Karate & Coffee: Mastering the art of change management
COVER IMAGE: EYAD TARIQ
I’m standing at the counter in a coffee shop in the middle of Bali. The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans mingles with the sticky morning air. Outside, scooters speed down the narrow dirt lane as the local residents prepare to go about their day.
I’m here on a short trip with two old friends. Bali is a somewhat central location for us to fly in from our various corners of the world to catch up and unwind. We’d all worked together at one point or another over the years, so there was a healthy dose of shop talk mingled in with the lazy afternoons lounging in the pool in the front yard of our rented villa.
Bali is famous for its rich cultural heritage, and is in fact well known around Southeast Asia for its many coffee plantations and the rich, sweet blends of local coffee readily available all over the island. However, it can be difficult to find a great cup of espresso in the area we’re staying. The good news is, we seem to have discovered the best place in town for this very specific type of coffee. The bad news? On this particular morning it feels like every other foreigner in town has decided to grab their breakfast cup o’ joe at this exact spot.
After a short wait, I order three cups of coffee for takeaway and pay for them. I then stand back and watch the sole young man making coffee for the waiting throngs. Immediately, I get the sense this is the first time he’s doing this - he moves in a way that makes it apparent he’s unsure of himself, his movements hesitant and tentative. As I look around the small, minimally decorated room, I realise the half dozen or so customers waiting had clearly been there for some time, waiting patiently as the nervous barista brewed their beverages.
Quizzically I decide to observe the coffee making process more closely. Each step seems to be over-engineered to the highest extreme. He measures the number of beans exactly into the machine before grinding them. Once ground, he weighs them on a small precision scale on the counter. Water and milk is also measured out to the millilitre, and weighed on the scale for good measure. Brewing and frothing is performed to a stop watch, with all of the attentiveness of an Olympic official timing the gold medal event of the 100m sprint. And finally, once all of the elements are finally assembled in their cup? You guessed it, back on the scale again.
The process of making each cup of coffee could only be described as a performance, some kind of sadistic one man show that is equal parts intense precision and white-knuckled nervousness.
My curiosity gets the better of me and I strike up a conversation with the manager who is casually restocking the fridge and tallying up receipts at the other end of the counter. I ask in the nicest way possible why the barista is making coffee in this most unusual way.
His explanation makes a lot of sense: apparently it’s very hard to retain regular staff in Bali, and with a revolving door of young workers it can be almost impossible to maintain the quality of coffee his customers demand. His solution? He had hired a master barista who was mostly retired and only interested in working part-time. In order to maintain quality control while he was away, the master barista had created a foolproof system for making each cup of coffee, which he used to train the inexperienced staff and provide them with a step-by-step checklist. Armed with all of this, even the inexperienced young apprentices were able to produce high quality coffee with surprising consistency.
The only drawback to this system, it seemed, was that it took an interminably long time to make each cup of coffee. When I finally enquire how long I might be waiting, the young barista in training cheerily informs me it will be roughly 30 minutes until my order of three coffees was up. By this stage I’m more curious than impatient, no doubt aided by my holiday mindset, the beautiful tropical weather and that excellent feeling of having nowhere to be. I let him know I’m going to leave and come back in half an hour to pick up my order.
Upon returning to our nearby villa, my friends are naturally inquisitive as to why I’ve come back empty handed. When I relayed the entire story of the checklist barista, one friend gives a knowing smile and tells me it reminds him of an ancient Japanese learning method called “Shu Ha Ri”
Shu... Ha... Ri. It turns out that this method describes the three stages a student takes on the path to mastery.
At the “Shu” or beginner stage, the student follows a set of specific instructions from a single master or teacher. They shouldn’t worry about the theory - just copy and do.
At the “Ha” or intermediate stage, the student is able to apply best practices and begin to understand the underlying theory. This may lead them to adopting lessons from other masters.
