121: Tracy Defoe
Listen to full episode:
Joe Krebs speaks with Tracy Defoe about Kata and the Kata community in general . She explains what makes the Improvement and Coaching Kata (a.k.a. Toyota Kata) so interesting for any kind of improvement. She has actively coached software / IT teams at Volvo and Volkswagen in using Kata and can draw from a wealth of information. Her background however spans across many more industries. She is the organizer of Kata Geek Girls and the Kata School Cascadia, both communities that spread knowledge and experiences among Kata enthusiasts.
Transcript:
Joe Krebs 0:20 Welcome to another episode of Agile FM today I'm here with Tracy Defoe from the learning factor, I believe in Canada because your domain name is the learning factor.ca.
Tracy Defoe 0:35 that's right. I'm in Vancouver, Canada on the Pacific coast.
Joe Krebs 0:39 Fantastic. Tracy, we want to talk a little bit about a lot of things here today, we want to talk about Kata. We want to talk about maybe bring a little bit order into the various kinds of terms that are floating around and getting possibly the Agile community a little bit, you know, warmed up to Kata thinking, and most importantly, where they can go and you know what's out there because you are not only a community builder, you are building
community builders, right. So there is a lot going on in your in your work before we get started though, because I myself have been working a lot lately. In recent, let's say 12-24 months on something that's called the Agile Kata that is not the topic necessarily of today, even though we could explore that, right? We're really talking about the core of the Agile Kata, which is the improvement kata, the coaching kata things that were published a while back by Mike Rother. So just to give it a little orientation here now first Tracy, the learning factor. Just curious, your company name what is the learning factor is somehow related to Kata and Kata thinking Lean thinking.
Tracy Defoe 1:57 No, the learning factor greatly predates when even my learning about Canada but my background is in education. So I have a master's degree in adult education, curriculum actually an instruction. And so I was doing I've been for a long time been doing consulting in adult learning and I'm actually a specialist in what people learn at work. So most of the time, if you once you've left school 75% of new things you learn, you'll learn at work and I'm a specialist in workplace learning. Particularly I'm interested actually in what you might think of as frontline learning so blue collar learning, literacy, numeracy, technology advancements. All of that took me into of course, then helping supervisors and managers and they're the people who introduced me to Lean and through that. I was in a good position when Mike Rother was first publishing his first book, to get involved in the Kata community here in the Pacific Northwest where there was actually Mike did some of his research here in
the West Coast. So I got to meet some people about 2010. Who helped me get passionate about the Kata.
Joe Krebs 3:08 Yeah, that was the Toyota kata by Mike Rother.
Tracy Defoe 3:10 Toyota Kata Yeah, the original Toyota kata research book was in 2009, I think.
Joe Krebs 3:15 Right? So, and since then you have obviously stepped into this. In the Kata world, you did a lot of coaching. That's my understanding, you have worked with some companies out there also, although on the software side, we might have some listeners right now, on this on this podcast, you might be thinking, Lean and Toyota factoring. There are companies out there that are using this for for other means to produce something different than a car.
Tracy Defoe 3:44 Well, the cool thing for me about the improvement kata and coaching Kata is they're just a really excellent model for continuous learning, and learning together and having a non hierarchical relationship between managers and workers or between the coach and the learner. Basically, we teach coaches to listen and ask questions, and not to tell people what they think the answers are. And that's really great training for anybody who's in a management position or a coaching position,
Joe Krebs 4:18 right. And those two cutters, they really belong to each other. So the improvement kata, the coaching kata, I mean that we're using the word kata a lot, right? It doesn't exist in plural. It's my understanding. It's just kata. But it's these two things that really go hand in hand.
