Giving Wings to Her Team

Developing constant improvement with the Toyota Kata - 

Toyota Kata is relevant to you, no matter if you do not work in Automotive or any manufacturing function. If you would like to improve your function, and learn how to hands-on coach improvements, read the article!  

This is a review of the novel "Giving Wings to Her Team" by Tilo Schwarz about the very useful Toyota Kata approach. 

Thorsten Speil

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^{* this article is 0 % AI and 100 % content written by myself *}

Business novels are a very nice way to approach a subject.

Toyota Kata is relevant to you, no matter if you do not work in Automotive or any manufacturing function. If you would like to improve your function, read on 

Until now, there was no novel about the very useful approach of Toyota Kata.

    Since Mike Rother developed the Toyota Kata approach, a very active community has developed around it world-wide. Based on practitioner posts and experiences e. g. on LinkedIn, it seems to work very well in improving companies of many industries and sizes.

    In the novel, the approach is applied, yes, to manufacturing, but also to Sales and Services. In short: the approach works anywhere. Any part of a company, any industry, IT, production, finance, ... you get the picture.

If you are already familiar with Toyota Kata, skip the next paragraphs and -> go to the review of the novel 

Otherwise, a short description on Toyota Kata: 

Toyota Kata: Learn to coach employees on real-work improvements as a manager! Hands-on, how to start and how to do it

    You want improvements, on the real work? Then you need to know how to do it.

The Toyota Kata is a set of practices for exactly this, developed by Mike Rother, one of the leading Lean experts, with long-standing research and practical experience at Toyota.

 You can read the following paragraphs in my own wording, or read/watch Mike Rother himself explain Toyota Kata:

• Mike Rother: The Role of Kata in Lean (5:30 min.)
• Mike Rother: The Toyota Kata - Introduction (Slides)

    Toyota is excellent at improvement and at developing their employees and managers. Mike Rother adapted the way that the best managers at Toyota he accompanied and interviewed coach their employees - and their direct report managers. Often, they couldn't really put into precise words what and how they coached. This very regular and intensive improvement coaching is not called "Kata" at Toyota. But it's a fitting analogy, since in martial arts, a Kata is a set of movements to practice over and over to get better, and then be able to do the next more complicated combination or variation.

    So Rother distilled these coaching and improvement patterns into a teachable format of "starter kata" steps/routines:

How to go about a concrete improvement as an employee in an ordered way, and how to guide and coach the improvement as a manager. So both sides learn along each other.

 As an advantage, it is not "just training" on some fictional processes or a mock project, simulation etc. - in real lean spirit, improvements are on the real processes. So they really help both the employees in their real work, and the manager/company to get real improvements.

     Since Mike Rother published Toyota Kata, there have been several books expanding on it. By Mike Rother himself: Toyota Kata Culture and The Toyota Kata Practice Guide.

Also, there's a very nice graphic novel/comic! Engaging the Team at Zingerman's Mail Order (2023 - link is to my review about it) - about the real experiences at Zingerman's company with the Toyota Kata.  

(Find the part about the novel "Giving Wings to Her Team" below the book-pictures!)

The novel - Giving Wings to Her Team 

The novel was written by Tilo Schwarz and Lean/Toyota "bedrock" author and researcher Jeffrey Liker, who both share long-standing relationships working together with Mike Rother.

 Tilo Schwarz has expanded on the coaching patterns, i. e. creating a "Kata Dojo" to enhance the coaching through coaching groups, exercises, the "KataJet" example and a set of Micro-Skills for improvement coaches. The novel contains a lot of concrete examples from Rother's Toyota Kata Practice Guide and Tilo Schwarz' own Kata Coaching Dojo Book.

Personally, I would probably recommend to read Giving Wings to Her Team first, to get a good understanding of how to start with Toyota Kata, explained through the story of Denise, the young manager at fictional "Goldberg Pumps" that have significant problems.

But it also works the other way around, i. e. first reading the Toyota Kata Practice Guide or the original Toyota Kata book.

The story is easy to follow. The three elements that I especially liked about the structure of the book were

• Entries in "Denise's Personal Learning Notebook" - as summaries of key points
• Use of sketches and diagrams of the layout of the Improvement Storyboard, Coaching Cards and many more
• Several QR-Codes leading to articles delving deeper into aspects of coaching, questions and approach - like the following, that you can try out! 

Example of QR Code with link to an article in the book 

On a funny note, while reading, I had the strong wish to tell Denise, the heroine of the book, to give Alex Rogo a ring - figuring he must be her uncle or something. He could have told her a thing or three, since he managed to jump the gun and save his production somewhere in the mid-eighties. Or probably ask Bill Palmer - he might be her elder cousin and learned a lot about how to save a company through improving IT performance around 2013. ;-)

At any rate, beware of characters called Dick Landry or Dick Murdoch ...

    Well, now I have the Kata Coaching Dojo Book on my reading list ... and Tilo Schwarz has some interesting resources available on his website.

I hope you liked this post! If so, please like and share it. 

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Giving Wings to Her Team