The Five Questions

Definition

Once a target condition is set, Toyota's coaches move people forward with a fixed sequence: (1) What is the target condition? (2) What is the actual condition now? (3) What obstacles are now preventing you from reaching the target condition, and which one are you addressing now? (4) What is your next step (the start of the next PDCA cycle)? (5) When can we go and see what you have learned from taking that step? Rother calls this a "minikata" — a small, teachable device that distills the improvement kata down to something "accessible and usable by anyone."

In the Book

Chapter 6 presents the five questions (Figure 6-21) as the summary distillation of everything the chapter has built: target conditions, the gray zone, PDCA, and go-and-see. Rother notes the questions are cumulative — "the better you've defined the target condition, the better you'll be able to assess the current condition," and so on down the chain — and that before a target condition exists, questions 1 and 2 run in reverse order. Chapter 8 shows the questions in use as the backbone of the mentor/mentee "coaching kata": a coach asks them of a mentee at the process, repeatedly, turning the abstract improvement kata into a concrete habit through sheer repetition — Rother reports asking them "any time I visit a process."

Why It Matters

A complex practice becomes teachable only when it can be compressed into a short, memorizable sequence that someone can run without supervision. The five questions work because they force a strict order: you can't skip to "what should we do" before establishing what you're aiming at and what's actually true right now. That ordering — target, actual, obstacle, step, checkpoint — is a domain-neutral template for turning open-ended problem solving into a routine, applicable anywhere a coach wants a trainee to internalize a way of thinking rather than just receive an answer.