Learning to Think Scientifically
From the Frontlines to the Top in Your Organization
There is a saying, attributed to Niels Bohr but apparently a Danish proverb, that it is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. In the challenging and uncertain times of the early 21st century this remark comes off less witty and more real than ever. The array of changes we are now experiencing creates challenges, and opportunities, for individuals, teams, organizations, communities, societies. And when the environment shifts, our skills usually need to shift too. If we can’t predict what is around the corner, then a key skill is being able to learn and adapt to what appears.
Today a scientific mindset has become one of the most beneficial skills you and your team can have. Thinking scientifically helps us successfully navigate unknown territory. It takes us beyond initial assumptions to grasp and capitalize on previously undetected realities and find our way. Whoever you are and wherever you are, scientific thinking helps you reach even seemingly impossible goals.
Research Into a Less Visible Part of Toyota’s Way
Intrigued by Toyota’s nearly unbroken record of profitability (60 years and counting) I spent several years studying Toyota’s less visible management system. (Read about the research here). It turns out Toyota’s management approach revolves around developing a scientific mindset in their people, which gets applied in the pursuit of goals at every level in the organization. It’s a secret sauce that makes Lean work. To share the findings, I subsequently wrote the McGraw-Hill Toyota Kata series of books.
At the core of those books is a simple four-step scientific striving model, called the Improvement Kata (IK), which is a representation of Toyota’s approach to situations. Think of the Improvement Kata model as a civilian version of science applied to goals and challenges, that’s useful for anyone and any team.
Here’s the four-step model in brief: To reach a challenging goal you need to 1) have a sense of direction, 2) know where you are today, and 3) have a nearer-term target to focus your current efforts. With those items in place you can then 4) experiment to try to reach that next target. Take a step, learn, adjust, repeat. What are we learning? What does that mean for our next step? Things you learn along the way to this target inform setting the next target. Rinse, repeat. It’s a way to navigate with a compass instead of a map, because there is no roadmap for the challenging place you are trying to go.
Making it Real
Okay, that’s great in theory, but a model alone doesn’t change our habits and magically generate new skills. That takes practice. So to make the model transferrable there’s also a breakdown of the process into manageable elements that can each be practiced to form useful skills. Specifically, for each step of the IK model we developed simple, structured practice routines, which I call ‘Starter Kata,’ that help you get started with daily practice. It’s learning by doing, which is how theory can be turned into reality.
Kata, a term borrowed from the martial arts, contain small skill routines that, once practiced and turned into habits, get activated and used as needed in battle. The coach at first asks you to practice each small skill exactly as demonstrated, repeatedly until they are natural and almost unconscious. But that is not the end of learning, because Kata are only a kind of temporary scaffolding. To learn to face an opponent the patterns inherent in Kata become building blocks the fighter, or in this case the scientific thinker, strings together in various ways depending on the particular demands of each situation.
Practicing the Improvement Kata model via its Starter Kata, shown below, helps learners develop the skills and habit of scientific thinking. The goal is that with some structured practice the four-step scientific-thinking model – and HOW to do it – becomes internalized and natural… habitual. That is, the scaffolding disappears and you’re able to react scientifically in a variety of contexts. Pro Tip: you’ll know you’re getting to the ‘remove-the-scaffolding’ skill level when you find it hard to go back to the old way.
There are also Starter Kata practice routines to help you coach someone daily, who is practicing the Improvement Kata pattern: daily coaching cycles, a card with questions to ask to get the learner started, and a storyboard for the learner to show how they are currently thinking. Coaching is necessary to help a beginner move beyond their current habits, which otherwise tend to dominate. The coach gets the learner out of their comfort zone and into the learning zone, which is hard to do by yourself. As we all know, practicing something new is uncomfortable and easy to avoid.
A good forum for practicing scientific thinking, and helping to scale it in society, is the workplace, which I like to think of as the world’s largest classroom. Adults go there almost every day, there are real goals and processes to work on, and colleagues are available to coach one another. The scientific-thinking skills and habits of mind we practice at work then spill over to the rest of life, because mindset and habits are not things you turn off when you go home.
Workplace Application: The Front Line Practicing on Problems in Their Processes
One setting in the workplace where Toyota Kata gets practiced is frontline work teams reacting to and solving problems in their processes. The sense of direction here may simply come from a process standard, which defines what should normally be happening. The goal is to close the gap between the actual situation and the standard, and this may be all the sense of direction needed here, since these kinds of issues are often resolved in days. In limited ‘process problem’ situations the team might not need to define a separate next target condition.
For these type of problems, in addition to analyzing the current condition with data, an important routine is the so-called “experimenting record” Starter Kata. The experimenting record treats potential solutions as ideas to test. There are four boxes for each experiment. What is the idea? What do you predict will happen? Then after running the experiment, what actually happened? And what did you learn?
By treating “solutions” as ideas to test Learners begin to learn:
· No matter how certain we may feel, any idea needs to be tested, often on a small scale at first.
· How to conduct fruitful experiments — rapidly, cheaply, and safely.
