Patrick Adams  00:00

Welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. This is the podcast that adds value to leaders by helping you improve performance using process improvement solutions with bottom line results. My name is Patrick Adams, and this season, I’ll be joined by three other amazing hosts, including Catherine O’Donnell from Ireland, Andy Ulrich from Australia, and Shane gottlenbal from the United States. Join us as we bring you guests and experiences of Lean practitioners from all over the world. Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Patrick Adams, and my guest today is David McRaney, who was also the keynote for the Michigan lean Consortium’s annual conference here in beautiful Traverse City, Michigan. We’re actually recording this podcast today live and in front of a live audience here at the conference. So I’ll just give just a little bit of background on David. I know the individuals who are sitting here in the room have heard David’s bio just from this morning. He did our keynote today, which was amazing, by the way, we’ll talk a little bit about that. We’re going to dive a little bit deeper into just the connection to our work and how some of the things that David talked about during his keynote today can be utilized for those of us that are working with human beings, which I think is every one of our listeners in the audience. So David mcgraney is a science journalist, author and podcaster. His blog, exploring how we delude ourselves, laid the groundwork for his first book, you are not so smart, which became an international bestseller and has been translated into 14 languages. He later created the podcast, you are not so smart, and then wrote a follow up book, you are now less dumb. Love the titles, by the way, David’s third book, which released in 2022 is titled How minds change. So since his last book, he’s been an editor, photographer, voiceover artist, television host, journalism teacher, lecturer and even a Tornado Survivor. I’m excited to hear a little bit more about that. We touched on it this morning. But David, welcome to the show. Hey. Thank you very much. We just did a fun marshmallow experiment challenge thing. I had the marshmallow researchers on the show my podcast. I’m just wondering. I know the listeners won’t be able to see this, but I’ll tell you what happens. How many people here ate a marshmallow?

 

David McRaney  02:34

No one ate a marshmallow, which I’ll find, I don’t know. Oh, we did have no there was two. There were two people. People raised the marshmallows, which were supposed to be used as structural integrity objects. So that’s nice. That’s nice to see.

 

Patrick Adams  02:46

So for those that are listening in to this episode, we did the marshmallow challenge, but the theme of the Michigan lean consortium annual conference this year is we’ve never done it this way. And so what we did was we put a little spin on the marshmallow challenge, and we ran three rapid PDCA cycles that were six minutes each, with some reflection time in between. And I think it was a lot of fun. I’ll throw this out there. We added a little bit of alcohol, since there’s an open bar, and that also added to the fun. It certainly contributed to the challenge. It contributed to the challenge. Yeah, good. So anyways, David, let’s, let’s dive in here. So I’m excited to talk with you about your keynote today, and just the you know, little little bit into your book as well. But before we do that, I think everyone here wants to know a little bit about the the Tornado Survivor story. So can you tell us just maybe a little bit more about that. I was finishing my second book, and I we were only about four days out from my deadline, and the deadline was one of those deadlines where they would have been happy to give me a little more time, but there was a printer, and the printer has a schedule, and you, once your time is up for that, you have to turn in your stuff and get your book printed, and if you don’t get it in time, you move to the back of the line. So I was at the time, I was working for a local television station as well, and I was giving updates about the tornado, and I saw that, yeah, this tornado is definitely headed straight for me. And sure enough, I hunkered down. The tornado hit the house. It obliterated the house. And right before it got there, I uploaded my manuscript to Dropbox, and then I hunkered down in the hallway. Tornado obliterated the house, opened my office after it went by and it was one of the walls was missing and the ceiling was missing, and I was just sort of put my hands on my hips and was like, hmm, well, that happened.

 

David McRaney  04:54

Let me call my editor. So I called my editor, of course, that. Be the first person I’d call to. I called my editor, and I said, Hey, so a tornado ate my homework, and they she was like, Look, I I know this is terrible, but we cannot give you more time your deadline is still your deadline. Figure something out. And I, I drove to Walmart. I bought a laptop and I bought a because I was using a desktop. I didn’t have a laptop at the time. I bought a laptop and a copy of Microsoft Word, and then I went to my parents, who live about 30 minutes away, and I set everything up. I downloaded the I installed word, downloaded the manuscript from Dropbox, and just went to work, and I finished that over the course of about 48 hours and uploaded it, and then I got to work repairing the house after that so and the thing about that is my agent at the time when she caught word of this, because I didn’t include her in all the messaging. She really freaked out and yelled at a lot of people about that. And for years, for like a decade, that became a sort of story that got shared in the publishing world, like, Hey, this is the guy that finished a book with a tornado thing. So I did at least get points for like, this guy will finish his work even after our tornadoes destroyed his house. But it was a bizarre experience, and I get to tell people like you about it now. So yeah, and that I ended up having to fix a gazillion things that got ate up, and that whole neighborhood was destroyed. There were two houses in my neighborhood that were completely scraped off of their foundations. There’s no, there was no house remaining at all from that tornado. So it was a big deal.

