Patrick Adams  00:00

Hello, and welcome to lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams and I am joined today by our another host, Andy Olrich. Welcome to the show, Andy. And I, Patrick. Yeah, now I’m excited to be here. Today is a special day we have someone obviously Andy, you’re from Australia, on one side of the world, we have a guest that’s all the way over on the other side of the world. And we’re gonna be talking about Toyota kata. And so I don’t want to steal his thunder because we’re gonna we’re gonna dive into the topic extensively. But what I will say is, Toyota kata, you know, as a, as a methodology is has become very popular in the last few years in helping to start the journey of scientific thinking and really creating a, a model around how we can learn and start scientific thinking for ourselves. And so we’ll dive into this specifically, but in a larger way, we’re going to talk about coaching kata and what it means to actually coach the process of scientific thinking. So I’m excited to have this discussion. And with that, Andy, do you want to introduce our guest today?

Andy Olrich  01:39

Absolutely. Thanks, Patrick. Via today, we’re lucky to be joined by Tilo Schwartz. So TLO supports organizations and managers and successful, successfully leading change and empowering their teams for improvement adaptiveness and superior results. Tilo was a plant manager at a renowned German power tool manufacturer, and he and his management team started practicing Toyota kata as part of Mike Rogers groundbreaking research way back in 2007. By doing so, Tilo and his team established continuous improvement as a daily working routine throughout all areas of the plant. That led to winning the 80 Kearney manufacturing competition factory of the year. And also a W. Hu INSEAD industrial Excellence Award. Tilo was co founder of the campus for leaders at the University of Applied Science ants back and the author of several books on coaching Toyota kata. And most recently, we’ve all got a copy. It’s the giving wings to her team, which he co wrote with Jeff liker. Great to have you here, mate. Welcome, Tilo.

Tilo Schwarz  02:40

Thank you, Andy. 

Andy Olrich  02:41

Awesome. So Tilo just touched on, we’re talking about Carter, and about you writing the books. It’s fresh, it’s about six months out on the market, would you be able to give us a bit of a bit of an insight into giving links to her team, please?

Tilo Schwarz  02:55

Sure, sure. So the book is written in a novel style. And it’s a novel about a young manager taking her first managerial role. So that’s the nice and she has this aspiration of leading her team in a you know, up to date way, coaching her team. And of course, she is in a managerial position in a company that is currently struggling. So there’s a lot of pressure on achieving results. But she still wants to coach her team. And that’s kind of what the story is about. So we can basically explore with her her learning journey as a coach, but also her teams and our organizations learning journey on scaling, upscaling this kind of this way of leading and developing a team. And of course, she goes through several learning cycles, a couple of crises. So that’s that’s what the book is about learning. So really an insight into learning to coach your team and become a better manager. Coaching manager.

Patrick Adams  04:01

Yeah, I love love the the book and it’s almost like it’s a next step because you have improvement kata, and then you have coaching kata, and we’re talking specifically in this in which you wrote as a novel, which is also I really, really like that, and we’ll talk more about that later on. But for those that are listening in that maybe are unfamiliar with Toyota kata or improvement kata Can, can you just give us just a quick overview of of what that is? I mean, I talked about in kind of the introduction, I talked about being an intro to you know, creating a culture of scientific thinking and coaching. But what what is kata what is the basis behind it? What’s the approach? Where did it come from? Can you just maybe touch on that just a little bit before we dive coaching kata?

Tilo Schwarz  04:46

Yeah, certainly, Patrick. So, Kata is a word. It’s a Japanese word. And there’s two meanings to it. So the first meaning, which we usually relate to means kata as a training routine for learning a skill, which is a concept that we use in in actually everywhere we develop skill. So it’s a practice routine to learn a specific skill. Now, Toyota Kata is based on my author’s research at Toyota, basically following two research questions. So number one, what are the unseen managerial routines that enabled Toyota to produce new ideas be innovative and could just improve for decades? And then question number two, how can we do something similar in our organizations having a completely different culture in our companies. So that’s why it is called Toyota kata. Now, actually, it’s not so much about Toyota, it’s more about how can we develop scientific thinking skills in our teams that enable our teams to achieve outstanding results and basically explore the unknown, which I think makes it so interesting for the times we live in. So in a way, you could say Toyota Kata is an approach for managers, educators, or actually anybody, entrusted with leading people to practice and coach for a more scientific way of approaching things, challenging goals, kind of counters our natural tendency to jump to what we know, based on our experience, so this is a mechanism our brain has, which is very, very powerful. And makes it enables us to navigate everyday situations in a good way. But sometimes hinders us from developing new solutions and exploring an unknown zone. So basically, Toyota Kata is, is a way for, if you want to develop your team in this direction.

