The TK Research University of Michigan（TK研究密歇根大学）.pdf

About the Toyota Kata Research By Mike Rother, Ann Arbor, July 2014 The research that led to the book Toyota Kata ran from 2004-2009. The objective was to gain a deeper understanding of how Toyota manages people in order to achieve continuous improvement and adaptation, and what it will take to develop that in non-Toyota organizations. The research was driven by these two questions: 1. What are the unseen managerial routines and thinking that lie behind Toyotas success with continuous improvement and adaptation? 2. How can other companies develop similar routines and thinking in their organizations? My colleagues and I began by interviewing Toyota people, but it quickly became apparent that they have difficulty articulating and explaining the patterns of their thinking and routines. I believe this is because such patterns represent the customary way of doing things in an organization and are thus somewhat invisible to those carrying them out. This may be true for managers in any management system. So we had to shift to figuring it out ourselves by experimenting in factory and managerial settings. Five companies agreed to provide long-term test beds, and several additional companies became sites for shorter, specific trials. The experimenting involved applying technical and managerial Toyota practices and paying particular attention to what did not work as intended, investigating why, adjusting accordingly and trying again. During that six-year investigation process I also periodically met with Toyota- group sites, Toyota suppliers and Toyota employees to discuss our interim findings and ask for comment, which would often influence the character of our next trials. The Improvement Kata Model After numerous iterations and observations we began to see a pattern of thinking and behavior in Toyota managers approach, which was different from our prevailing Western command-and-control managerial routines.