Developing PDSA Capabilities

As with any skill, developing PDSA (plan – do – study – act) capabilities is all about practice. To achieve the discipline in consistent problem solving that you need to reach outstanding performance, you need to have the discipline to practice – and not just you, but everyone in your organization – again and again and again and again.

In recent years, two ways of deploying PDSA and generating opportunities for repetitive practice have gained attention. I believe both have value and are useful to organizations. The first, the improvement kata, described by Mike Rother in his book “Toyota Kata,” is an excellent way to deploy PDSA quickly throughout the organization so that people have frequent opportunities to practice. The second is A3 management, detailed in books by John Shook (“Managing to Learn”) and by Durward Sobek and Art Smalley (“Understanding A3 Thinking”). I find it most useful for more complex problems, with the intention of developing deep mastery of PDSA and of coaching skills. I offer each one not as a dogmatic approach to be adopted by every organization, but as two examples of how organizations can inject disciplined improvement into their organizational DNA and highlight the interplay between developing people and generating results.

The Improvement Kata

Rother uses the term kata to reflect his discovery of how Toyota deploys PDSA to improve, adapt and innovate. Kata are routines and movements practiced to develop new habits. In martial arts, kata are detailed choreographed patterns of movement. In music, kata are the scales, or the breaking down of complex pieces into small parts to build mastery. In Rother's view, the two primary kata – the improvement kata and the coaching kata – are systematic, scientific and mutually reinforcing ways the organization uses to achieve challenging goals and develop its workforce. The improvement kata essentially builds deliberate practice and experienced coaching into every employee's job, allowing each person to solve the small problems that affect their daily work through the rapid, repetitive use of PDSA. Through this method, almost every employee can progress from novice to advanced beginner and so on.

At first, structured cycles of rapid PDSA as experiments will feel foreign to organizations that are more accustomed to project-based improvement focused on discovering the best “solution.” Within such an organization, a mindset predominates that focuses on waiting for perfection rather than on the continuous pursuit of perfection. Your goal with the improvement kata and the practice of rapid PDSA cycles is to build knowledge and inject continuous improvement into the organization's DNA. Small daily rounds of deliberate practice – the rapid PDSA cycles – are a necessary component of the change in mindset.

The kata allows managers at every level to become improvement coaches, developing skills in two areas:

Technical capability. Managers must have or develop improvement-related knowledge and skills through study and application, including capability in applying the PDSA cycle, process analysis methods, root cause analysis techniques, the full spectrum of countermeasures available for solving process design problems, the psychology of change and process performance measures, to name a few.

Coaching capability. All managers (and above) need to be capable of asking Socratic questions, listening deeply, assessing learning and knowing when and how to give directed guidance.

Most senior leaders struggle with the notion that they need to have deep knowledge of improvement tools – cause-and-effect diagrams, value stream maps or even the steps of the PDSA cycle. There is no way to be an effective improvement coach without having at least moderate technical competence. Likewise, there is no way to inject improvement into your organization's DNA – where it becomes “the way you operate” – without striving to have every manager and senior leader serve as an improvement coach as part of their job. In outstanding organizations, improvement is management.

For most organizations, this means a lot of development. That is why I say it takes 10 years for an organization to build discipline. You are not just sending high-potential employees to attend a training. Instead, you are teaching everyone and giving them frequent opportunities to practice. Senior leaders should understand that the faster and more effectively they build problem-solving discipline throughout the organization, the less they will need external resources to build discipline from top to bottom. Middle managers can also give this book to senior leaders and hope they will be convinced, or you can start where you are, developing your own technical skills and then serving as a coach for your people.

A special note for readers who are improvement professionals: your professional goal should be to design your way out of this job. You are not serving the organization if you are not preparing it to be self-sufficient. Don't worry: most businesses, government agencies, healthcare organizations, nonprofit groups and educational institutions have not adopted improvement, let alone become self-sufficient. There will still be plenty of work to do. If history is any indication, we have decades upon decades of work ahead. But that does not diminish the obvious need for you to vigorously develop deep improvement skills up, down and across the organization, with the goal of eliminating the need for specialized improvement professionals for all but the most complex problems.

A3 Management

A3 management is a long-term process, less focused on repetitive practice to gain basic proficiency and more on developing deep understanding of and experience with PDSA and coaching. A3 refers to the paper size, roughly equivalent to the 42 X 29.7 cm sheet common in the United States, which is typically used for one-page reports that reflect the problem-solving process. The report is typically divided into sections representing each step of the problem-solving process: plan, do, study and adjust. It is a highly visual “way of telling the story” that develops critical thinking, not only by limiting the physical space in which to explain something, but also by asking the problem owner to define the best way to describe the relevant data needed to build consensus and support organizational learning. Practitioners of the approach often misunderstand the purpose of the A3 and put too much enthusiasm into the report itself and not enough into the process of creating it.

Practitioners also often ignore the most relevant part of the development process: the role of the coach. A3 management was designed as a development tool, similar to the apprenticeship model that predominates in many skill-driven professions, with the goal of providing directed learning to develop aspiring professionals from novices to the most advanced. Starting to deploy A3 without skilled coaches is like teaching yourself guitar: you may be able to play a rudimentary version of “Stairway to Heaven,” but you will probably have picked up some bad habits along the way that will keep you from building true mastery. The primary purpose of A3 management and of the report is to facilitate iterative discussion and learning between a specific coach and a designated problem “owner.” In an organization with great problem-solving experience and discipline, the coach is typically the problem owner's immediate supervisor, no matter at what level within the organization the problem owner sits. For organizations just beginning to learn the process, a “second coach” is typically needed to teach both the problem owner and the coach how to succeed in their respective roles.

A3 management is distinguished not only by the role of the coach, but also by designating a single problem owner, which builds accountability into the organizational DNA. While most problems are cross-functional by nature and therefore require a team-based approach to solve them, the problem owner is solely accountable for the results. While the coach spends most of their time with the problem owner, they should also conduct “group coaching” sessions to accelerate learning across a larger number of people.

A3 and the improvement kata: bringing the two together

Since you need to practice problem solving whenever you can at every level, I recommend a two-tier approach. The first is to use A3 management to solve your most vexing problems and pursue high-potential business opportunities. In essence, you are taking the outputs of the improvement planning process and tackling the annual priorities that emerged from that effort using the A3 management approach.

The second part lies at the other end of the spectrum, as your organization practices the improvement and coaching kata every day on the small issues that emerge everywhere in the company. Many of these problems will show up in the annual improvement plan, but not all of those confronting the front lines have obvious strategic relevance. For example, a safety issue that arises within a process may have nothing to do with any of the organization's objectives, but it still needs to be solved in the interest of the employees. The same goes for the quality and consistency of yield from one step to another in a process. These small problems offer perfect opportunities to practice rapid PDSA cycles and to work on the micro-details of an operation that collectively change the outcome. This is the essence of daily kaizen (continuous improvement).

*Karen Martin is principal consultant at Karen Martin & Associates, L.L.C.

Portuguese translation by Tamiris Masetto Manzano.