Patrick Adams  06:50

Yeah, and I love I love the framework, it’s, it’s so helpful for people that are, you know, learning how to think scientifically or critically in you know, solving problems and leading teams. So it gives us a really great starting point to follow, you know, step by step. I mean, Mike rather even gives a we have a there’s a he has a free website out there with you know, all the coaching questions and, and all the materials that you need in order to get started storyboard, you know, everything which is really cool and that and I also love in your book too, that you have QR codes in here with scant where you can scan it and actually download you know, free resources as well. So, again, there’s just so much out there to help us to actually implement ATA, it’s like there should be no reason why we can’t you know, implement this, this style of of learning into our organizations. And so that that piece of it is one piece of it the improvement kata, and in the novel, you talk with Denise, Denise basically is learning how to coach kata. And so what’s the difference then? Or Or can you explain, you know, based on the basis of the book being, being specifically around coaching, so what is our coaching the Toyota kata way? What does that look like?

Tilo Schwarz  08:11

So, as you see, the subtitle is a novel about learning to coach and then the Toyota kata way. So, one way to explain that is that coaching the Toyota kata way is about learning to become a better coach. And, and it’s, you could say, you could do a comma after a novel about learning to coach comma, the Toyota cutaway. So the Toyota Kata is an approach for learning, right, a more scientific way of working and collaborating on the one side improvement kata, and then it’s a way of learning how to become a better coach to develop scientific thinking skills in our teams. So why I feel this for me personally, this is so important, because I, my experience is in a leadership role, it’s not a lack of understanding that I should be coaching. It’s not a lack of knowledge. I mean, we know as managers, we should be coaching and probably most of us have had coaching training at some point of their career. So understanding is not the issue. The issue is that like, if somebody walks into your office, Hey, boss, I have a problem and you have like 2122 23 to make a decision. Do you tell? Do you just delegate or do you coach so tell a coach, it’s a impromptu decision. So what is coaching that kind of way that Georgia cut away is a way to learn to make this kind of coaching, intuitive so you can empower your team to deal with the day to day issues, but also especially to deal with the challenging, challenging goals we face. So in a way you could say, coaching today Callaway is a way of learning to become a better coach.

Andy Olrich  10:03

I love that, you know, what struck me about the book, too is talking about the nice story where she’s gone, you know, moving into an organization where she’s, you know, she’s quite familiar with with the lane and the practice and she’s trying to get the other leaders on board and it’s there’s that you know, and I kind of buying this yet, you know, and how the through practical application that that then gets people on the, on the journey and seeing it and getting it in and starting to, to buy in and put it into practice. And then, you know, within the the evolution there, Denise’s talks about a significant evolution in leadership style. So from traditional management to coaching, orientated approach. Why would this be useful for leading teams today, and especially in the future Tilo?