Tracy Defoe 4:35 Yeah, the word Kata is a Japanese word that comes mostly you would hear it from martial arts, but it's used in other things and it has two meanings. The I guess nobody's gonna see this but the I have it on a pin. The Japanese characters mean both the method and a way so it's, it's a way to be but also the way to learn to be and we If we save, you know, everybody always talks about the Karate Kid movie where the guys teaching him wax on wax off. And then that turns out to be the move that helps him win his match or something like that. But also, if you practice the improvement kata, it's a method to learn more scientific thinking patterns, right? So what leaves behind is a mindset. And on the coaching side, if you practice the coaching kata, it leaves behind a kind of curiosity and discipline around not talent. So turning from a command and control kind of coach are telling you no, do this do that to the kind of person who's invested in developing people and seeing other people do stuff. So I think the the Mike Rother, the author of the Toyota kata books always says, It's not about the Coaching Questions. It's not about the improvement kind of steps. It's the mindset and the skills that they leave behind.
Joe Krebs 6:02 Right, this is fascinating. They did improvement Kata is something that reminded me when I started way, way back with something called Scrum in the Agile community. And we often hear in the community. And sometimes I say that to is that Scrum is easy to teach, you know, but hard to do. The first time when I came across the Kata, it felt very similar to that. So it's like that is is it's very simple steps. We don't have to go into the details. It's a great improvement kata, it's four, or sometimes five steps, depending on how you see it right. But what are your What is Your Experience? Why is it that some companies, what are they struggling with when they are trying to use the product the first time,
Tracy Defoe 6:46 the first step of the improvement Kata is to understand the direction or the challenge that you need to go. And an enormous number of companies don't have a clear strategic direction, or a clear business strategy that people know. So that already says, you know, you have the benefit of everybody understanding where they go is that they can align their actions and move together like towards it, and I do my part of that job, and you do yours and we end up somewhere better. So the first step sounds easy. Oh, you know, your your your executive suite people will give you your strategic direction very clearly, and you will understand what to do. That doesn't happen very much. So that first one already, people end up having to craft their own challenge. Or guess what they think based on maybe a statement or a five year KPI or something a ey performance indicator, you know where they're supposed to go. So that's step one. But imagining now we have that, then the second step, which is to grasp your current condition, is to get a good look at where are we now? So it's like, where do we want to be in six months? Or whatever? a month? Where are we now? And that takes process analysis skills, or some way of asking, answering the questions. How is how am I performing over time? What are the steps in our process? How are we measuring it, etc. So there are sort of skills built in to each step. So that's where we going that's the challenge. Where are we now? How are we doing that's during condition, target condition? Where do we want to be in a little while, so usually a week or two. And that, again, there's a bit of skill around having a good look at where we are now and saying apples to apples, like direct comparison, what we want to change how we're doing, that we hypothesize will give us a different result. And it is, I think it is the structures, all of that is before you start experimenting. So you know, you know where you are, and you know where you want to be in 10 days or two weeks, then the next coaching question. And the next step really is to say, what do we believe is in our way, what do we perceive is in the way, and it's very important that they don't have to be factually or data proven to be in your way at first when you list them all down? Because confronting your perceptions is really, really cool. Yeah, you know, like, it's really often people will write down all these things that they think are in their way. And then as you say, Okay, pick one. And then let's work on that one. What do you want to learn about it? What what test or change do you want to run? After you've tried to run the way you think you can run you're gonna see all these obstacles we call them obstacles are things in your way. And mostly, we want to learn about them. So people sort of that part always make sense to people pick something, kick it, see what happened and make a change, run it. And then of course, the last step of that fourth stage is to reflect on what you learned. Right? And this is what Mike always says the writing it down and reflecting is what makes it scientific, because we use that to inform our next step. Step or next kicker, the obstacle. But I find many, many people are not very comfortable with reflection. Like they're, they're literally not used to it. And they'd rather take a swing, you know, just try again, without literally saying what is the data show us is happening? What do our observations show us is happening and what our learning show us is happening? And that's where I think the Yeah, can you talked about them being a pair, I always think of them as a duo, the improvement kata and coaching kata, but it's kind of like a food term for me, you know, they like they go together. And I think that the powerfulness of the structure is partly that it's, it gives you a lot of structure. So you don't there's a lot of room for creativity there. Because a lot of things are held in place. Right? The questions are known, you know, what questions you will be asked, the steps aren't known. And so in between those things, there's time to listen and learn. But also, I think people don't know how to reflect they literally are perplexed that you're asking them, Did you learn anything else? What did you learn about what you thought was going to happen? What did you learn about your process? What you learned about your team? What did you learn about your assumptions? And people are like, Oh, my gosh, she's just keeps asking me this stuff. But in about two weeks, or three weeks, people are like, piling on what they learned, like, they're really understanding that you want to see what they learned.
