Show me
Fewer things have affected my leadership style in a direct, practical, quick-turnaround way than the Toyota Kata "show me".
The picture below (link from O'Reilly Toyota Kata excerpt, found via Google) summarizes it, albeit in a short, easy to overlook form:
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| From: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/toyota-kata-managing/9780071639859/xhtml/spart4.html. For those with the physical book it's at page 225. |
"Show me" is the mantra-ish question I ask whenever someone comes up with a proposal to do something, without clearly stating, or being able to explain, what is the root cause of the problem they are trying to solve. I am sure we all have experienced this, for example: a user asks that we add a feature so that they can edit a certain record, which is intentionally not editable. They might ask this because they often make a mistake in another part of the app, i.e. because of bad UI/UX.
In this case we want (and have!) to fix UI/UX rather than adding another feature.
In my team meetings I call this specifying a problem by its solution rather than its cause(s). I ask everybody to pay attention and train themselves to spot it in both external requests, but also in requests we might be making ourselves. The latter is intuitively much harder because it is more difficult to be aware when we ourselves are misled.
How can we catch the "mistake" both when our user is asking for the edit record feature, and in the daily dealings within our team or organization?
My go-to practice is to ask: "show me". Then I literally ask them to share their screen and walk me through the process. This part cannot be overlooked enough: it is imperative that we sit down together, pairing up for as long as necessary while they repeat the steps, describing them out loud. We just cannot rely on a description by memory because we will apply selective bias to our memory and alter it or even remove important parts entirely!
Sometimes we cannot literally repeat the process together (which is a problem in its own, but let's gloss over it). In this case, after having listened (patiently!) to the recollection of events, we will repeat everything back so that our counterpart can confirm we have understood the situation as they also understand it.
When doing this, I stop to explore or consider possible alternative paths at critical junctions. This confirms that not only we understand the chain of events as they were recalled, but, more importantly, we also can exclude all, well major at least, events that were not mentioned in the recollection. Until we rule them out we cannot know if they did not happen, or if they were selectively cut out from the narration, because of cognitive bias kicking in.
From my experience, the advantages of "show me" are:
- a clear, factual, understanding of the problem, rather than based on assumptions, or outdated knowledge
- a sense of shared ownership of the problem
- a sense of being "listened to" by the mentee
- continuously updated knowledge on the coach part
- an opportunity for coaching and confrontation