While in Europe this month I attended a training session on ‘Toyota Kata’, a continuous improvement model for competitive advantage, based on learnings from Toyota by a U.S. professor of business improvement, which is now growing throughout Europe.

‘Kata’ is a term from the martial arts which refers to practicing a training routine until the action becomes second nature. In the business sense it refers to developing consistent management and work patterns until they become habits and continuous improvement becomes a core competency.

While I worked at ECOsystems, we identified the need to make energy efficiency a continuous process if savings are to be sustainable and developed a process we called Continuous Energy Optimisation. This training has given me further insights into developing the concept further.

Take as an example ‘Monitoring and Targeting’ which today is typically applied as a classic ‘management by exception’ routine where spikes in energy use are identified and actions taken to bring use back to ‘normal’. This routine has many limitations. Imagine instead an inspirational target and a team iterating through experimentation to achieve this target. This is a very different process and perhaps closer to how Monitoring and Targeting was originally conceived. Making this process sustainable in the long term is the key.

Given New Zealand’s Productivity Commission’s recent ranking of New Zealand’s productivity internationally, it would also appear there is a lot of scope for us to use this system to make a substantial difference to our productivity throughout industry and business.

The process starts with a clear vision of where we want to get to and breaks this down onto manageable steps or ‘targets’ towards which the company iterates on the way to achieving the goal. Continuous improvement therefore becomes part of everybody’s daily work.

I plan to discuss this in further posts but if you have any comments I am keen to hear from you.