The Coaching Manager -- Toyota Kata and Scientific Thinking

Just this month, Tilo Schwarz and Jeffrey K. Liker published a new book entitled Giving Wings to Her Team: A Novel About Learning to Coach the Toyota Kata Way, which presents a story about the benefits of becoming a coaching manager and how to get there. We follow the fictional character, named Denise, on a journey of discovery and skill development, as she moves beyond the tools and concepts of Lean and focuses on daily practice that helps her supervisors achieve their goals. It's about the Toyota Kata approach, which helps anyone develop and apply scientific thinking -- an exploratory mindset of curiosity and experimentation.

When I recently spoke with Tilo and Jeff, I had the chance to ask them some questions specific to the concepts discussed in their current book, and how those concepts apply to daily work.

Question 1: What are the benefits of becoming a coaching manager?

In general terms, a coach teaches, watches the student, gives appropriate feedback, and assigns drills to learn specific skills.  You can coach anyone on any skill.  In Giving Wings to Her Team, the central character Denise learns a specific type of coaching for a particular skill set -- scientific thinking.

We often think that to navigate today’s complex challenges we need decisive leaders with a clear roadmap that they rigorously implement.  In reality, the more complex the challenge the less a roadmap will be helpful.  Instead, we need adaptive problem-solving, testing ideas rapidly, and learning our way to goals.  In Toyota Kata, this way is called scientific thinking—focus on facts, formulate hypotheses, test ideas instead of making assumptions, reflect, and learn.

Toyota Kata teaches a coaching approach that enables your team to become increasingly adaptive, innovative, and resilient – fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement, so your team can meet their current challenges and be ready for more.

Question 2: How does Toyota Kata help you to become a coaching manager?

The term “kata” is used in Japanese martial arts and are the small skills the black belt teaches and then the student practices repeatedly, with feedback, until doing it the right way becomes a habit. Michael Jordan put it nicely: “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way.” 

In the novel, Denise faces the biggest challenges of her life as a manufacturing manager and is fortunate to get coaching help from Maggie who runs the local gym.  Maggie has studied and used Toyota Kata in her gym.  She helps Denise learn to work with her team to set big challenges they can relate to, study the current condition, set short-term target conditions, and then experiment toward these targets.  Denise struggles at first, but through practice, and Maggie’s coaching, she gets better and better at giving wings to her team.  

You can learn along with Denise how to become a coach of scientific thinking and by coaching your team to achieve goals that at first seem impossible.  In this book, we go beyond laundry lists of coaching best practices and demonstrate how to develop actual skills in yourself and your team.  

We hope our novel will help you start a learning journey of your own.

What are your experiences with Toyota Kata? Have you applied it in your organization? How has it benefited your managers and teams? 

The "Preceptor" and the Lean Transformation

Conrad Soltero and Patrice Boutier recently published an interesting book titled The 7 Kata: Toyota Kata, TWI, and Lean Training that explains why a mix of the skill sets that Training Within Industry (TWI) and the Toyota Kata (behavior patterns) teach is the ideal recipe to boost organizational synergies and enhance any Lean transformation.

In this book, the authors introduce a term -- preceptor -- that might be unfamiliar to readers of Lean literature. I asked Conrad if he could expound on how exactly he and Patrice define this term, and here is his repsonse:

After working in a healthcare environment, I became curious about its use in that industry sector. After a deeper understanding of its use in healthcare and delving a bit into the word’s origins, Patrice and I became convinced that it was an important concept that would convey a proper meaning for the English reader.

Any organization preparing for a Lean journey must understand that what they’re actually undertaking is an organizational transformation -- a true renovation of their entire culture. As creatures of habit, we know that transformation at this level is not trivial and many managers will be asked to not only do things differently, but quite possibly to lead for the first time in their careers.

When we say lead, we mean the ability to: prepare their charges for the transformation, demonstrate Lean skills (7 kata), teach the Lean skills, maintain the efficacy of the skills, and have a command of the tools of Lean and Six Sigma. This depth and breadth of required improvement knowledge exceeds certifications, colored and non-colored belts, and even formal education. Once this knowledge is acquired, however, a tacit understanding of the organization’s “precepts” becomes inherent and can be more easily spread throughout the organization. Hence the word preceptor was chosen to reflect the level of commitment that the organization’s leadership must prepare for.

The use of the word preceptor seeks to translate the word sensei into a descriptive English word. We understand from martial arts that a sensei is more than a trainer or teacher. Our understanding was that a sensei is also tasked with preserving the ethic or “precepts” of the given martial style. We felt the need to not only distinguish the differences between a kata coach and a preceptor, but also sought out a somewhat unfamiliar expression that might evoke curious investigation. Our primary concern was in convincing management that their Lean transformational efforts will fall flat without their practice and teaching of the three Lean skills (improvement, one-on-one JT, and problem solving).

Are any readers familiar the term preceptor in this context? Do you agree with Conrad's use of the word in relation to the term sensei?

The Visual Author

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a healthy and happy holiday season.

CRC Press, the parent company of Productivity Press, recently established a YouTube channel that will feature many Productivity Press authors discussing performance-improvement topics as well as methodologies explored in their respective books. I've decided to feature a sample of some recent videos in this blog post.

Patrice Boutier speaks about his forthcoming book The Seven Kata: Toyota Kata, TWI, and Lean Training here:


Robert Hafey discusses Lean Safety: Transforming your Safety Culture with Lean Management here:



Larry Fast discusses The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence: A Leader's Guide to Achieving and Sustaining Excellence here:
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Daniel Markovitz discusses A Factory of One: Applying Lean Principles to Banish Waste and Improve Your Personal Performance here:



Please let me know your thoughts on these videos as we plan to shoot more and suggestions are always welcome.