Videos

Intro to Toyota Kata (27 min)

TK Book Review (11 min)

21st Century Lean (10 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. Middle Managers are the true coaches, not the external coaches or Lean/Agile groups.
2. Coaching by managers is an everyday job for daily improvements.
3. Periodic improvements cannot lead to building capabilities needed for breakthrough results.
4. Coaching aims to achieve strategic objectives, eliminating waste is a by-product that will happen after we reach our goals.
4. Instead of imitating successful companies, we need to invent tools and practices that solve our own problems.

Everyone needs a Coach (10 min)

Key Takeaways:
In the face of complexity that we deal with daily, we at our limits, meaning we cannot improve anymore. There are two views to improve our abilities:
1.Pedagogy view: Attend formal education, then afterwards you’re on your own.
2.Sports view: You’re never done, everyone needs a coach; even the top athletes.

Microlearning with TK (10 min)

Achieving More with Less (4 min)

Key Takeaways:
Constraints help people to achieve more by working better. Constraints lead to innovation by exploiting the scare resources we have. Stretch is about adopting minimalism approach and focusing on improving performance to figure-out solutions.

It’s about Grit, not IQ (5 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. What counts in performance is having both “passion and perseverance” (grit) for a very long term goal. IQ, social skills and emotional intelligence are important they are less relevant than having grit.
2. How to keep people motivated towards a certain goal and for a very long time?
3. Grit is inversely related to the measure of talent.
4. Our ability to learn is not fixed, it can be nurtured using Growth Mindset.

The power of “Yet” (10 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. Abilities can grow through hard work, vs limiting our core intelligence.
2. In face of errors, the brains of Growth-mindset people are fired with ‘yet’. They strive in face of challenges.
3. Praising talent make people vulnerable, therefore they will be reluctant to move out of their comfort zone. Instead, we should praise the act not the person.
4. As we are pushed out of our comfort zone, we form new neurons in our brains which eventually can make us smarter.

Iterative small steps (7 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. Phase-based approaches for work do not work for innovation and solving challenges. These approaches introduce controls that instill risk aversion, which cripples teams from experimenting; because of lack of psychological safety.
2. Experimenting and doing small steps instead of prolonged planning is not the default mode for adults. This is because of behaviors introduced by our education system and organizations.

Thinking Fast vs Thinking Slow (6 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. In our complex world, a good move does not necessarily make us successful.
2. Intuitive vs deliberate moves.
3. Some mistakes can be avoided when we employ System-2.

The Science of Expertise (18 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. Regardless of work discipline, we are looking for ways for developing high performers.
2. There are common scientific principles that explain how people reach high performance regardless of their work disciplines.
3. Deliberate Practice is based on setting goals by coaches that drive intense practice by learners. Providing regular feedback from a coach is crucial for improving the learner’s performance.
4. We can improve our performance when we are challenged by a goal.
5. Larry King is expert in the way her interviews people. He interviews people daily which is his version of deliberate practice. While Larry did not have a coach, he was a pioneer in his domain and forced to develop his kills by himself.
6. There is a downside for people calling themselves experts while they do not have the performance backing their claims.
7. Anyone can achieve a challenging goal when he/she desires so, then deliberately practice towards this goal with help from a coach.
8. Leonardo De Caprio is an expert in acting because he met the criteria of acting many times, which his version of deliberate practice.
9. Steve Job is an expert because of his repeated and demonstrable ability of designing personalized computer products and motivating his coworkers.

Science of Great Teams (7 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. Flow of information and solving problems in real-time are the key skills for growth and high performance in teams. Sharing accurate information can only happen if people feel safe to do so.
2. We need signals that connect us. Signals are tokens that it will be safe to share our vulnerabilities.
3. Status management and safety impact performance. Worrying about who is in charge impacts performance.
4. So why do not then having teams in-charge while coached by their leaders?

Failure’s Mixed Bag (20 min)

Key Takeaways:
1. Destigmatizing failure is what unlocks teams so that they can experiment and therefore innovate.
2. How to override human instinct of fearing from failure?
3. Rather than celebrating failure, we celebrate learning that comes out from intelligent failure. Neither preventable nor complex failures are good, we should not celebrate them.
4. Failure is a natural by by-product of thoughtful experimentation. High performers learn from intelligent failures and share the lessons widely.
5. Failure is not all Bad, Failure is not all Good either.
6. As organizations face unavoidable uncertainty, they need to reframe how managers interact with their people so that they can innovate.
7. Teams need to be designed to ‘fail’ instead of being designed to ‘succeed’.
8. We need to manage teams in a way that reward learning rather rewarding success. Success is an elusive measure and might not be based on reality. Rewarding success creates behaviors that are the antitheses of those needed for experimentation and learning.
9. If we can get better in distinguishing among the three types of failures: Intelligent, Preventable, Complex; we can get better in embracing the intelligent one.
10. Elements of Intelligent Failure:
– The opportunity explored is significant.
– The outcome will be informative.
– The cost and scope are relatively small.
– Key assumptions are explicitly articulated in advance.
– The plan will test those assumptions.
– The risks of failures are understood in advance by everyone
11. The more creativity is needed the higher the failure rate will be. Meaning, failure is inescapable, but we need to make it intelligent.
12. Failures can be caused by: Experimentation, Uncertainty, Complexity, Incompetence, Inattention, and Deliberate Violation.
13. The Blame game is played based on the cause of failure.