 

Patrick Adams  06:45

It’s always tough. And I, I, I’m just thinking like, clearly, you were okay, everyone else in your family, everybody’s okay,

 

David McRaney  06:53

no physical no physical damage. Yeah, yeah.

 

Patrick Adams  06:58

Well, that is a story for sure to tell I know you have a few others, which we heard this morning too, but we won’t dive into those. I want to talk about your keynote, because it was mind blowing to me, just some of the things that you shared. And obviously to those that are listening in that we’re not here to see the keynote. You missed out, but I know you have quite a bit out on YouTube and your website. So if anyone’s interested, I know they can go out and check out some of that stuff, but we want to know a little bit more about some of the things that we talked about. Specifically, I want to start by just talking about difficult conversations so many, all of us here and many of our listeners are dealing with change continuously in in the workplaces that we’re in, and when you’re when you’re helping to promote change, positive change, and you’re, you have people, human beings, that you’re working with, there’s going to be some some rub that happens, and probably there needs to be some difficult conversations that happen. I’m just curious to hear what your approach would be for a difficult conversation. What? What if you had you had to have this conversation? Maybe it’s a co worker. Maybe it’s someone that is that working, that works for you, or maybe it’s your your boss that you have to have a difficult conversation with. What would be your approach be? How would you start? What would that look like? How would you follow up? Sure, walk us through that.

 

