This was Gavriel's breakthrough discovery during his professional 'corporate' career in product and marketing management. Mike Rothers identified this practice in Toyota. It is elegantly simply, highly comprehensive, and lends itself perfectly well to the principles of Sociocracy.
See this article for a good breakdown of the Toyota Kata method.
At Camazotz Collective we approach it using documents broken down as shown:
First we have a kata document for Camazotz Mission Circle. This attempts to set the required direction for all other circles.
At time of producing this course we have the following circles:
- GARDENING
- HOSPITALITY
- INFRASTRUCTURE
- FOOD MANAGEMENT
- MISSION
- MEDIA
- FUNDING
Each contributor takes on membership of at least one of those circles, and may be member of many circles.
Then each contributor also has their own separate document for Kata's which includes:
Targets at the top — targets are what is agreed that they are aiming to achieve.
The next section then has 4 other components of the Toyota Kata system, which we label as follows:
What are your Learnings since last update?
What are the Challenges faced right now?
What are your Next Steps?
What are your Expectations?
This sets the stage for regular meetings with an inner circle member (such as the Mission Circle) who can act as a sounding board, coach, and guide to facilitate the contributor to make progress.
This excellent 40-minute presentation by Mike Rother demonstrate the beauty of the Toyota Kata method.