has nothing to compare against, and the cycle shrinks to a list of tasks done.

The kata held as an event loses its mechanism. Two workshop days a quarter produce target conditions that nobody picks up in between.

AI considerations

An assistant keeps the record. It takes the entry dictated after a coaching session and files the step, the expectation, the outcome and the lesson into the board's columns. It then flags the rows where the expectation was not noted before the step. The daily cadence makes that data entry a chore, and it is the first thing to slip.

It also helps with wording. A target condition is hard to write: asked about a wording, a model returns variants that give a measure and a date, which the learner then corrects. It reads a list of obstacles and marks the ones that are solutions in disguise, which the phrasing often gives away.

The current condition escapes it. That condition is observed on the process, and a model asked about a process it has not watched will return plausible values. An invented current condition distorts the target, the obstacles and the reading of every cycle that follows. The outcome of a step is observed on the floor too.

The mechanism remains. The coaching kata works through a conversation between two people in front of a board, and that conversation instils the habit. A board kept by an assistant, cycles neatly recorded and no daily dialogue, yields an exact record. It builds none of the skills the technique exists for.

Examples

A health insurer in French-speaking Switzerland processes its benefit invoices in a department of fifteen people. Management has set a challenge: every invoice received is processed the same day. The learner's board shows the kata at the end of three cycles. Four obstacles are noted on it and only one is being addressed.

Each row of the record sets the expectation written before the step against the observation taken after it: that pair makes the lesson. The third cycle is the most instructive of the three because it did not give the expected result. It rules out the sending channel as a cause. The obstacle addressed since the first cycle stays the same: the next step will have to act on what the issuing provider encloses with its original submission, not on how the request travels. Even so the target condition does not move, nor the date by which it must be reached. Only the next step changes. The three cycles run from 18 to 27 March, which gives the order of magnitude of one cycle: the first step served to find out which obstacle to address, the two that followed to test two ideas on that single obstacle.

Visualisations

The four-step pattern is a progression through space. A grid of rows and columns says neither where the target condition sits between the current condition and the challenge, nor where the break marks the unmapped ground. It is a diagram. The learner's board is a working layout of dated panels whose arrangement carries the meaning, and it is shown filled in rather than described. The coaching card is a numbered list, cut into two faces and followed by a reflection panel. Lists and their routing lines reproduce it as it is printed, with no drawing. The test of a target condition reads row by row and stays a table.

Cost

Tooling

The learner's board is printed and posted near the process being worked: a physical surface that the coach and the learner both correct during the coaching session.

The five-question card, printed on both sides, holds the routine until the coach has learned it.

An online whiteboard suits a distributed team, on one condition: that it stays a single surface, changed during the exchange and visible without anybody having to open it. A spreadsheet holds the record of cycles well. Its columns are date, step, expectation, observation and lesson. Kept by one person and never displayed, it loses what the board brought.

A task tracker is a poor home for the steps. The ticket has no field for the expectation written before the action, and the step turns back into a task to do. Anyone who nonetheless keeps their cycles in Jira or Azure DevOps adds that field before entering the first step.

Sources

• Rother, Mike (2009), Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results, McGraw-Hill: the reference work on the technique, where the improvement kata and the coaching kata are described together.
• Rother, Mike (2011), Toyota Kata: Mobilizing our ingenuity through good management, deck v14.2, hosted by the Lean Enterprise Institute: the statement of the four-step pattern, the four-element diagram with the break at the unmapped ground and the claim that the improvement kata carries no content.
• Rother, Mike (2017), The Toyota Kata Practice Guide: Practicing Scientific Thinking Skills for Superior Results in 20 Minutes a Day, McGraw-Hill: the current terminology (actual condition now, challenge) and the threshold of knowledge.
• Lean Enterprise Institute (2022), Improvement Kata Learner's Storyboard, revision 2.0: the blank board template, its fields and its dates.
• Rother, Mike (2012), The Five Coaching Kata Questions, The Lean Post, Lean Enterprise Institute: the publication of the five questions of the coaching kata.
• Lean Institute South Africa, Toyota Kata Coaching Card: the text of the five questions, the split across the two faces and the four-part reflection on the last step, which routes back to the third question.
• Roser, Christoph, Toyota Kata, AllAboutLean.com: an independent transcription of the five questions, in the same order.
• Liker, Jeffrey (2022), How the Toyota Way and Toyota Kata Fit Together, The Lean Post, Lean Enterprise Institute: the twenty minutes a day, the superiority of a short and repeated practice over sessions run from morning to night and the risk that the Toyota Way stays at the level of principles without the kata or an equivalent practice.