The Toyota Kata is a management book by Mike Rother. it can be defined as a systematic, scientific set of routines that activate and mobilize people’s creative capabilities to meet challenging goals. In this blog post, Håkan Forss, a Lean/Agile Coach in Sweden, introduces the Toyota Kata as an alternative or as a complement to agile retrospectives.
The first interesting aspect of this post is that it is mostly composed of snapshots of Lego scenes that tell the story around the Toyota Kata. The post focuses on the Improvement Kata that contains four steps:
1. Understand the Direction, so you know where you are going
2. Grasp the Current Condition, to get your reference point
3. Establish the Next Target Condition, that is your next step on the path towards the vision
4. Plan-Do-Check-Act Toward the Target Condition
You can read the complete post on http://hakanforss.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/agile-lego-toyota-kata-an-alternative-to-retrospectives/