Tilo Schwarz  10:54

Yeah. So maybe one more thing I’d like to add about the coaching Kata is that I’ve often feel we need to be very specific, when we ask managers to coach what do we mean? So the word coaching has become very popular in the management rearm in the past 678 years. And there is different coaching approaches. So I think it helps to be very specific, what kind of coaching we’re talking about here. Or in other words, you could say what’s the difference between the coaching kata approach and other coaching models, you could say there’s other there’s the GROW Model, there’s there’s other coaching approaches and model outputs out there. So the main difference or first similarity is that I think every coaching approach aims at helping an individual or a team to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Like if you think of sports coaching, business coaching, career coaching, even, you know, marriage counseling, so it’s always about, you know, achieve a goal or solve a problem. So coaching kata has that purpose to, in a coaching approach to help achieve something. Now, the interesting part is that the coaching kind of has a second purpose. And that is while you help a person to achieve a specific goal, at the same time, develop a way how to do that in a more structured in a scientific way. So basically, you’re not not only helping the person to achieve this one thing at hand, but also develop the person’s skill for working in a more scientific way. And and that’s I think, another important part is to get to help the person get calmer, or more resilient in dealing with the unpredictable and unknown. So now back to your question, why might this be a useful approach? Well, I think we all experienced that we’re faced more and more with unpredictability, complexity challenges, that’s just the 21st century as is. It’s just the time we live in. And I think, okay, cool. There’s also so many opportunities there. Okay, so let’s, let’s go. Now, what do we need to do? Well, first of all, we need to, first and foremost enable our team to deal with these challenges to deal with this ml. And that has to do a lot of in a way you could say we need to learn how to learn, it’s about learning to learn, or the world we’re facing pushes us to, you know, develop this organization we’ve been talking about for so long, the learning organization now the learning organization clearly. Okay, what is it? Well, the learning organization consists of learning individuals, okay, so then we need to enable people to learn faster, to be more comfortable with having to learn. And I think that is one of the great leadership challenges we face, how can we help individuals and teams to learn to learn faster, and be comfortable with learning? So I think that also if you’re asking, So why might this be a useful approach for leading a team? I think also the way we’ve, we’ve done management or we’ve learned management in the past, was good for the past, but we clearly feel this is not going to be the way we’re going to lead in the future. There’s a couple of aspects like traditional management is, is you know, very centralized, focused. It’s in a way you could say it’s focused on on maintaining the status quo, okay, so you need to get confirmation Yes, you can change this yes or no. So this all makes sense in a world that is a bit more stable then the world will experiencing now. Now what we’re experiencing now is we need fast changes and the team that learns the fastest adapts the fastest going to win, and we need I feel we need to To adapt our way of leading to that as well. So, so what do you do? Well, the leadership of the future, I think, is going to be much more people focused, less content focused much quicker in the cycles and interactions, because we need to adapt quickly. And that is why I feel learning to coach for a more scientific way of thinking new team is something that we definitely need in the future, in leading our teams.

Patrick Adams  15:28

Yeah, and I love that you mentioned that traditional management, right, because there are, and I know, just from my experience in the US, and other areas, that there are still so many companies that, you know, are still managing the old way. And, you know, unfortunately, they’re not having really great results. And I think a big part of that is a lot of what you just talked about where the world is changing, you know, the people are changing, culture is changing. And so we also have to be willing to change our, our style of leading right and in order to better, better manage the people that that are working for us. And so I guess as as you’re talking, I’m thinking through this, this change from traditional management to this coaching oriented approach, and I’m wondering, what are your thoughts or what has been your experience, and what you’ve seen the impact on team dynamics and performance through through utilizing more coach or coaching oriented type of leadership?

Tilo Schwarz  16:30

So well, if we think about that, on an organizational perspective, like if we think we want everybody, every day in every process to work on, you know, improving, then it’s quite clear, there’s a couple of ingredients we need. So if we want people to engage, you want, they want this kind of motivation, okay, motivated to do something. And then of course, if you if you give this freedom to act, we need to make sure there’s there’s a direction we’re working towards. And of course, we need to enable people to handle these, these challenges the to master these obstacles. So basically, what you see is you have to start with giving this this freedom of control, because motivation and self control are directly linked. Now, if you do that, of course, you run the risk that you know, things go havoc, you still are responsible for the results. So how do you do that? Well, you have to make sure there’s a clear direction, and you have to work on, on the skills on enabling your team to explore this, this unknown zone. Now, if you do that, what happens is, of course, at first people are kind of surprised, because that’s not the way they’ve behaved, maybe experienced the world so far. And then Oh, of course, there’s now this all of a sudden, there’s this freedom to act. And And once people get more comfortable that which also comes through the coaching and helping Yes, we can do that we can do this together. They they really kind of you know, they, they get curious, they get engaged, and they’re just because of you know, Henry Ford talked about the pride of craftsmanship. And he said, he said, like we’ve taken away from people, this pride of craftsmanship. And I think continuous improvement and exploration is a wonderful opportunity to give this back, being proud of look at this, what we’ve achieved here. And you know, I’ve seen that so many times, like one of our shift leaders. Back at my, during my time at festival she was very smart person, very active in like in our in the Lean workshops were doing, but never wanted to present. Okay, she had great ideas, but was hesitant to speak her mind. And if it came to the like to the you know, final presentation of the workshops, and okay, somebody else could please do that. Yeah. So now then we had our we had a new CEO coming in. And so I started to invite him to the plant and he said, Oh, that’s great. So he came once a month we did our walk, he wants to see the shop floor. So and then one day something happens. So we were walking past an assembly line where this lady was responsible for this shift. And same same person. We were walking past this line, our CEO in a nice suit. And and then all of a sudden she kind of jumped out at us, grabbed us by our you know, sleeves that you have to see what we learned in this experiment this morning. Yeah. And he like, what a day okay? So what happens is you really see people engage with with their process. You see how people grow and you see how they achieve things. Use thought were impossible. And maybe they themselves thought this is never gonna work. And this is just so great to see

