Toyota Kata
Many organisations struggle to make the concept of daily, continuous improvement a reality. Improvement projects are in the hands of dedicated specialists, target big-step improvement and take a long time to complete. Front line employees & their supervisors are hard to get on board. Improvement is slow.
To get to daily improvement, we need to change people’s routines. Skills and habits are developed through repetition of simple patterns. In contrast, typical Lean training raises awareness but often does not lead to changed habits. Just knowing about something is not enough to make people act differently. As the Lean saying goes:
‘You can’t think your way to a new way of acting, but you can act your way to a new way of thinking.’
Kata (a term borrowed from martial arts) are practice routines that develop skills to the point that they become automatic, sub-conscious & easy.
Toyota Kata develops the improvement & leadership skills that enable fast-paced, daily improvement. It enables organisations to:
Quickly engage their workforce in continuous improvement
Grow their improvement capability (real, hands-on skills) & capacity (more people, more often)
Deploy operations strategy faster
Accelerate process stabilisation & Operations Excellence efforts
Our Toyota Kata training develops three fundamental supervisor skills:
Running fast-paced experiments to rapidly close performance gaps
Aligning team & improvement priorities with operations strategy
Coaching them to use the Improvement Kata effectively
As is the case with all other Supervisor Academy skills training programmes, Toyota Kata develops a common language for improvement that enhances collaboration between your people and shapes a distinctive organisational culture.
By aligning direction with common business and operations challenges & focusing improvement purely on obstacles that get in in the way of your operations strategy, rather than random improvement opportunities, Toyota Kata ensures the use of your organisation’s improvement capacity is optimised and better results are achieved much faster.
Toyota Kata develops your front-line leaders skill in executing & coaching fast-paced improvement.
It enables your organisation to engage your entire workforce in rapid, daily improvement (Kaizen) and to grow the problem-solving skills of supervisors & their teams. By doing this, Toyota Kata boosts the deployment speed & impact of your operations strategy & operations excellence program.
Our experienced Supervisor Academy coaches accompany you and your team from training through full deployment of Toyota Kata skills, provide guidance on how and where to apply them to extract rapid Return on Training Investment (ROTI) and how to ensure sustainability of the new habits.
As supervisors and teams integrate the new practices in their daily work, they quickly get better at improving & coaching. They develop the skills and capability that enable your organisation to accelerate the pace of your Operations Excellence journey / Lean program and generate stable, capable processes that deliver exceptional operating results.