At the “Ri” stage, the student is able to learn and adapt based on their own practice. They are able to customise and synthesise the set of underlying principles that apply best to their particular circumstance. At the “Ri” stage, the student becomes the master.
Whether knowingly or not, our master barista had adopted this ancient teaching pattern for his apprentice coffee makers. The young man back at the coffee shop was clearly at the “Shu” stage, meticulously following the step-by-step checklist provided by his master without questioning the underlying theory of what makes a great cup of coffee.
In the business world, there has been a growing appreciation over recent years for the Shu Ha Ri learning method, particularly where new ways of working like agile require the introduction of unfamiliar behavioural shifts. My team and I worked with a large corporation in Southeast Asia driving one such program of work. The organisation in question was at the time quite traditional and extremely hierarchical, which meant that agile adoption was difficult. Even something as simple as running daily standups had become difficult to manage as senior leaders insisted on being present but would often move these sessions according to their schedule and ask for lengthy slide decks to provide them with status updates. As a result, even the most basic of agile ways of working had become laborious and counterproductive, leading the project sponsor to indicate that they wanted to just go back to the way things were.
Looking for inspiration, the team turned to the Shu Ha Ri framework to implement a series of changes:
Shu: the team implemented a very strict set of rules for the daily standup: no slides, fixed time each morning, limit of 3 questions and 1 minute per person. Senior execs were allowed to attend only if they limited their participation to that of observers and followed the rules. The team began to see immediate improvements in the effectiveness of the standup - within the first two weeks it began to help their work rather than hinder.
Ha: the team began to feel more comfortable and introduced some experimentation into the structure of the standup. They let their work guide which questions to answer, and weren’t afraid to trial other typical standup formats where it made sense. Within the first two months, the amount of work carried over week to week decreased dramatically, allowing them to make accurate and informed forecasts about productivity for the first time.
Ri: after three months of experimentation, the team had organically abandoned the strict structure of the standup. No fixed questions to answer, just a natural exchange of information. Notably absent were any status updates or justification for what has or hasn’t been done, simply a quick ritual that allowed everyone to get their work done in the most efficient manner.
The company in question has gone on to successfully roll out agile ways of working to a significant portion of their workforce, enabling teams to tackle projects and launch new products to market at an unprecedented rate. Like many organisations before them, adoption of Shu Ha Ri allowed them to stop questioning the theory, just follow best practice, and gradually build their own set of principles over time that work for them. The introduction of a progressive learning method like Shu Ha Ri was instrumental in saving them from the instinct to revert back to the old way of doing things.
The fundamental lesson seems to be elusively simple: in order to start something new, you first need to get good before you have a chance at becoming great. As an innovator, how might you adopt the stages of Shu Ha Ri to evolve towards mastery?
At the “Shu” stage, the goal is often just to get your innovation effort up and running and to gain executive buy-in. Don’t worry too much about the theory - simply use best practice to build your playbook and get going
At the “Ha” stage, it becomes feasible to start experimenting. What have other innovation teams done at other companies? What can you learn from innovation in other industry sectors? What can you customise by combining lessons from various schools of thought?
And finally in order to get to the “Ri” stage, it requires a realisation that innovation is fundamentally about creating new things. When something has never been done before, it’s unrealistic to think there will be a checklist that you can just follow. Tear up the playbook and throw it out. At this stage the focus has to be on learning from your own experiences, and adopting a principles based approach to suit your specific situation.
Back in Bali, I exit the villa and embark on the short walk down the lane back to the coffee shop. The glowing yellow sun is already beating down, promising another scorching day in the tropics. Back at the counter, I smile as the young barista finally hands over the three cups of coffee I’d ordered what seems like a lifetime ago. I flash him a knowing smile, feeling a connection with this young apprentice who has embraced the beginner’s mindset. I wonder about his path from Shu to Ha to Ri, when he will one day become a master coffee maker in his own right.
“See you tomorrow” I say as I cradle the precious cargo and step back out into the warm morning air.