In this session, Mike Rother will discuss the research findings behind the books," Toyota Kata," the "Toyota Kata Practice Guide," and "Toyota Kata Culture."
Since the publication of "Toyota Kata" in 2009, many organizations in many countries are now practicing IK/CK, to develop scientific thinking skills that don't come naturally to us:
• Improving in a strategic direction, rather than making random improvements.
• Systematically observing and measuring to deeply understand the current condition.
• Defining specific future conditions predicted to lead to desired outcomes.
• Going beyond implementation to experimentation.
Developing new ways of thinking means practicing targeted behaviors daily. Practicing IK/CK is a way of developing scientific skills and mindset, for achieving challenging goals, that gets integrated into the normal daily operation of a team or organization. Kata are structured routines that you practice deliberately, especially at the beginning, so their pattern becomes a habit and leaves you with new skills that you can build on.
Researcher and author Mike Rother will run a hands-on exercise that introduces the scientific-thinking pattern of the Improvement Kata. After this session, you will be able to run the exercise yourself.
Scientific thinking is a basis for creativity and successfully pursuing seemingly unattainable goals. The Improvement Kata (IK) is a four-step scientific striving pattern that is practiced in many business organizations. It makes scientific thinking a teachable skill anyone can learn.
The Kata in the Classroom exercise (KiC) has participants go through each step of the Improvement Kata pattern in a hands-on activity. Participants work in 5-person teams on a number of self-generated iterations to complete a small puzzle. Participants follow the Improvement Kata pattern to (1) face a challenge, (2) measure where they are, (3) establish a next goal and (4) experiment toward that goal in three-minute rounds.
After this exercise you will be able to run the KiC exercise yourself.
Takeaways include:
• Deeper understanding of the Improvement Kata pattern, through applying it in a hands-on way.
• Ability to run the KiC exercise in your own organization.
• The KiC exercise can be shared with regional educators. It is being used in many schools.
Mike Rother is an engineer, a researcher, teacher and speaker on the subjects of management, leadership, improvement, adaptiveness, and change in human organizations. He has been a member of the Industrial Technology Institute (Ann Arbor), the University of Michigan College of Engineering, the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (Stuttgart), and the Technical University Dortmund.
Mike Rother has been in hundreds of companies and is well-known for his book, "Toyota Kata," which explains a means for developing, activating and mobilizing human potential in a way that makes scientific working a daily habit. His previous book, "Learning to See," is known around the world as the standard explanation and user guide for value stream mapping.
