While I was conducting the research into Toyota's management approach that led to Toyota Kata, I came across this little business-traveler style guidebook.  In Chapter One, the author, Boye Lafayette De Menthe, introduces and explains the concept of Kata.  De Menthe calls kata, among other things, "behavioral guides".

I was surprised and even a little shaken by several things De Menthe presents in Chapters One and Two of this book, because they almost perfectly matched aspects of what I was learning about Toyota's approach.

Wikipedia's entry about Kata, from the perspective

of martial arts, is also interesting.  It includes, for example, this sentence:

        One explanation of the use of kata is as a reference

        guide for a set of moves. Not to be used following

        that "set" pattern but to keep the movements "filed".

After the manuscript for Toyota Kata was finished, a Google book search on the word "Kata" led me to this book by Professors Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka.  On page 25, Ichijo and Nonaka give a description of Kata that is particularly useful for the business reader.  It is excerpted below.

So one way to define kata is as a routine that, when practiced repeatedly, develops a reflexive, unconscious mindset...

Mindset  =   A habitual way of thinking and feeling, learned via successes

                       and failures, that determines how a person will interpret and

                       respond to situations.

So what kata should we practice?

Homepage     Defining Kata      Which Kata?     Teaching a Kata

Excerpt from:  Ichijo, Kazuo and Nonaka, Ikujiro, Knowledge Creation and Management:  New Challenges for Managers, Oxford University Press, 2006, page 25.

Knowledge Assets

Knowledge assets arise from the knowledge-creating process through dialogues and practices at ba.  Unlike other assets they are intangible, are specific to the firm, and change dynamically.  The essence of knowledge assets is that they must be built and used internally in order for full value to be realized, and hence they cannot be readily bought and sold (Treece, 2000).

Knowledge assets are not just the knowledge already created, such as know-how, pattents, technologies, or brands, but also include the knowledge to create knowledge, such as the organizational capability to innovate.  Although current views on knowledge assets tend to focus on the former because they are easier to measure and deal with, it is the latter that need more attention because they are the source of new knowledge to be created, and therefore a source of the future value of the firm.

Knowledge assets also include the social capital that is shared in the organization.  The economic value of a knowledge-creating firm arises through the interactions among knowledge workers, or between knowledge workers and the environment (such as customers, suppliers, or research institutes).

One of the most important knowledge assets for a firm is a firm-specific kata (roughly, "pattern" or "Way of doing things") of dialogues and practices.  Nelson and Winter (1982) emphasize the importance of routines for the firm's evolutionary process.  Here, we focus on "creative routines" of kata, which make knowledge creation possible by fostering creativity and preserving efficiency.  Kata is different from a routine in that it contains a conscious self-renewal process.  The three steps of kata - shu (learn), ha (break), and ri (create) - mean that one learns certain patterns first, then breaks away from them and creates new patterns once the old are totally mastered.  Continuous self-renewal is achieved by incorporating a high-quality feedback function that sharpens senses and helps to identify and modify the differences between predicted outcomes and reality (Feldman, 2000).  Kata works as an archetype with a high degree of freedom because it can be modified on the basis of feedback from the real world.

With such self-renewal functions embedded, kata keeps a routine from hindering creativity by preventing such tendencies as overadaptation to a past success (Levitt and March, 1988; Leonard-Barton, 1992).  At the same time, it helps an organization to work efficiently by functioning as a routine.  A firm with a good kata looks into the future but also appreciates past successes as a source of its knowledge.

The members of many companies practice routines related to traditional, formulaic management concepts like "ROI decision making" and "management by results."   But these routines -- and the mindsets and organization culture they produce -- may not be so well suited for today's crowded, less-predictable marketplaces.  Many desired new conditions go beyond our current capability, and we cannot see up front how we will achieve them.  Dan Pink provides a good example, in the video below, of how this calls for practicing a different kata; a different way of thinking and managing.

In the case of organizations, a group mindset leads to the organization culture, i.e., the set of shared basic assumptions that operate unconsciously and govern behavior.

Professor Steven Pinker comments

briefly on culture in this video.

(Video is an excerpt from The Darwin Debate, BBC, 1998)

(Video is an excerpt from Daniel Pink's TED-Global talk of July 2009)