· The fact that differences between what you expect to happen and what actually happens can be a useful source of learning.
A team may have an idea about what is causing a process problem and how to fix it, but reality will show if the idea is correct or not, giving the team the opportunity to learn and thereby move closer to an effective solution. And, they learn that ideas need to be tested.
It’s important to keep in mind, however, that practicing scientific thinking is not just about solving problems. It’s about developing a scientific mindset to give you a lifetime of benefits in an infinite range of situations.
Workplace Application: Raising the Level of Challenge by Practicing on Improvement
How to apply scientific thinking in striving for more complex challenges is not yet practiced by fixing individual problems in your current process as described above. The next plateau is to reach for a new level of performance, though typically still focused on an individual process. This requires higher-level skills for finding the way through more complicated territory toward a bigger challenge.
The sense of direction now often relates to broader, often customer-oriented goals. An important Starter Kata here is practicing how to set “target conditions” — interim goals or landing zones — one after another along the way. When you reach one target condition (or fail to reach it) you then define the next target condition in the direction of your overall challenge, based on what you just learned.
Scientific thinking in striving to improve process performance involves a longer cycle than just reacting to problems, often a few weeks, or more, but is usually quick enough to provide practice repetitions. Many learners, including senior executives, begin their practice at this level, perhaps in conjunction with the organization’s existing ‘continuous improvement’ efforts.
Workplace Application: Big Impact at the Senior/Strategy Level
Sometimes I see organizations make the mistake of thinking scientific-thinking practice with Toyota Kata is only for small goals at the front line. Although higher management tackles bigger, strategic goals they, too, face the very same requirements of having to navigate unchartered territory to achieve those goals. Turning strategy into reality often involves even more-distant goals, and even more uncertainty and unchartered territory, than for individual processes, making scientific thinking critical for the senior and middle levels.
Notice that the two previous practice domains — responding to process problems and improving processes — are focused inside the organization. For strategy-based improvement the senior level of an organization applies it to external goals and activity; using it to develop and deliver on the organization’s strategy in the marketplace. This area of practicing scientific thinking may even be the most powerful, because it frames both what needs to happen inside the organization and the organization’s outward success or failure.
Coaching is Necessary
Because existing habits are so strong, most of us learn a new skill best — whether music, sports, cooking, etc. — when we are shown the correct way to do a specific routine, try it, and get some feedback on where we are going wrong. Practicing scientific thinking is no different. For this reason, learning to think scientifically usually involves having a coach and daily coaching sessions, at least at the beginning. Coaching accelerates learning new skills and helps cement the scientific thinking pattern. Don’t worry, coaching-feedback sessions can be short, since you can really only work on one bad habit at a time.
Note, though, that coaching itself is also a skill that takes practice. Just because you are a manager doesn’t mean that you are able to coach scientific thinking. Toyota Kata’s Starter Kata questions for coaching, shown below, help you practice how to sense where a learner is struggling and how to reinforce the scientific pattern of the Improvement Kata every day.
For companies involved in “Lean management,” coaching scientific thinking supports Lean’s concept of ‘hoshin’ (also known as strategy development and deployment). Hoshin is an ongoing top-down and bottom-up dialog in the organization that helps align improvement efforts with larger objectives and fosters communication about what is being learned. In this back-and-forth dialog everyone in the organization ends up contributing to strategy.
Which brings me to the most important point of this article.
Scientific Thinking at All Levels
A scientific-thinking mindset becomes most powerful when it is used by everyone, top to frontline, in work, collaboration, and communication.
Adaptiveness takes a certain amount of decentralization. You can’t wait for every decision to be made by the boss, who is often too far removed from the actual situation anyway. However, making decentralized activity successful requires teaching everyone an effective and shared way of working, including the boss. Otherwise the boss won’t know what you’re talking about and will tend to swing back to old fashioned command and control. Practicing some form of scientific thinking is a key to empowerment that actually works well, and a significant factor in Toyota’s long-running success.
So what happens in your organization? Is practice of scientific thinking something that everyone, including senior leaders, is involved in, or is it limited to a few technical professionals and an employee involvement program at the front lines? To deal with the large, medium, and small challenges organizations today face, senior executives cannot simply set goals and delegate. They need to *both* ensure everyone practices working scientifically and stay aware of what is being learned as teams strive toward fulfilling the organization’s purpose.
As a scientific-thinking way becomes shared and begins to feel comfortable it becomes a common language, actually building culture. Scientific thinking becomes part of a team’s nervous system, coordinating how the team senses what is happening, how it takes action, and how it communicates. That’s where the power of scientific thinking lies: In collaboration that mobilizes and channels human cognitive capability.
There is power in making scientific thinking a way of acting, reacting, and interacting in your team, and Toyota Kata helps you do that.
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Thank you to Professor Jeffrey Liker for his assistance in preparing this article. If you are interested in learning more about Toyota Kata, an excellent quick read is the book Bringing Scientific Thinking to Life by Professor Sylvain Landry.
