--- name: improvement-kata-storyboard description: "Work toward a hard challenge one small, predicted step at a time: a challenge, the current condition seen first-hand, a near target condition (usually 1 to 4 weeks out), one obstacle in focus, and experiment records where what you expect is written before each step. Use it with a coach when the path to a goal can't be planned in advance. Use when: You have a challenging goal and nobody can say in advance exactly how to get there, so you'll need to learn your way. You can go and see the process yourself, and try small steps whose results show up within days. Not for: The solution is already known and agreed. Just do it, and track it with an implementation plan. You have one bounded problem with a measurable gap that needs taking to root cause. An A3 fits better, and can sit alongside a storyboard as one obstacle's deep dive. Results only show up monthly or quarterly and you can't find a measure that moves within days. Find a faster process measure first, or the experiments will be too slow to learn from." --- # Improvement Kata storyboard Work toward a hard challenge one small, predicted step at a time: a challenge, the current condition seen first-hand, a near target condition (usually 1 to 4 weeks out), one obstacle in focus, and experiment records where what you expect is written before each step. Use it with a coach when the path to a goal can't be planned in advance. Family: Improvement kata · Format: .xlsx · Domain: core ## What it is The Improvement Kata is a practice routine for reaching a goal when you can't see the path in advance. ("Kata" means a pattern you practise until it becomes habit.) Mike Rother described it in his book Toyota Kata, from studying how Toyota develops improvement thinking in its people. It has four steps: understand the challenge, grasp the current condition, set the next target condition, and experiment toward it one step at a time. The storyboard is the one sheet the learner keeps for all four, and the sheet a coach reads with them in a short, regular coaching cycle. It deliberately doesn't hold a plan of solutions. The route is found through small experiments, each with a prediction written down before the step, so the gap between what you expected and what happened shows exactly where your knowledge ran out, which is where the next step goes. ## When to use it Use it when: - You have a challenging goal and nobody can say in advance exactly how to get there, so you'll need to learn your way. - You can go and see the process yourself, and try small steps whose results show up within days. - You want to build improvement thinking in a person or a team, with a coach who meets them regularly, not only fix one problem. Not when: - The solution is already known and agreed. Just do it, and track it with an implementation plan. - You have one bounded problem with a measurable gap that needs taking to root cause. An A3 fits better, and can sit alongside a storyboard as one obstacle's deep dive. - Results only show up monthly or quarterly and you can't find a measure that moves within days. Find a faster process measure first, or the experiments will be too slow to learn from. - As a way to judge or rank people. The storyboard only works if a wrong prediction is safe to write down. ## How to fill it in - **challenge** — Write the direction you're working toward, usually six months to three years out, set by or agreed with the level above you. It should be beyond what you know how to do today: if you already know how to get there, it's a project plan, not a challenge. Describe what will be different for the customer or the process, with a measure and a date, and say why it matters. Don't write the solution into the challenge. - **currentCondition** — Go and see the work where it happens before setting a target condition. Watch several cycles, time them, and talk to the people doing the work. Write down two things. The operating pattern: how the work actually runs today, including the sequence, who does what, where time goes and how much it varies. And the outcome: what the process produces today, with its spread, not just an average. Date each observation, and note where you were, what you saw and who does the work. Reports and dashboards can show you where to look, but they don't replace watching. Update the current condition after each step; it keeps moving. - **targetCondition** — Describe how you want the process to be running on a date ahead. Anything from about a week to about three months works; 1 to 4 weeks is a good default, because short cycles mean you learn faster. Go longer only when the process itself is slow, for example when each result takes weeks to show. Write it in two parts. First the operating pattern, as a state you could go and see: "every changeover runs from materials already staged at the booth, and both shifts clean in the same order." Then the outcome metric, with a number, a unit and a date: "35 minutes or less on 8 of the last 10 changeovers, by 15 May." It isn't a list of actions: "train the operators, buy a cart" is a to-do list, and the actions are what your experiments will discover. It should sit beyond what you know how to reach today. Once it's set, keep it until the date, and put what you learn into the next one. - **obstacles** — List what you think stands between the current condition and the target condition. It's a parking lot, not a plan: you don't need to rank it carefully or solve everything on it. Pick one obstacle, mark it in focus, and work only on that one until it's cleared or you learn it doesn't matter. Expect the list to change as you learn; add new obstacles as they appear and strike out cleared ones. Obstacles are about the process (the method, materials, equipment or information), never about a person. - **experiments** — One row per step, filled in as a Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle. Plan: write the step and what you expect will happen, before you take it. Do: take the step. Check: write what actually happened, as soon as you can go and see. Act: write what you learned, which shapes the next step. There are two kinds of step. An observe step goes and looks to learn more, and changes nothing. A change step changes one thing, so you can tell what caused the result. Give each step a date to go and see the result, ideally within a day or a few days; if you can't see the result within about a week, the step is too big, so break it down. Never fill in or edit the expectation once you know the result. A prediction that didn't come true is the most useful row on the sheet. - **thresholdOfKnowledge** — The threshold of knowledge is the line between what you know and what you don't know yet. Before each step, write what you don't know yet that the step should find out. Your next step belongs right at that line: not so far beyond it that