Andy Olrich  20:06

it giving them wings, coming back to the book. Yeah, title and that decentralized approach where they’ve got that freedom, the trust is there for them to experiment, and especially at the rate of change and innovation, as you mentioned, tlo, as opposed to everything has to come through a central team, a central manager, nothing moves without me, all those sorts of things. I think it’s a it’s a fantastic place to be. And I’m really pleased you wrote the book on it I, around the the novel approach, one of the first books I read, when I started getting into this was the goal. And it was the similar in a way, it was a story and and there was some some touch points there, I think, and human nature, you talk about the scientific thinking approach. So for, for me thinking about that is challenging our human nature that you talked about jumping straight to solution, I have to have to fix Like many terms, there’s many different ways that people interpreted what what do you tell I was scientifically thinking, and you’ve touched on it a little bit as the importance but if there’s one thing about scientific thinking that you’ve learned, and you want people to connect with, what would that be?

Tilo Schwarz  21:52

So added at the core, if you ask me for one thing, which is very difficult. It’s this this mindset or this attitude, we say, hey, everything we think and propose is a hypothesis and should be tested everything no matter how Sure I am. So in a way, you could say, the core is Don’t be so sure. I don’t mean that in an emotional in stable way. Okay, don’t be so sure. But I mean, in an attitude in a positive attitude, hey, cool idea. How can we test it? So if you ask me, for one thing, that’s probably the thing

Andy Olrich  22:36

that motivated me. To will be fine. Tilo. Okay. Okay.

Tilo Schwarz  22:43

So, another thing is a focusing on learning. Okay, so let’s take this to the organizational level. First, I have the feeling that in many, we’ve actually built our organization for fast execution, make a plan, and then make sure this plan gets executed correctly and fast. Now, this is wonderful for scaling, which we’ve experienced in the past four years. So we’ve grown through companies and also our society and economy through scaling. What best practices, let’s do them again. Now, while this is this is great. In a world that doesn’t change too much, it runs into difficulties once kind of the circumstances change, okay, because skate. jumping to conclusions means we’re, we’re projecting what we’ve learned to future tasks and problems. With the underlying caveat that, of course, experience is always context bound. So this means in the world we see now, probably speed of learning beats speed of execution, we don’t want to be slow. That’s not the point. But it’s more about learning than it is about just you know, execute. And I think that is the second very important aspect of scientific thinking, which means, how can we learn more? How can we learn faster? So you could think of and that’s, that’s, for me, a simple takeaway that can be changed. It’s like, like life hacks take away from this podcast. Like, if you if you look on on minutes from a meeting, like if you think of your meetings, you probably do in minutes. So then you usually have, who does what, until when, and then you have this checklist for the next meeting where you check if it got done. This is execution focus. Now what you could change to or not totally change, but add to have it a bit more scientific you could, once you’ve done okay, who does what until when you could ask and what do we expect to happen? So have an expectation connected with your countermeasures step. And when you meet in your next meeting, not only check Have you done the step could ask and what did we earned. Compared to our expectations, if you just add these two things to your minutes, you probably don’t need to change the form, you can use the same form. Because, okay, who does what? And what do we expect? And next time did we do it? And what did we learn? So don’t be so sure. And focus on learning, comparing. So that means compare what you expect it to what really happened. And kind of, you know, draw a conclusion from that and adapt your approach.

