Scientific Thinking — An All-Purpose Ingredient for Your Team

Scientific thinking is an ingredient, not an overall business movement or crusade like Agile, Lean, etc. As such, ST can be added to good effect.

“Agility is the ability of our organization to renew itself, sense, learn, adapt, and change quickly, execute at speed, and thrive in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment while living our values & leadership behaviors, understanding the trade-offs and maintaining a focus on the customer.”

An American manufacturing executive sent me that description of Agile, the well-known approach that originated in the software development world. Judging from the description, it sounds like a timely and fitting approach for the unpredictable conditions and multiple challenges we face today.

But I’m also old enough to have seen that tree before. Many big movements in the business world — Lean, Agile, Lean Startup, etc. — seem to pass through a similar arc, with each landing at a plateau that’s marked by insufficient deployment. Initially the insider-group is justifiably excited about all the good that can be achieved, but ends up disappointed when the approach doesn’t spread beyond the in-group, gets misunderstood and fragmented, fails to evolve in context, and falls short of its bright promise.

Working in industry out of college I encountered my first crusade, in the Quality movement that formed around the ideas of W. Edwards Deming et.al. Later I got into the Lean movement, which formed around descriptions in the 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World (TMTCTW). It didn’t hurt that by then I had shifted into manufacturing research and had some connections into Toyota, the progenitor of what TMTCTW called “Lean.” But, eventually — here we go again — Lean was not catching on as expected. I moved on, to a path to which my own research was pulling me … research that was triggered because something was obviously still missing from the Lean movement.

What was missing was an invisible underlying construct at Toyota. We studied Toyota again, this time seeking to understand (a) the less-visible managerial and leadership mindset & behavior behind their success with improvement and adaptation, and (b) how transmission of such mindset & behavior might be done more successfully. At about the same time, brain science research — largely about habits and habit change — meshed perfectly with our findings, which was encouraging. The research results were published in 2009.

Overall our finding was that Toyota’s success with continuous improvement and adaptiveness stems to a significant degree from daily application-practice of a practical form of scientific thinking throughout the organization, with managers acting as coaches. (Note: Training & doing are combined at Toyota.) Basically, they teach everyone how to navigate through unpredictable territory toward challenging goals, again and again, by thinking and working scientifically. At Toyota this is a part of what has led to exactly what the executive was saying about Agile:

“…the ability of our organization to renew itself, sense, learn, adapt, and change quickly, execute at speed, and thrive in a rapidly changing, ambiguous, turbulent environment while living our values & leadership behaviors, understanding the trade-offs and maintaining a focus on the customer.”

So. That’s a great description of agility, but how do we actually develop that kind of skill, mindset, habit … culture … in a team or organization (and maybe avoid that disappointing plateau)? What did we learn about that?

Turns out it’s basically the same process as in sports and music: daily chunks of coached, deliberate practice to hone skill elements, while working on meaningful goals. Funny, I’m imagining brain scientists, sports coaches, and music teachers reacting to that statement by saying … “well, duh.” We change our habits through deliberate practice, a bit at a time, and at the start it often takes some coaching too.

You guessed it, what I landed on became known as “Toyota Kata” (TK), a method of deliberate practice to develop a practical, everyday form of scientific thinking in any team or organization. Here are two things I like about TK and scientific thinking:

• TK is about practicing small routines that build up scientific thinking skill and mindset over time. That step-by-step approach is closer to how our brain actually modifies itself than encountering a whole movement at once.
• TK and scientific thinking play well with others. Scientific thinking is an ingredient — a common element — that makes nearly any business approach more effective. It’s not a Problem-Solving, Quality, Lean or Agility movement, but more of a tweak that makes you, your team, and your organization a better problem solver and more agile. TK doesn’t take away from your business initiatives, it makes them work better. In other words, scientific thinking is not a replacement for what you are doing, but it can be added to help you be more successful at what you are already trying to do.

It has been great to see more and more people pick up on how adding practice of scientific thinking can have a significant impact in business, education, and our personal lives.

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Addenda (Aug. 4–5, 2023):

Haha, here’s a neat way to put it, from Jennifer Ayers: “Thanks, Mike. Great read and great point about it being an extra ingredient vs. a new meal.”

And a similar good one from Sam Morgan: “The article gives you a taste of “the ingredient” without having to eat the whole buffet.”

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Looking for a definition of “scientific thinking”? Here’s one: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/KATA_Files/Scientific_Thinking.pdf.

Interestingly, the ‘scientific method’ and the Lean community’s ‘PDCA/PDSA’ do not describe a way of thinking, which is not suprising. We tend to focus on methods like those rather than on thought. Why? Perhaps because methods are easy to depict, while a way of thinking is quite difficult (maybe even impossible?) to nail down and describe. However, our ways of thinking (i.e., our paradigms) tend to dominate and thus may be more powerful than a method can be.

I like to think of many methods as practice routines to help us develop our thinking. Perhaps if we view methods more this way we wouldn’t try so much to ‘implement’ or ‘teach’ methods, but utilize them more for practice. Toyota Kata, for instance, is a method designed to help you and your team develop a scientific way of thinking. Then you and your team will have an intrinsic superpower!