Kata and Culture

“So low did we sink” -said a member of the Steering Committee looking gloomily at everybody. We were sitting at our first monthly report-out of a new Ci initiative at the headquarters of the company and I just placed a large clock with very visible bells on top of it on the table and set it to 15 minutes. We already explained the new rule, that we need to keep the schedule and we have too much to discuss so that everybody is limited to 15 minutes to react to the topic under discussion.

Of course this had a pre-history. As I explained the concept of the report-out to management my partner at the company told me rather sheepishly that this idea will never work with them because the top management has a tradition of drowning any useful discussion in endless speeches that meander from topic to topic. So, with the agreement of the CEO we introduced the 15 Minutes Rule and no-one objected, because, obviously no one imagined that we will enforce it. Seeing the alarm-clock made them realize that we mean business – hence the gloomy reaction.

Now, the interesting thing about this story is that it happened in Germany. Given the stereotypes about national cultures, no one would expect a German engineering company to object to a request to respect a schedule and to be precise about what they want to communicate. Yet, there we were.

I remembered the story because I just commented on a question in Linked-in about how national cultures fit into the Lean and especially into the Toyota Kata worldview. The argument generally goes in one of these directions : either

            - “The Japanese are special (collectivist, intelligent, have a special work-ethic … pick what you like)”  or

- “We (American, European, Hungarian … pick what you like) have a special culture “

and the sentence than ends always with “therefore Lean can not work in our company” or sometimes with “therefore we need to adapt Lean to our culture."

At the first sight this argument has a lot of merit. National cultures are truly quite different and we also see many Lean implementations that fail or get derailed , sometime spectacularly. In such cases it is really easy to fall back to stereotypes:  “Sure thing, these individualist Americans will never be able to implement Lean” or “Yeah, Germans will never accept to experiment with PDCAs” and such. 

But this is at the first sight only. Thinking about it a bit more deeply we will realize, that we have successful Lean implementations in the same country where we have the failures and even though people will gladly see huge regional differences in culture I really do not think that the culture in Salzkammergut for instance is so wildly different from that of Lower Austria that in one region Lean works well and in the other it does not. Also, I vividly remember a dear colleague of mine who during a tour in Japan asked at each factory we visited what they thought of the Toyota Production System and always got the same answer “Toyota? Those guys are crazy”. So, were they less or more Japanese than “those guys” at Toyota, I wonder.

Culture is important, no question, but I think we need to go one level deeper and look at the company culture. This will surely be influenced by the national culture to some extent, but it has many other components. Also, we never see “culture” as such, at work, what we see are habits and reflexes – and with this we arrive at the main point of our discussion.  As we, Toyota Kata practitioners, know and train, habits can be learned and un-learned, they can be trained and this is the most important contribution we can bring to a company. A typical Toyota Kata implementation would start with the description of a set of thought patterns and habits we would like to adopt and we get a consensus that these patterns and habits are indeed desirable for the company. Then, we start learning them by practicing them day-to-day and periodically check the progress, adapt and repeat until they become the new company culture.

It so happens, that the thought patterns and habits we start with, originated at Toyota. But we do not propose them because they come from Toyota, we propose them because they are worthy and desirable objectives independently of where we want to adopt them.  No one would ever use the argument “we need to involve all who have subject matter expertise in searching for the causes of a mistake because Toyota does this and it works for them” . We propose these habits and thought patterns because they are optimally suited for a modern company irrespective of whether Toyota adopted them first or not.

Of course, changing habits is hard, no doubt about it. The more ingrained those habits are, the harder it will be to change them. But culture is not destiny. If we know the direction, we know the next step and we persevere eventually we will reach our target condition and as we know even the first steps will already bring improvements.

A year after that first gloomy meeting at the German company, we had another meeting to review our progress . We closed 14 improvement projects that year, the best one alone brought more the 900 000 Euros yearly benefit. More importantly, we had an enthusiastic following among the engineers and first level managers and we were flooded with proposals for new projects and requests for support in projects people started by themselves. So low did we sink? No one asked that question, ever after that first year and our initiative is alive and well today, after more than 10 years.