Patrick Adams  25:28

I love that what a great great example of embedding scientific thinking into our normal practices that, you know, probably many people are doing that already. So I love that a great simple way to just start slowly embedding scientific thinking into our organizations. I also think about some of the organizations that I’ve visited, that would say that they have a lean business system that they use, that they follow Lean principles that they are a lean company. But maybe they’re not necessarily using scientific thinking or have never heard of the term or I don’t know, maybe, you know, maybe they’re not doing those things, like the example that you just gave us. For those organizations, you know, how can you explain how scientific thinking can come alongside? Or maybe it should be a massive part of Lean thinking or, you know, the basis? So can you just kind of combine the two and explain how they come together? What the importance of the two are, together? How scientific thinking can help support a lean effort, you know, all of that. In one? Sure.

Tilo Schwarz  26:45

So, I guess you like many of us, including me, we’ve been on the Lean journey for a couple of years. And we could ask ourselves, so is it working? Are we happy with our results? And I think, yes, we can see positive results, we’ve implemented tools, it’s quite amazing how well, the two solutions Toyota developed fit to our problems, that’s I find this quite amazing. Now, the the catch 22 here seems to be to do it in a sustainable way. And also to, you know, keep developing our lead system. And lean started with very simple principles. So basically, it started with, you know, just in time to flow one piece flow, and, and judoka. So stop on failure. So that’s kind of the two fundamentals. And over the years, now, it has grown into kind of a system approach. Because yes, we say, unless you change the system, it’s not gonna work. But that, in my experience, in my feeling has become so huge, that it’s very hard to implement and sustain. Now, taking a more scientific approach will be to say, Okay, keep what we have what we’ve implemented so far with Lean, but treat what we’re doing as a hypothesis. And then kind of use a scientific approach of formulating a hypothesis, testing the hypothesis, then learning and adapting to developing our Lean system. So actually start very simple. But use a scientific way of building and growing what you do with Lean. And that is why I feel like scientific thinking is not a replacement. Not by far, it’s it’s an enabler. Like if you even if you look bigger than lean, you could say, in our endeavor to develop learning organizations, agile organizations, with many played on two big fields in the last years in many organizations, and that is introducing methods and tools. So you could think of lean, you could think of agile methods and tools for helping teams to be more nimble and experiment. And we’ve also done changes to our organization and roles like less hierarchical new roles, our product owner, whatever, yeah, Value Stream manager. So we’ve we’ve played on these two fields. And now I feel like there’s a third field, because it’s not that the other two are important. They’re fine. But basically, any transformation gets, you know, stuck by the existing habits and thinking patterns. So habits in thinking parents always win. And that’s kind of that field of thinking patterns and habits we haven’t addressed yet or not enough. And that is why I feel like scientific thinking and practicing Toyota kata as a way to develop this mental this mindset. It’s an enabler for bringing our Lean system to life step by step.

Andy Olrich  29:56

So, again, when you’re giving that Freedom or that additional capacity to your team to go on and try these new things. Having a structured scientific method and process behind that, to me would help reduce some of that risk. Some people may be listening thinking, Well, I just couldn’t let my team loose and I will you learn that that didn’t work again. And they’re just off doing their own thing. Having this this structure around Carter Carter and the coaching around it. How do you find that their best managers those risks with new approaches and there’s pressure there, it’s okay, you want to you want to be let go and do some things? Here you go. I expect results. Here it Can you talk us through a few things in that space.