Joe Krebs 11:33 What I think one point you just mentioned, was like data too. Sometimes some answers to those questions you just said, right, before a newcomer to kata, maybe something like I don't have any answers for those questions, right? Because I haven't collected the data points before. I have no reference point. But I think that's what the kata also takes care of right? It's, over time people want because they know the questions as you said, right, and they will be preparing for those things in a different way. So the kata has a behavioral change.
Tracy Defoe 12:06 Yeah, in a mindset change, but also we It comes with what we call starter kata, or prescriptive tools to use in the beginning. So that you, you are like not leaving anything out. And also the starter kata will tell you like, what is what do we expect to see? We use a storyboard which is like a giant A3. I don't know if you use A3, but it's a giant A3. And is there was derived during my process research from the A3 that he saw at Toyota, and the conversations around the A3 that became the coaching kata. But the, you know, what do I expect as a coach to see in current condition, I expect to see a run chart, a process diagram, some process metrics, how do we know how this is working? When it's working? How do we know outcome? How did it what happened when it was over? And some description of the conditions that this was happening under which we call process characteristics, but the people I have coached who came from agile and I don't know if this is common, or if it was idiosyncratic, had never done a run chart?
Joe Krebs 13:07 Yes, that's right.
Tracy Defoe 13:08But to teach her how to do the run chart the first week, and at first, she didn't see any value in having each time what was the what was the number and making a little chart, I'm making W's in the air with my hands down, up and down. But in fact, the pattern like once you have some data points, we start to look at the pattern, and what can you learn from the pattern. And making it visual means we all agree, this is what it looks like. And it's it's a simple visual tool, pen and pencil, you can do it in software, but you can also just do it with a pencil and a piece of paper.
Joe Krebs 13:47 Yeah. So that's very interesting. So you have applied this agile kata, we have probably a lot of listeners here from agile, coming from IT groups, not exclusively, there is a lot of business agility. But you have applied these kind of concepts in the context of software engineering.
Tracy Defoe 14:06 I've coached people who worked in software a couple times, actually. And there's their starting positions and their strengths and their habits. Were kind of expanded by learning the kata that gave them a bigger look. But like I said, never seen a run chart before. And it's not unusual in manufacturing to sometimes run into people who have never kept track of how this is performing over each trial in a chart, but that's basically what a run chart is.
Joe Krebs 14:40 Yeah. Very interesting, right. So just come back to my in-coming kind point about the Agile Kata, right? So this is being utilized. And there's like an agile culture, as you know, and it's it's all around and surrounding this. So this is a very interesting thing, and I'm pretty sure the listeners were now make connections between those four steps. You just write to the Agile world because that is really what we're dealing with in Agile transformations, or what people are talking about in business agility. When I , many, many years ago, is probably 20 years ago, when I getting more and more involved in the Agile community. It was a grassroots movement. It agile, right? So everything was like bottom some people did it. And there was like, a lot of polished kinds of things. It was a lot of sharing of experiences, but it has like to have this energy. I'm sensing this in the Kata community too.
Tracy Defoe 15:39 Yes, we always say the Kata community is a sharing community. And lots and lots of people will share their stuff with you or present or help you. The reason I got so much help because I'm remember, I'm just an adult education teacher from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, but the people across the American state line in Washington State House ROIC and Mark Rosenthal for two. They were people who were practicing before way before I was for sure. And they just opened their doors to me and how let me hang around his factory and see how he was using it every day with 13 Different storyboards on the go. And Mark taught me what I a lot of what I know about process analysis and how to how to manage the started was up. And board and things like that. And I didn't pay them. They were just community members who said you want to learn come and learn. And I think the Kata has a pretty because we're enthusiastic. And because we see that it's, we say it's a meta skill, that scientific thinking part you can apply to lots of places in your life. And so we're happy to share that with people.