David McRaney  08:26

Yeah, of course. I mean, in the course of working on this book, I spent almost seven years on this project, and so I spent time with conspiratorial communities, cults, pseudo cults, religious extremists, political extremists, all sorts of interesting organizations where people had left those organizations for one reason or another, and then many different scientists who studied on a lot of different levels, whether that’s sociological, psychological, neurological, one of the most fascinating things I discovered in working on this project was I found all these independent organizations who had decided that they wanted to master the art of persuasion, and they weren’t happy with any of the books that were available, and they weren’t necessarily eager to dig or dig into the literature. And one of the group was the group was the deep canvassers, another group of Street Epistemology. And then another group were the psychologists who work under a framework called motivational interviewing. And I think the most, the thing that really got a fire in my belly about all of this was as I would spend two or three weeks at a time with these different groups, and then I would go back and forth. And like with the deep canvassers, I flew back and forth to Los Angeles like nine times, and would go out to walk door to door and knock on doors and everything. And I started to notice that all of them had a framework for how they approached the conversation based off of some sort of AB testing where they had, like the. Cameras had 17,000 conversations with people recorded on video, and they would pick them apart and keep what worked, throw away what didn’t work, and slowly hone in on something that they could dependably rely upon. As this is how you have a conversation with someone about a difficult topic for them, it was usually wedge issues, whatever was in the news at the time, the time I was visiting, when I was visiting them, they were talking about transgender bathroom rights, was that they would go to door to door, and in neighborhoods where they were pretty sure people were opposed to the idea, and they would have difficult conversations with them about that, but they had had all sorts of other wedge issues they had discussed before that, from the climate change, to immigration, to same sex marriage, to abortion rights, that sort of thing. And they had a framework. And then the motivational interviewing people. They also would go to college campuses and have conversations, and they had had 1000s of conversations, and they had done the AB testing. And then motivational interviewing is something that’s used in therapeutic situations, and what I discovered was that all of these groups, they were not aware of one another. Some of them had never looked at the scientific literature, yet they had all landed upon the exact same technique. And if they had a series of steps, it was pretty much the same steps in the same order. And I was lucky enough to find some German researchers. When I brought it to them, they said, This is, yeah, you’ve you’ve lucked up and fallen into something that we call technique rebuttal, which is the different framework than topic rebuttal. So topic rebuttal is the idea that you you sit across from someone, or you stand across from someone at a lectern, and you have sort of a debate. You have a an argument with that person that involves, I want to be right, I want you to be wrong, and I’m going to present my propositions, my arguments, my and my the evidence that I feel like supports my position. You do yours, and then we will butt heads and technique rebuttal all these organizations is completely different from that. You’re not trying to butt heads with the person over the facts of the matter. You’re trying to help them sort out. Why do you feel the way you feel about this issue? How did you arrive at your beliefs? How did you get to this confidence? How did you get to this attitude? What is motivating you, and you can do the same with me, but we’re trying to get behind all of that, and we’re not having a facts first discussion, and I started to see it something more akin to like, like, if you were to show the airplane from, from Kitty Hawk, like the the Wright Brothers aircraft, to like, a kid like, to just Like, like, like, show a little little black and white and say, What do you see here? Almost every child in the world be like, that’s an airplane. And it looks like an airplane because airplanes have a certain form to them. Airplanes look like airplanes. And the reason airplanes look like airplanes is because to overcome all the challenges required to get a object to fly in the air, you have to take on a certain format of material sciences, and that format ends up looking like an airplane. And we’re talking about weight ratios and engines and structure integrity and all sorts of stuff, the conversations that work when it comes to having a difficult conversation with someone the format of that in which there is any likelihood that they may see things differently by the end of that, without pushing away or getting angry at you or saying, let’s agree to disagree, they all tend to have a certain format to them, a certain shape, because you’re trying to overcome the same challenges, and once you figure out how to overcome those challenges. That’s why everything had the same structure. So my very long preamble to the answer to your question is all of that led me to what I’m about to say to you is that when you approach a conversation with someone that you expect to be challenging, the first thing I would ask you to do is on your own answer the question of, Why do you expect this to be challenging? And I mean, really, actually write this down somewhere, type it up or put it on a piece of paper. What is it about this that makes you think? I bet this is going to be a challenging conversation. What is giving you that intuition? Then, if you are hoping that you’re going to persuade that person in some way, why? Why do you want to persuade them answer this question to yourself first, and then when you get an answer to why ask, why that? And then why that? And then why that. And keep drilling down, if you have to get all the way down to quarks and muons of the why of this. And you do that so that when you begin the conversation with them, you can be transparent and honest about why you’re doing this, why you wanted to talk to them, why this is important to you, and what you expect to be challenging upfront and you’re wanting you’re doing all that so that you avoid the first thing that usually destroys the conversation like this, which is reactance. Reactance is the pushback that a person experiences when even if they agree with you, even if they like what you’re talking about, you. If it’s a problem you both share, even if it’s a goal you both share, they may push back just because they feel like you’re trying to get them to do it your way, or you’re trying to get them to see it your way. Why? Because you want them to, and that’s the only thing you’ve given them is like any, any sort of like clue as to why this conversation has taken place. So the first thing you want to do is avoid reactants. In the keynote I describe reactants like this. Teenagers oftentimes will have a very messy room, and they’ll have like a blinking neon sign in their head that says, I should clean my room. And then if someone in the family, if their mom is like, hey, you need to clean your room, then the first thing they’ll do is go make their room messy. They’ll eat a candy bar and throw the wrapper onto the whatever pile of junk is already in there, even though they want to clean their room, and they have been thinking about it, the fact that somebody else has told them to clean it means that when they start cleaning their room, they’ll think that the motivation to clean this room came from somebody else. I’ve lost my agency. I’m only doing this because somebody told me to, not because I want to do it, because, at the end of the day, all persuasion is self persuasion. What you’re getting the person to do is want to change, and that’s the goal of the conversation, not to get sort of dump a bunch of information on them, or force them, or try to coerce the person. Ethical persuasion is always going to be, very clearly, not coercion. And so the first step in the process is going to be build rapport in some way. Hey, I’m here. You’re here. I think you’re a reasonable, intelligent human being. We share similar goals and problems. I would like to talk to you about this. Would you be willing to talk to me about this? And what I’m hoping to do is we can, like, look at it together and come to some sort of decision that we come to together. I’m not trying to copy and paste anything out of me into you, and that needs to be made clear up front. So that’s the answer to your the first question that you have,

 