Tilo Schwarz  30:45

So that is one of the aspects Jeff and I tried to cover in Denise’s story. Because this is a very big challenge as a manager, and if exactly experienced that myself, you, you want to develop your team at the same time. You’re not coached yourself, you’re just asked for results. Okay? And as long as you deliver results, you’re fine. If you’re not delivering results, okay, can catch on. So now, I think there is there is a bit of a misunderstanding. Sometimes people think like, we go by experiments, we experiment we coach so anything goes and speed doesn’t matter. quite contradictory. Okay. So we want speed. Now also clear that developing skills, coaching skills, as well as scientific thinking skills, takes time skill doesn’t develop by reading a book, okay, you don’t learn to fly a plane by reading a book you practice and you go to the flight simulator. Okay. So that is kind of the the, the pressure or the trade off, you’re talking about. Now, how do you mitigate that? So first of all, if you if you give freedom, it’s very clear, and there have been experiment in the past was just giving freedom. It comes with a obligation. And that is, you need to help people to understand what their action is. So this talks about our policy deployment. And that also makes it clear that the way we’re doing policy deployment today in many companies is not sufficient for giving people direction, because we only deploy numbers. Now numbers are okay, but they don’t create picture or in other words, if we talk about increasing productivity, we also have like by 10%, we all three have a picture in mind, but this picture very likely is different. Whereas if we deploy what we call term conditions, without wanting to go into too many details here, it’s about the point, what is it we want to achieve? So you could think of a lever in stone. So what is the stone we want to live? That’s the KPI. And what is the lever in the process? We want to, you know, to change so this stone gets gets lifted. So basically, how do you mitigate that risk? You’re responsible for results, but you want to coach? Well, first of all, the targets you deploy have to be much clearer in creating aligned pictures of how do we want this process to run in three months from now, in one month from now, in a week from now. Secondly, when we only look at the results, we all kind of you know, we dragged the hockey stick, nobody wants to see the hockey stick. Now, the truth is, whenever you do something new, when you whenever you you know, want to be innovative into this unknown zone, your result will follow the hockey stick curve. Okay. So actually, the real question, the real challenge for me here as a manager is, how do you know your team is making progress, although you don’t yet see it in the result, because this is not possible. If you do something new, very clearly, it’s gonna be the hockey stick. And that means this is where this coaching frequency comes in. So basically, coaching not only develops your team, the frequent coaching cycles, and we’re talking about daily coaching cycles here, also give you as the coach the feedback how fast your team is learning. So if you want to mitigate this risk, you not only need to look kind of stare at the results, why are the results are coming, it’s much more important to understand the learning speed of your team. So if you, if you learn in your daily coaching circles, my team is working at the relevant, relevant obstacles. They’re deepening their understanding, they’re producing, they’re starting to produce solutions that will remove this obstacle. So learning speed is good, you can see well, because the results will come. Now if we just do the classical, you know, every four weeks steering committee project check, this is never gonna work because you only see the results you don’t know if the team is learning. So basically, you mitigate this risk giving direction, Coach daily so you understand the learning speed. And of course, in the way you define the experiments, you want to define them in a way that you’re have, you know, getting into the danger zone? Sure, sure. So again, to summarize that, the way to mitigate the pressure of achieving results, while developing your team is understanding the learning speed of your team. Yeah,

Patrick Adams  35:14

know your people know your people, and I love your the framework that you just kind of gave us of how to coach. And I think about when I was learning, the coach, you know, came in many difficulties that that, that I came in contact with, you know, learning how to set SMART goals and ensuring that people have targets that have due dates, and that there’s owners and these different things that I came across. Another one was that I would hear from team members at times was conflicting priorities, right. You know, we set this goal or this challenge, and we’re working towards it, but then I get pulled in this other direction, because there’s this other thing that came up. And so that that was another challenge that I came across. So for those that are listening in that, you know, maybe they pick up your book, maybe they grab Toyota kata, and they start to learn about kata, and then how to coach kata. And they’re there. Maybe they’re a new leader, they they’re just starting to, you know, learn coaching, what are some of the difficulties that they might come across as they’re beginning this this journey into coaching themselves? And what are some of the things that they can do to to overcome those?

