Why are PDCAs so hard?

Introducing Toyota Kata to a plant has two major components - the Improvement Kata and the Coaching Kata. The common root of both is the assumption that people working in the Toyota Kata way are PDCAs to work on problems and also are continuously being coached on how to improve thinking and working with PDCAs. This seems to be straightforward enough - after all what can be easier then to coach people to define a target first, list the impediments and then to pick one impediment at a time and start experimenting to eliminate it?

Accordingly, by introducing Toyota Kata we spend a lot of effort to establish routines and rituals to allow a continuous flow of identified problems towards the practitioners who will then solve them, with the help of the Kata Coaches. Of course, we also explain and train the PDCA method but compared to the effort spent to develop the rituals of problem discovery this effort is definitely minor. The logic behind this is that once people see the effectiveness of the PDCA method, and the simplicity of it, they will just start to apply it everywhere, even without our help. And this is indeed something that happens some of the time, people enthusiastically picking up the method and apply it for some time. What we missed is that for every enthusiastic adopter we have several trained practitioners who either apply PDCAs formally or not at all.

The formal version is, for me, the case where a PDCVA is closed in one cycle : "- We already knew what we wanted to do" - is the answer with a wink, when we ask how come it all went so fast. It is an uncomfortable position for the coach to be in - should one explain why it is an abuse of the method to just use it to smuggle in an already decided solution and to pretend to do Toyota Kata? Or is it better to let this pass hoping that next time it will be better?

I tried both ways and both are problematic. If I accept the fake PDCA chances are the same people will never run another one. "We do not have a solution"- will be a frequent excuse. It is in a way legitimate, the coach agreed to use a PDCA when it was really faked so why would he object when we cannot fake it? If the one cycle fake PDCA is not accepted by the coach, then people will feel unappreciated and see PDCAs as a bureaucratic method where the solution is way less important then the right number of PDCA cycles. And again, the result is that they will return to the old, simple methods of solving or not solving problems.

The other option is to not run PDCAs at all but to hold on the traditional way of solving problems. Of course, many of the problems raised in the boards have been known and tried in the traditional way and the solution failed. This will lead to more frustration and will in the end endanger the whole Toyota Kata initiative, as the problems from the boards will stay open forever. In some cases these problems will be solved because the coordinator uses his/her clout to achieve something that the other team members could not. This will reinforce the feeling that the teams are helpless and need higher ups to solve any problem they have - definitively not the message we want to spread.

So, why are PDCAs so hard to apply? Thinking about it I realized that here, again, we have to change habits and ingrained reflexes. But this time we are up against a habit we all learned in the elementary school, namely : "If you don't know the answer don't raise your hand". This rule served all of us well in the school but also in professional life. In one of his Kata trainigs Mike Rother says that we are all waiting for the day when a politicoan will say : "This is the objective we all want to reach. We do not know HOW to reach it but we have a great method that will enable us to reach our objective". He also says that such a politician would not be elected today. Now imagine a discussion with your manager, where you say this exact sentence. In the best of the cases, in a traditional compüany, you would be sent away to come back when you have a precise timeline and a commited budget to solve the problem. So, obviouisly, you will not be supported to work with a PDCA. (I know this because I tried this way of thinking and although we were ultimately successfull the comment from my boss was "man, are you crazy? I would never have taken such huge risks."

This means , there are several good reasons why people will not jump to the chance of doing PDCAs, especially not if left alone. To change these long-term habits takes at least as much effort as the introduction of the daily board meetings. We have to make working with PDCAs, that is knowing an objective without having an idea of how to get there, normal and accepted. This message needs to be repetead again and again and positive feedback offered as often as possible. And, remarkably, this feedback needs to be given not only for the successfull PDCAs but even more forcefully for those that did the right thing but failed for some reason.

Who should give this feedback? Of course, first and foremost the Lean coach, but this will not be enough. We do not want to create a Lean subculture that is at odds with the company culture, so the Lean coordinator has a huge reposibility here to work with management and to convince them to praise PDCAs that do the right thing even if they fail and also to frown upon ad-hoc immediate solutions even if they succeed. And this every single time when an occasion arises and for a long time.

People used to say that it takes a whole village to raise a child. As we learn it every day it takes a whole plant to make PDCAs a success.