Patrick Adams  16:51

no that’s good. It’s I love that I love that you talked about. To take, take a step back yourself personally, and take the time to write it out and really think, think through. You know that you’re going to have an important conversation. It’s going to be difficult. It’s important for you to take the time to actually understand why, why you want this to happen and and what are the steps that that need to take in order for you to express, you know, the why behind it. So I think that’s that’s a really important piece. And I’m just thinking of a specific example of an individual that I worked with at an organization who we had gone through a Kaizen event together, a rapid improvement event together, and we the team, had agreed on doing things differently within this assembly cell that she worked in, and they updated their standard work. They retrained the team. Everyone was fully on board. She was seemed fully on board during the event, and it wasn’t until a week later when I walked out on the floor and I saw her doing the exact same thing that we were doing prior to the event. And so I asked her, Hey, I thought we had made some agreements and decided to do this differently. And and she said, Well, I know we decided that, but this is the way we’ve always done it, and this is the way I’m going to continue to do it. And at that moment, I knew, like, Okay, this is going to be a hard conversation, like in that situation, I mean, you’re you’re out there on for those of us that are in manufacturing, you’re on the production floor, you’re in the emergency room, you’re wherever it is, and you you’re faced with this difficult conversation where you, you don’t have the ability to walk away, or, I guess maybe you could, but let’s just say we have to have the conversation right now. I mean, what are you doing if you’re standing there and she says, Yes, we agreed to that, but I’m not going to do it. I’m going to continue to do things the old way, no matter what you say. Well, the

 

David McRaney  18:46

first thing I’ll do in a situation like that is make sure you have plenty of cognitive empathy on hand for what’s going on. Like cognitive empathy is the idea that people do things for reasons. People believe things for reasons. People behave or plan to behave or plan not to behave for reasons. There’s some sort of there’s some true justification and rationalization at play. And it is also very likely that the person you’re talking with has no idea what that true justification and rationalization is, and when you ask them to present to you their rationalization or justification for their behavior, they’re going to give you something that is a best guess so, and you can’t go with that at first. You need to have cognitive empathy for the fact that they have no choice but to feel the way they feel. It’s happening to them. It’s like being hungry. It’s something that happens without your permission, and you are following through with the emotional state that has arrived inside your body and mind, and you may not be aware you have you don’t gain any control over the situation until you gain some sort of insight into what it is that’s driving your behavior. So the kind of conversation you want to have with that person is one in which. Much you hold space for them to discover. Well, why is it that I want to keep doing things the way I’ve always done it? Like, I know I want to do that. I feel that it’s like bumping your knee against the table, like, Okay, I bumped my knee and it hurts. I just feel that right now, but I’m not exactly sure why I feel that. And that’s kind of conversation you want to have with that person. So the first thing you want to do is the rapport building like I suggested you sure and you in that you want to make sure that you do not shame the individual like the easiest way to end a difficult conversation is to communicate something that is interpreted on their side as you ought to be ashamed. And it’s very easy to communicate something that gets interpreted that way, whether or not you intended it to come out that way, because people are listening for that. That’s the thing. That’s the one thing they’re most concerned about in the conversation is like, is this person about to attempt to jeopardize my status, my reputation, my social position within the organization, my social position within this dynamic where social primates, and as the great sociologist Brook Harrington once told me, if there was an Eagles mc squared of social science, would be SD, greater than PD, the fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. And if we’re put into a situation where we think that our social self is in danger, we will gladly put our physical self in the lifeboat and let our so we’ll put our social self in the lifeboat and let our physical self go down with the ship. We’ve seen that here recently. Vaccination was a good example of that, where it once it became a signal whether of you being on one side or another to vaccinate or not vaccinate. It became important to do it for those reasons, and you want to make sure that you never frighten the person or instill with them, instill in within them, the the suggestion that taking a position that they don’t want to take is going to jeopardize their social status, because all bets are off once you do that, and you can very easily say something to someone where they that will be interpreted as you’re silly, you’re stupid, you’re you’re ridiculous, you’re crazy. You are a bad member of this organization. You’re a bad member of the human race for taking the position you’ve taken, and if you say anything like that, all that is the whatever, the whatever the topic of the conversation was originally that gets put way to the side. Everything is going to be about trying to regain this concept of self, this identity, this feeling of worthiness, and that’s the conversation you have for the rest a lot of the debates. Have you ever had any kind of argument online, or you’ve been on the side and lurked in some sort of like Reddit argument or something like that, or a Twitter conversation. Notice that very often, like within two or three back and forth, that’s all the conversation is about from that point forward, whatever they were talking about originally is gone, and they’re just trying to regain their social status with the other person. And they may even go into ad hominem at some very quickly, and that’s just to try to regain it. So make sure you like, in this situation, you’re just, you’re describing. I would then like, hey, they tell you, Oh, I want to do it the way I’ve always done it. We go like, Oh, okay, I understand. I understand there’s a I see you’ve got some hesitation here. And if you don’t understand how it’s always been done, ask, ask how they intend to do it, and then to get into the weeds of it, we have to go through some of the steps of the process. But what you want to do is help that person arrive at why is it that I want to do it that way and not the other way? And don’t immediately jump in with, well, I challenge you to prove to me that that’s a better way to do it than the way I’ve suggested. Don’t turn it into a competition between you and your ideas and them and their ideas. Sure. It needs to be almost immediately, a collaboration, where you go shoulder to shoulder and go, Ah, it’s fascinating that we disagree. I wonder why it is. I wonder what it is that’s driving you here, because you want to hold space for them to demonstrate to you that they probably have a good reason for the way they feel. And it’s worth airing it between the two of you,