you can't interpret the result, and not behind it repeating what you already know. When a result surprises you, you've found the line. Not knowing is normal and useful; pretending to know is what stalls improvement. - **metric** — Record the outcome metric on the day you measure it, from your own measurements, and plot it as a run chart: dates along the bottom, values up the side, with the target line drawn across. Look at the pattern over several points rather than reacting to a single one. Don't rebuild the numbers afterwards from memory. - **coachingCycle** — A short, regular check-in at the storyboard: daily if you can, a few times a week at least, and short enough to fit between other work. The learner walks the coach through the board from left to right in their own words: where they're heading and the target they're working toward now, what they saw the last time they watched the work, what they expected from their last step and how it turned out, which obstacle has their attention, and what they'll try next and what they predict. The coach listens for gaps in the reasoning (a prediction written after the result, a claim nobody went and looked at, a step that changes several things at once) and asks how the learner knows. The coach doesn't hand over answers; together they agree when to look at the result of the next step. The routine draws on the coaching practice described in Mike Rother's Toyota Kata; the wording here is Katafacts' own. ## What good looks like The example below continues Line 2's paint booth after the sequencing rule. The challenge is changeovers under 10 minutes by the end of 2027, so custom colours no longer wait for set slots. The current condition comes from watching changeovers on both shifts, with one report entry clearly marked as a report. The target condition, three weeks out, describes how changeovers should run plus "35 minutes or less on 8 of the last 10". There are four experiment records: an observe step that timed the walks away from the booth, two single-change steps (a staged cart, then the nozzle size on the queue card), and a new observe step on the obstacle now in focus, still waiting for its result. Two obstacles are cleared, one is in focus, and a run chart shows changeover time falling toward the target line. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/improvement-kata-storyboard ## Common mistakes - **The target condition is a to-do list.** — "Buy a cart, train second shift, update the standard" decides the answers before anyone has learned anything, and leaves nothing to check except whether the tasks got done. Describe how the process will be running, plus a dated outcome, and let the experiments find the actions. - **The prediction is written after the result.** — Once you know what happened, it's almost impossible not to "expect" it. The gap between expected and actual is what shows where your knowledge ran out, so write the expectation first and never edit it. - **Several changes in one step.** — If you stage a cart, move the solvent store and change the cleaning order all at once, you can't tell which one made the difference, or which one made things worse. Change one thing per step. Observe steps, which change nothing, are how you learn before changing. - **Skipping go and see.** — A current condition written from a report or from memory describes the process as people think it runs. The walks away from the booth, the drying wait and the locked cage only show up when you watch. Go again after every few steps, because the current condition keeps moving. - **Blaming people.** — "Operator error", "retrain the team" and "be more careful" stop the learning at a person and leave the process that let it happen untouched. Ask what about the method, materials, equipment or information made the mistake possible, and work on that. - **Steps too big to learn from.** — A step whose result you can't see for weeks gives you a few learning cycles a quarter instead of several a week. If the go-and-see date is more than about a week away, break the step down. ## What it connects to Upstream: - **Value stream map — current and future state** (`value-stream-map`) — A future-state map is a common source of a challenge, and the map shows which process box to work on first. - **Go-see protocol** (`go-see-protocol`) — How to watch the work first-hand when grasping the current condition, rather than writing it from memory. - **Makigami process map** (`makigami`) — For an office or information process, a Makigami of a real case is a strong way to grasp the current condition's operating pattern. - **Metric definition sheet** (`metric-definition-sheet`) — Pin down exactly how the outcome metric is measured before plotting it, so the run chart compares like with like. - **Coaching Kata** (not in the catalogue yet) — The coach's own practice routine: how to run the five-question coaching cycle without handing over solutions. Downstream: - **A3 problem solving** (`a3`) — When one obstacle turns out to be a bounded problem with a clear gap, take it to root cause on an A3 and bring what you learn back to the storyboard. - **Learning log** (`learning-log`) — Keeps track of hypotheses across many efforts; lessons from the storyboard's experiment records can feed it. - **Work instruction** (`work-instruction`) — Once a target condition is reached, write the new way of working down as the standard, so the next target condition starts from it. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Setting the challenge and the next target condition - Going to see the process and describing what you saw - Choosing which obstacle to work on and what the next step is - Writing what you expect before each step, and what you learned after - Coaching: a person runs the coaching cycle, and there's no automated coaching on the storyboard in this version Analysis — AI helps: - Explaining a term such as target condition, threshold of knowledge or operating pattern - Explaining when the Improvement Kata fits and when another tool fits better Drudgery — automated: - Laying out the storyboard, experiment records and metric sheet for printing - Drawing the run chart of your metric against the target line - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Improvement Kata storyboard is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attribution: Katafacts (katafacts.com). ## Using this skill Apply this method as part of whatever broader task, instructions, or deliverable you're already working on -- it's a method to use, not a standalone conversation to start. There is no generation tool for this catalogue yet, so draft the artifact's actual content yourself, following the fields above, the same way a person filling this out by hand would. The canonical guide page and a downloadable worked example (.xlsx) are at https://www.katafacts.com/katas/improvement-kata-storyboard.