Joe Krebs 16:53 Yeah. And you in particular, right. So I just want to ask, because you're very humble here right now in all the work you do. And in the in the community space, there is even a club. There is a I call it a club, but I'm not invited to. It's the Kata
Tracy Defoe 17:09 Girl Geeks, yes, yes, no, unless you identify as female. We don't ask any questions on screening, okay, but I in 2020, m plus C. So early COVID days, I was contacted by a young woman in the UK, well, younger than me, sorry, Gemma. And she had was trying to learn the Kata and was really confused. And she reached out somebody on LinkedIn said, You should talk to Tracy Defoe. And so she called me and I said I would coach her. So I coached her remotely. And at the end of she wanted to be a coach. But firstly, we really do say in the Kata community, be a learner before your coach. So getting some experience as the person answering the questions, reading the storyboard, studying your own process, studying your thinking and stuff. So we do that first. So I coached her through I'm gonna say maybe it was May, June, July, August, or something like that. And she said, Okay, now I'm a coach. And I said, No. Now you need more practice.
And so we decided to invite some more women into our group, and that group grew up to be Kata Girl geeks, we have a website and a home we meet every Monday, we have members from, oh, I'm gonna say Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the UK, Canada, the United States, all the way through, like, as many time zones as we can think. And we actually match up people. In addition to teaching people, we match them up for free coaching. So we've had many, many, many coaches and second coaches go through and and we're think we're pretty good at turning new learners into coaches fairly quickly. One month or six months or so for most
Joe Krebs 18:53 people, I'll definitely put the link into the Show page so that people can click on it and, you know, possibly read more about this. And
Tracy Defoe 19:01 I'm not gender centric. So I also have a group for men and women. That which is actually older than kata girl geeks. So it's called Kata school Cascadia. There are Kata schools all over the world. They're regionally based. Cascadia is a term for the west coast of North America. It is an earthquake zone and a biological song. And it includes Canada and the US. And since since we were a group of people in Canada in the US before we became a kata school, that's why we took that name. And we meet every Friday for free with a drop-in zoom. There's two there's one for beginners and one for coaches and we just try to bring the community together. And then we also offer some trainings or conference. We have a conference in July 2022. And we have online training where people can sign up in
and learn We also do some free training. And I will occasionally match people up with a coach if they can't find a coach. So we're just out there trying to build the community. And our mission is to rock people's worlds.
Joe Krebs 20:12 That was the intriguing part. For me when I first really came across the car several years ago as like, I write about it, I found it intriguing, interesting. And then I went on websites, and I learn more, etc. And what's very interesting, is it is this helping to bring people into this topic. And as you said, I made It's the passion I make since then, have been very much here we are. Oh, here we are. Exactly.
Tracy Defoe 20:41 Oh, well, I think that actually started with Mike Rother, he made although he sells a couple of books, he made a lot of material available under Creative Commons. And so following that lots of people who have subsequently created new material or new downloadable things, we offer them under Creative Comments. So they're usable. You can use them for non commercial use. Yeah.
Joe Krebs 21:05 You just use the word online and online help and bringing people together in different time zones. When I looked at some videos on YouTube, about cycle, coaching cycles, etc, etc. A lot of these things were in person in these videos, because they were pre pandemic, what do you think has changed with a Kata? If so, anything with a workplace, the coaching relationship, the Kata itself? Do you see anything in the last few years on the improvement Kata?
Tracy Defoe 21:35 I had? I had the opportunity to remotely coach somebody in 2017, I think. And we were using WebEx. And I'm only laughing because yeah, it was funny. It was terrible. And I actually didn't think it would work to remotely coach because I thought, the body language and the together at the board that this really meant something. But to my surprise, it did actually work. And so we were using, I started remote coaching people then after that, if they asked, there's a lot of advantages to the remote coaching, if you're, if you're paying for coaching, no travel time. Yeah, so you're paying for 20 minutes instead of a half a day, right? Yeah, the other thing is, I think you can have a wide variety of experiences as a coach. So a lot of the time, as you said, within a company, it's your leader, who's your coach. But if you're going remote, you have the opportunity as a coach to coach people where you do not understand their process. And this makes you a better coach. Because you don't give it you can't give advice because you literally don't know enough about it to give advice, you can't give direction, all you can do is follow that one of our categories calls it the golden thread, you can follow the golden thread of logic, across the actions and the things that the person says the improver says that they want to do. And this is like a really great liberation for a coach to not even think about the process. Just think about the learning. Think about the person and how they're doing. So I think we've seen a lot more remote coaching, yeah, for sure, during the pandemic, and
we've also expanded our community. So I wasn't in daily contact with people in the UK, or Sweden or Germany, before the pandemic. But now, some of my favorite co workers are in Ireland, or they're, you know, someplace like South America, someplace where I would not normally think of connecting with people around the Kata.