 

Patrick Adams  24:01

sure, sure. Okay, makes sense. The other thing, I think this kind of leads into my next question that just around how brains develop, and you know, we in the Cata world, Mike Rother talks about rewiring your brain and your thinking and how you approach problems. So this is how I would normally do it. I would jump to a solution, and I want to actually use scientific thinking to allow myself to experiment and learn through the process. So I’m rewiring the way I think. But what we’re talking about, the question that I have is, should we as managers, as leaders in Lean organizations? Should we try to rewire other people to think differently than they do think like not in the way that I’m talking about with with problem solving, because we understand the value of that, but should I impress on them to try to change the way that they’re thinking and to try to rewire the way that they. Think, like, is that even, is that something I should be doing, or is it, is it just about finding that common ground or understanding that person, we’re going to get into empathy and things like that. But is there ever a point where I should really try to just rewire their thinking or change the way that they’re thinking? Well, you’re

 

David McRaney  25:16

going to do it, no matter why. Like, that’s learning is rewiring your brain, and if, if you’re, if, if, the if, the endeavor that we’re talking about involves anybody learning anything, then everybody’s brain is going to get rewired by the process. Sure, if you think of it as like training to go, if you’re going to boot camp, to train to be in the military, there’s a whole lot of brain rewiring that’s taking place there just through the art of learning how to absolutely things right. The what I would press upon people is to make sure that you have communicated. Why are we doing this? Like, what is the actual overall justification and rationalization for the thing that we are now about to engage and do the best way to go about doing this, according to people who work in the world of change management and the people who study that, is, let’s establish up front like, what are the goals? What are the do this in a proximal to distal way? So we start with, what is the goal for the next five minutes? What’s the goal for the next hour? What’s the goal for the next week, month, year, and what’s the overall goal of this particular project, and what’s the goal for this organization as an organization? And they the other, everybody involved needs to buy in. They buy in at each level of that, and they get to have input at each level of that. And then you also say, Well, what are our challenges? What are the things we need to overcome, what are the problems we’re trying to solve? And you do that the same way, distally, what’s the problem right now? What’s the problem here, here, here, all the way to what is the overall thing we’re trying to change in this world? And if everybody has all that properly communicated one another, then we can say, Okay, now, how do we solve how do we reach this goal, and how do we solve that problem as a group? And to do that, we need input from everyone, and we need to anywhere where were there people if there, if there’s anything that any of us isn’t currently capable of doing, we need to figure out, well, how do we train to become capable of doing that? If there’s anybody here who can teach another person, because they already have skills in that regard, how can we set up a way for you to transfer your knowledge to the other person? And what you end up with is a network of change toward a shared, agreed upon goal, toward a shared, agreed upon solution to a problem, and in a framework like that, everyone is rewiring everyone else together as a unit, so that when you come out of the process, you become much more efficient and less likely to get angry and have the conversation at the cooler that you’re not having in the room. Thing you know you’re not doing this properly if your organization is starting to have, like, you have meetings and then you have the real meeting in the hallway. You have the real meeting around the coffee you have the real meeting at lunch, you have the real meeting over text. You have the real meeting in the like, private slack room or whatever you’re doing, if that’s where you’re having the actual conversations, where things are actually getting communicated back and forth and done, then that’s the problem that’s got to be solved. First. You need to be having the conversation to be able to have those difficult conversations with each other in the room around the boss, if the boss is part of that, and if that requires people adjusting the way they look at each other, talk to each other and feel safe around one another, then rewiring of one another is going to be a absolutely necessary part of the process, for sure. Yeah, hey, everyone. I am sorry to interrupt this episode of the lean solutions podcast, but I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to our company, lean solutions. We exist to empower and equip people for positive change. We do this through our three pillars, which include training and development, coaching and consulting and talent solutions. Whether you have specific areas for improvement or you’re not really sure where to start, we can build tailored solutions and provide resources to meet your needs. Send us an email at office, at findling solutions.com, to begin your journey towards transformation.