Tilo Schwarz  36:26

So the difficulty? I mean, what, what makes a good coach? Well, a good coach, I often say you realize a good coach, because people go to this person voluntarily. Say, Hey, Patrick, I think I’m stuck. Can you coach me? So it’s not the title is not the role. It’s like, they feel value coming out of the coaching cycle, and they say, this 10 minutes with Patrick? Interesting, he didn’t give me any solutions. But somehow he asked some questions that kind of changed my perspective, my posture on how I was looking at what I was doing, and right. There was a threshold of knowledge. I didn’t know that. So I need to, I need to find out that first. I was making some assumptions here. Awesome. Great. 10 minutes. Okay. So what are the difficult to learn that? Well, first of all, the coaching, we often say it’s about asking questions. Well, while this is true, I think the much more difficult part is what do you do with the answer? So in a way, those that are familiar with the coaching data questions, I like to use the example of a ski coach. So imagine, I don’t know any of us skiers. I know, Patrick,

Patrick Adams  37:40

1. My daughter skis

Andy Olrich  37:44

1. Now you’re talking about snow skiing? Yeah. snow

Tilo Schwarz  37:46

skiing. Yeah. So downhill skiing. Now you can pick any other sports you do is something you can already do on a decent level. And now you say I want to, I want to get to the next level, okay. And in order to do that, you hire a coach, a ski instructor for the weekend or for the Saturday. So now, once you meet the ski instructor, what’s the first thing? What’s the first thing that’s going to be she’s going to do after saying hello? Well, she’s gonna say, well go down this hill, but she’s assessing current condition gives you a task. While you do that she’s gonna observe. What is she going to do with her observation? While she’s going to analyze it, and how can she do that, while she’s comparing what she sees what she sees, for example, me doing when I do a left turn and skis, how should my hips be my shoulders, my arms, my knees, is she’s comparing that with a picture in her mind. So basically, she’s comparing what she sees with an ideal reference in her mind. And based on that the variation, she then step four gives me a tip, what to do on the next run some advice, okay. So basically, coaching cycles follows the same structure, you ask the question, which is like giving a task, then you have to listen to the answer. And then now comes the tricky part. How do you evaluate this answer? So basically, if you ask, what’s the target condition? Which one? Was you trying to condition? What is a good answer? That’s your reference. So listening to the answer, and comparing it to the reference is the much more difficult part to learn. Now, I always say we always have a reference in evaluating our answer, evaluating the answer. And our first go to reference is our experience with the same or a similar topic. So that is a content reference. And then we say, Andy, are you sure the last time when, you know a couple of years ago when I was still working at this machine? I think that they’re not in the coaches role anymore, right? See that? So what’s the chance to become a good coach is moving your reference from a content level to a method level? So basically, the coach says, Any solution is fine as long as you can show me how this is scientific building logic chain is building why you’re coming to this hypothesis. Awesome. Yeah, that’s difficult to learn. The second part that is difficult to learn is letting go of your own ideas. That’s probably the hardest part. Because it sounds simple, but actually, this is not just, you know, something you have to be aware of, it’s actually kind of changing your role. Now, if you think especially for managerial careers, how do you how do you get to managerial role? Well, usually, because you’ve done something amazing on the content level, you’ve been the expert on this, and that and because you’ve been the expert, somebody asks you, Hey, Annie, when you might, we might managing the team, okay. Now, when that happens, we think we’re going to lead our team the same way we did before, which was through our expertise, right. And letting go of that means the role is changing. So in a way, you could say, coaching, the Toyota cutter way comes down to this question, how do you want to lead your team? Is it about you and your ideas? Or is it about your team, and helping them to develop their ideas? And that is, no matter if it’s a you mentioned a young coach, no matter if it’s a young coach or an older coach, this is probably the number one charge.

Andy Olrich  41:19

Okay, so, Tilo, the new book, giving wings to her team, novel style or touched on it’s a it’s telling the story, what was the thinking behind that, or the goal behind doing it in the novel style.

