Welcome to our Site

Dear visitors,

We started this blog with the intent to describe and document our experiences in implementing Toyota Kata. There are of course many books about the subject and adding another theoretical work to the list is not our objective here. We believe that here is still room to tell the subjective stories about how things happen in real life and how it feels to implement Toyota Kata. The books will necessarily focus on the learnings and not on the day-to-day struggles, setbacks and small victories punctuated by occasional defeats that make up the implementation in any real situation of course. We sincerely hope that our blog entries will help any practitioner to see that others struggle in the same way he/she does and most of all, that even in defeat there is hope and that on the long term we are on a winning journey simply because the Toyota Kata is a way of working that has appeal at the shopfloor and in the management as well.

Before we begin, let us lay down a few principles we aim to stick to in this blog:

1. Honesty

We pledge to not make things look nicer than they were in our experience.  We think that talking about our own mistakes here is a necessary learning for us and for all the readers we might eventually have.

1. Respect

We shall never be disrespectful of others even though we take pains to anonymize our stories. People working at the shop floor or in plant management are no fools. Even though they might not grasp the benefits of a method or way of thinking our partners are smart people who are optimizing their own processes and situation. Given the historical and cultural constraints we all are subjected to, their optimization goals are time and again contrary to what we aim for in Toyota Kata, but it is not for lack of intelligence that people oppose what we want to achieve.

1. Truthfulness

All our stories are deeply rooted in real life. However, this being our subjective view, it would not be fair or respectful to make the involved persons recognizable for anyone of our potential readers, so we shall omit all details that might be too concrete and also merge our experiences from different times, countries and industries into one story. However, even with this redaction of our stories we shall be careful to not make anything up that is relevant to our learnings.

And finally on a personal note – in the last 5 years of implementing Toyota Kata in different countries and industries it happened to me time and again that I thought that what I just experienced in a given situation is something that should be put into a novel. It is this sense of marvel and joy that we would like to reflect in this blog, as we realized some time ago that we do not have the skills and the time to really write a novel. We sincerely hope, that you will enjoy these stories and maybe even find some learnings and encouragement as we did when reading some of the great authors of process improvement literature – the Northern Stars that we can aim for but definitely never reach .