 

Patrick Adams  28:59

Now back to the show. And David, you had, you’d mentioned before we hit record that you had kind of a little activity that you wanted to run

 

David McRaney  29:08

us through too. Yeah, I would love to just demonstrate this with you. I have a simpler version than the full version, the full version of all of these things. If you’re using a technique, rebuttal would be, we’re going to establish rapport. And then if it’s a belief or an attitude or a value, you slightly change the flow. I might ask for a claim if it’s a fact based issue, I’d ask for a claim if it’s a attitude based issue, I’d ask you on a scale of one to 10 how you feel about it. And then we go from that to your reasoning, your justification for that reasoning, and then we there’s like, three or more, four or more steps after that. That can be a long, drawn out, 30 minute process, but I have a five minute version of it that we can do that goes through everything, and also gives you something you could just do right now. And you could do it, you could start engaging in this kind of conversation technique immediately, either in a professional. Setting, or just in an icebreaking setting, over drinks. If that’s something that you’d like to do, I would love to demonstrate. It’s very easy, and I promise you to be neutral, non political and fun, and you’ll become a better person by the end of it. Love it.

 

Patrick Adams  30:12

So could we get a volunteer from the audience? We have a microphone right over here, and would love to have someone come up and take part in this. Get

 

David McRaney  30:21

1. All right, here we go. Who do we have? Alicia, everyone? Alicia. Do we have an audience here? Alicia, please for Alicia.

 

Patrick Adams  30:31

All right. So obviously we have people listening at home. So we’ll, we’ll make sure we explain this as we go. The best view so

 

David McRaney  30:37

I can talk to you. These microphones are weird. You have to talk straight into it. Oh, that’s fine, sure. Here we go. All right, join me, please. Hello, hey. All right. Are we ready? We’re ready. Let’s do it. Alicia, you’re right. No, you’re gonna be fine. This is just a conversation. We’re just gonna talk to each other. Are you cool with having a conversation that your mind might end up getting changed by the end of it.

 

31:00

I’m fine with that. All right, cool. Hey, Alicia.

 

David McRaney  31:02

Alicia, do you live here in Michigan? I do open. Saginaw, what made you want to come to this thing we’re doing? I

 

31:09

like lean. We’re trying to put lean into our organization. Yeah, have you ever been in a lean conference before? We have never. This is our first time for our company. So this is kind of exciting. You say we? Who’s we? Roman, come up here. I have a counterpart. I have a What

 

David McRaney  31:25

does your company do?

 

31:27

We manufacture car parts. Car parts. All of them are just some of them, some of them. So in Saginaw, we manufacture half shafts and steering columns. How

 

David McRaney  31:35

did you get into a business like that? How’d this become a thing that you do? How did this become a

 

31:41

thing for me? Yeah, my grandfather and my father both worked for the company and actually went to school to be a special education teacher, but this company offered me more money, all right, fair enough. Ironically, ironically, she loves the mindset of people, so I liked listening to you. Yeah, I’ve actually sent your information on the internet to my daughter because she’s in neuropsychology. Oh, so I like the mindset. Yeah,

 

David McRaney  32:09

you’ve interested in me. Is your daughter already studying somewhere?

 

32:12

My daughter is a going to Central Michigan. She wanted to be a neuropsychologist.

 

David McRaney  32:17

This is cool. Okay, yes, I will talk to your daughter more about neuropsychology. I love that stuff too. The and I’m wondering, like, when did you fall into this whole cult of Lean thinking people? How did that become a thing you got in your

 

32:29

life? I was actually offered a position a couple months ago to do a knockoff of the Toyota Production System in our business. Yeah, but four years ago, I put in a kanban system in our plant.