Tilo Schwarz  41:37

The goal was to was to go beyond just referencing the goal, you know, the book you mentioned now. Now, again, going back to something I mentioned, the beginning, I feel like especially in a managerial role, coaching knowledge is not the issue. We know, we should be coaches, and we’ve, we’ve had some coaching training, putting into practice is the difficult part skill wise, but also risk wise, this is risky. And this is kind of, you know, a role change for me as a manager. And I also feel that like, you know, the typical books on coaching kind of explain the perfect way, and like the clean way, now, reality is not that way, my learning curve is not like this, I’m gonna make mistakes, okay, all of us, we’re gonna make mistakes. And we’re still making mistakes from coaching. It happens every day. So the novice, the idea behind the novice style is putting this learning journey as a coach into real world situations, because the challenge is not the knowledge. The challenge is how do I do this? This kind of, you know, big, hairy thing of coaching in my daily business. So and, of course, the nice has a quite steep learning curve in the novel, because I mean, the book is still thick, but we want to, we want to get there. And, and our hope, Jeff, and my hope is that this book is inspiring you, the readers to start a learning journey as a coach on their own. Like, hey, it’s not about if I want to coach now it’s about how can I learn to become a better coach. And if you opt into that, this is just such a cool experience. It’s it’s a lifelong learning journey, if you want, and you will learn as you go to become a better and better coach. So becoming a coaching leader starts with yourself and the willingness to be a learner as a coach. That is why it’s not the style. Yeah.

Andy Olrich  43:53

Yeah, the story making that connection with what’s real. I can relate to it a lot easier. I find then, is the step by step. very technical. Yeah, there’s the manual. There’s the wall. Yeah,

Tilo Schwarz  44:05

exactly. Because some, some some, some of the early readers like well, we have a manuscript they said, Yeah, but wait on page on page 50. That’s not right. What Denise is doing. I mean, you know, if you do improve a cache, you should do this. So yeah, she’s made a mistake. Okay. Of course, we all will. So let’s see how she gets herself out of that again, because that’s what’s going

Patrick Adams  44:29

to happen. That’s the reality. Yeah, that’s what I that’s what I like about it as a narrative is it’s it’s scattered a story that we can all relate to. And everyone that reads this is going to be able to pick themselves out in the book, and to make that make a connection to something that we’ve done, whether it’s a mistake, or again, as we’re learning to coach, you know, the different aspects of of, you know, successes and trials that we’ll go through. So, the other cool thing as we start To wrap up today T lo is that you will be in attendance and one of our keynote speakers at the Lean Solution Summit this year on September 24, fifth, and sixth in West Michigan. So you’re coming all the way from Germany to keynote at our summit, and every one of our attendees is going to receive your book giving wings to her team. So these will be four bags, and everyone will receive one. And we’re excited for everyone to be able to tap into this book, powerful book to learn how to coach. But tell us a little bit give us a little bit of a sneak peek for the summit. What are the what are you going to be talking about? What are you going to be promoting or or, you know, discussing with attendees at the summit when you’re there speaking.

Tilo Schwarz  45:49

So basically what what we talked about about the novel, is that our hope is that this novel inspires the readers to start a learning journey of their own. So I’m, I’m going to talk about and give examples, and also some tips on how can you give wings to your team. Because, you know, we believe people can achieve the unexpected, through better coaching, and your team can do it too. They need you as a coach. So I’m going to talk about this learning journey as a coach, what you can do to get started, how can you proceed? And also, why that is it worth pursuing this, this learning journey? Love it. And

Patrick Adams  46:37

the theme of the summit is unleashing the power of continuous learning. So it matches up so perfectly with what we’re going to be talking about at the summit. And we’ll drop a link for the summit into the shownotes along with some links to to those book for those of you that unfortunately won’t be in attendance. But if you again, if you’re in attendance, you will receive the book. Otherwise, the other links to the best way to get a hold of you. Would it be LinkedIn or are there other links in the show notes for people that want to reach out?

Tilo Schwarz  47:08

You could put my email in LinkedIn. Perfect. That’s part of it.

Patrick Adams  47:13

We’ll do that. Well, T though it’s been great to have you on. I feel like we could have talked for quite a while longer. But again, we’ll catch up at the Summit in September. And Andy as well we’ll be there so it’ll be Andy T lo and myself. All three of us will be together in person. So that’ll be that’ll be cool to see you guys in person at the summit. But again, T low. Thanks again for coming on. Love your book, love, love everything that you’re doing. And yeah, appreciate you,

Tilo Schwarz  47:40

Patrick. And yeah, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks, Tilo.