Joe Krebs 23:46 That is really fascinating. And I feel like everybody can hear you and what you're saying and the passion you have for this topic, from early stages of business education, in our being in the Kata world, and obviously that drives you in all aspects. For everybody out there. I wanted to bring you the topic I wanted to bring Tracy in into agile FM, that everybody can see, even though it's called Toyota kata, this is not only for car makers.
Tracy Defoe 24:18 No, actually the Toyota came for the publisher. Right? Exactly. Mike wanted to call the first book beyond what we can see. Because it's about that on the invisible routines, the managers running in their head and it's about the invisible thinking that the learner is doing. Yeah, but I think his publisher said there's pretty big money in anything we slap Toyota on so they call it Toyota kata
Joe Krebs 24:43 but might be misleading for somebody says, Oh, that is for car manufacturer.
Tracy Defoe 24:48 We're not making cars. I know
We are not making cars right.
Joe Krebs 24:52So maybe maybe that podcast helped a little bit for people to see you can improve possibly anything with this Kata.
Tracy Defoe 24:59 Yeah, and And we know a lot of people use the kata pattern for their personal improvement too. So, we often encourage people as they're learning to take their first project or their first thing, something that they personally can 100% We always say put their arms around, but something they can't control of. And for that reason, people often do something, not necessarily in their work life as their very first project. And I know that it is you can do it for any any issue or problem or thing you want to improve parenting your relationship with somebody your finances, you want to lose weight, you want to get more active, more creative, you want to get more sleep, we can Kata that stuff.
Joe Krebs 25:42 So yeah, it has, it's great. And for all of those things you just mentioned, the Toyota kata, or, as we just said, improvement, kata does coaching kata together, would make great sense. If somebody is really interested here on Agile transformations, you can certainly try that too. Or just look at the Agile Kata agilekata.org, which is an extension of what we just talked about. And it's very specific to Agile, and we are on agile FM. So I thought it would mention this.
Tracy Defoe 26:10 Yes, yeah, I don't like I said, I've coached a few people who work in Agile, but it's not my world.
Joe Krebs 26:17 Yeah. Okay. All right. So there's two reference points for everyone. I want to say thank you, Tracy. That's Tracy with the learning factor.ca. In Canada, if somebody wants to check out and have a starting point for a conversation with you about Kata. And what you can use, you will
Tracy Defoe 26:34 find Kata Girl Geeks, we have a website and we're on LinkedIn too. If you want to join because you identify as female and you're interested in attending, it's just I want to join I want to join at KataGirlGeeks.com and Kata school Cascadia. We also have free resource board. So you'll find us at KataSchoolCascadia.org Or you can email me info@KataSchoolCascadia.org is where easy to find. And we have a whole big bunch of free resources and videos all laid out for people who are isolated or trying to learn on their own. So we want to Well, as I says on our website, if you're looking for the Kata community, welcome home. So we want people to feel at home and we want them to feel welcome. So
Joe Krebs 27:21 alright, and there's even an invitation to start something there. So this is not just to join. This is also to create something if there is a gap or Yeah. Oh, yes.
So I think you're the things you're doing with the Agile Kata. Marriage are amazing. Yeah, thank you.
Tracy Defoe 27:38 Thank you for that.
Joe Krebs 27:40Tracy, I want to thank you and everything else will be on the show page of this episode. And maybe we continue the conversation if at some later point in time and see, you know what else is happening in the Kata world? Always appreciate it. Thank you.
Tracy Defoe 27:55 Thank you so much for having me.
