The Toyota Kata Practice Guide: Practicing Scientific Thinking Skills For Superior Result in 20 Minutes A Day

by Rother

Brand New

Genres: Management, Business, Leadership

312 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Sicofonia · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Toyota Kata Practice Guide picks up where Toyota Kata ended ten years ago and focuses on the practical aspects of implementing the same scientific thinking pattern in an organization.
In order to do so, it proposes a set of Starter Kata (which are a set of practices to bootstrap each step of the process) for getting familiar and practice the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata

Sadly, Toyota Kata does not deliver on its promise. The content of this book could have been summarized and published in a series of blog posts or LinkedIn articles and saved us time and resources. It is overly repetitive, and if you have already read Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results then you won't learn much else other than seeing the templates people can use to plan, execute and coach experiments.

As things are, Rother already has plenty of free material on the web (see https://www.katatogrow.com/) to teach this stuff yet he doesn't mention any of this on the book which is baffling.

In the end I was left with the impression that this Toyota Kata thing is no more than a glorified version of the GROW coaching model (https://www.mindtools.com/pages/artic...) which apparently has been around since the 1980s!!!

I find it hard to recommend this book. If you have read Toyota Kata then that is all you needed to know. Make us of the free resources online to practice and teaching it otherwise.

[Ramesh Ruthrasekar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Skip this and read 4DX

+ Importance of Managers as coach, Motivating top down a scientific thinking by asking the 5 Kata questions, encouraging it as daily practice to develop it as a habit is a take away

- The take away could have been written in one chapter and not a 300 page book. This book does not work as a standalone. May be it complements the author's first book on Kata. Even so, it feels Kata as one another gimmick to squeeze out a bestseller from an over-mystified Toyota.
- There are no case studies, examples. The why, what and how questions are still unclear
- Kata fails to stand out on purpose as in a 4DX for visual lead/lag metric driven goal reaching or a design of experiments or FMEA for process or product design, PDCA in Lean or project management. The application is not clear

I love Mike Rother for coloured book series from Lean enterprise institute which were revolutionary - Learning to see, Create continuous flow

[Jussi Mäkelä · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very practical advice on how to apply the Toyota Kata. Plenty of new insights and take-aways for me at least.

[Bjoern Rochel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good and detailed book that walks you through the whole process of Toyota Kata from learner and coach perspective. For knowledge work, especially software engineering the starter kata section is too manufactoring focussed. Jesper Boegs Level Up book helps greatly there. Without that, it would have been hard for me to grasp how to transition practices over to my world. On the other hand Jespers book lacks an in depth discussion of the coach practices with all their pitfalls. So in the end I probably needed to read both to get a good grasp.

I like the overall idea and for me it fills also a gap where usually Agile falls short (how exactly does continues improvement look like and towards what do we improve). The practices seems sane, well grounded and methodical. I like that.

I'm willing to give this a shot in my work area. Let's see where this might take me/us

[Valentin · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's a very good book written in a very accesible vocabulary. It gives you hand's on instruction on how to start practicing the schientific thinking aproach that Toyota is doing.
what I didn't like is that scientific thinking is very similar with Agile and Lean and design thinking and at least for me it seemed through the book that is presented as something new.

[Abby Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are trying to start applying Kata yourself or within your business, this book is fantastic! There are many great strategies to help not only learn yourself but also how to coach others to learn to apply this method in practice. I’ve found that it helped me improve my Kata skills which in turn helped me coach others better. I’m a Kata believer!

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es practico, pero con la mitad del libro seria suficiente.

Aveces es mejor acortar

[Gordon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like most Agile books this one professes that if you follow it to a "T" initially, learn the process, and how to track it you drastically improve your work processes. While I don't doubt the majority of this any framework needs to be highly flexible and the initial approach in this book is not. Why it has many positive takeaways and practices that I was already closely following the rigor isn't quite what I was looking for. For those unfamiliar with Kata and Agile practices this may be an excellent starter guide but for our process/program which is already working well this book only had a few worthwhile takeaways, namely approaches to coaching, focusing on the process, and stating goals in a manner where you have already reached them.