The Toyota Kata is a structured way to create a culture of continuous learning and improvement at all levels. It is an organizations daily habits or routines forming its “muscle memory” for continuous learning and improvements.
Toyota Kata is a management book by Mike Rother. The book explains the Improvement Kata, which is a means for making creative work teachable. The daily habits/routines help us to strive towards our vision, or our state of awesomeness in small focused experiments.
At the heart of Toyota Kata is the Improvement Kata. The Improvement Kata forms the continuous improvement habits of the method. The Improvement Kata guides the learners, the teams, through a four-step process focused on learning and improving your way of working. The second and equally important part of Toyota Kata is the Coaching Kata. The Coaching Kata is supporting the Improvement Kata by helping the learners to focus on learning, improving, and pointing in the right direction. The Coaching Kata itself is primarily supporting the fourth step of the Improvement Kata, PDCA toward the Target Condition.
Applying the Toyota Kata is a improvement tool that can be used by team using the Scrum Agile project management approach instead of retrospectives.
Toyota Kata References
Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results, McGraw-Hill
The Toyota Kata Website http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mrother/Homepage.html
Hakan Forss Blog http://hakanforss.wordpress.com/tag/toyota-kata/
Toyota Kata – Habits for Continuous Improvements http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/toyotakata.php
Stop Doing Retrospectives: http://www.scrumexpert.com/videos/stop-doing-retrospectives
Agile, Lean and Scrum 
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