 

David McRaney  32:41

What’s a kanban system? Oh, K, a n, b, a n, Bond. I have some familiarity with that. I have a lot Kanban

 

32:48

we put in a kanban system in our plant, and I really enjoy it. I love the Lean I love working with

 

David McRaney  32:54

at first I thought that might be a car part, but then my brain material

 

32:58

delivery got it. That’s how I got into it. And then, so four years ago, I started that, and then they asked me to go into the production system, a lean production system, and next tier. So I said yes. And then I met Roman. Hey, Roman, he’s been doing this for four years, so he’s amazing. Wow. You come highly

 

David McRaney  33:16

recommended. Roman, nice to see you. I’m gonna give you a chance to play around with some psychology stuff real quick. And it’s very easy. There’s a very simple question, all right, Alicia, what is the last movie that you remember watching?

 

33:32

What was that movie about the beehive? The beekeeper? The

 

David McRaney  33:38

last movie you saw was the beekeeper? Did you? Did you like it? I did. You did like it? Okay, if you worked for, say, Netflix, and you were the person whose job was to write the little paragraph for when people are browsing with their remote and they’re trying to decide whether or not I want to watch this movie, what would you put in the paragraph for the beekeeper? No wrong answers. I just want to

 

34:00

hear what you said. I know, so I’m a mother. So what I really liked about the movies, you don’t screw with my kids, you don’t screw with my family. You’d put that in the in the Netflix, I don’t know, but you don’t screw with people that I love. Mama Bear will come out.

 

David McRaney  34:13

So revenge movie, okay? Or revenge movie, okay? Screw with

 

34:16

people that you care about. Another side comes out. Okay,

 

David McRaney  34:21

I am fascinated. Now I may, I may want to watch this based off this description. Okay, I’m browsing Netflix. I see a thing it says, If you screw with people, bad things might happen to you. This is a revenge movie. And then I’ll have, like, the date, and I’ll be like, All right, cool. If you were to give, let’s say you were a a a movie reviewer, and you had a real simple system where you just give a score between one and 10 and but you’re pretty harsh about your ones and 10s. A one would be everybody involved in the production of this film should go to federal prison for two and a half years. And a 10 would be a. The director and the producer and the writer all should get a Congressional Medal of Honor, and we get to watch that on television, and the President will actually kiss the director’s feet live on television. That’s a 10. So between a one and a 10, what would you give the beekeeper?

 

35:13

A five? Five.

 

David McRaney  35:17

Okay, good, okay, we got a five, and so far, you told me you like it and you dig the principles of revenge, because apparently you’re a very vengeful person, just based off that one thing. But the beekeeper. The beekeeper, it isn’t the worst movie ever made, but it certainly isn’t the best movie ever made. It gets a five. Okay, now I want you to notice that when I asked you if you liked it, it was a instantaneous, immediate, an immediate response, like, Do you like it? Yes. So you said that without you didn’t have to even think, because you’re just sampling your emotional state whenever I’d say the word beekeeper, and that’s sort of like I said earlier, that’s like bumping your knee against the table. But when I ask you, what would you give it? One to 10. First of all, I saw your nine. Your eyes narrowed, and you looked at me like I might be up to something, and you’re doing it again right now. And you thought for a second, and that’s usually what happens when you’re trying to figure out, what number am I going to give this thing, which indicates you’re engaging in a little bit of metacognition. You are thinking about your own thinking while also thinking about my thinking and trying to see how our thinking is coming together. And that’s nice. That’s good, because we want to be thinking about our thinking. That’s where we’re at right now. Now I’m interested in this five answer, because you said you liked it and you gave it a five, and I’m wondering, what is it about the beekeeper that keeps it from getting to a six?

 

36:40

So you said that it would get lots of awards. What was it? You said to be a 10, yeah, explain that again, to be like, lots of awards, and everybody love it. The presidential would give them congressional address. Sure, I don’t think everybody’s gonna love it as much as I did. Why is that?

 

David McRaney  36:58

I don’t know. Well, it’s in there, and you feel it,

 

37:01

I feel it, but I don’t think everybody would like it as much as I do.

 

David McRaney  37:05

How come? What is it about it? What is it? What’s something that about it that you think somebody wouldn’t

 

37:09

like? So I don’t like people getting physically harmed, but there was some harmful moments in there where, again, you screw with somebody that you love, you’re gonna get hurt. So there’s I covered my eyes during those parts. Violence, violence, yes, there’s

 

David McRaney  37:23

anything else that keeps it from getting to I’m just asking for a six here.

 

37:26

No, I’m trying to figure out. I don’t think it’s everybody’s cup of tea. It’s not a happy go lucky movie.

 

David McRaney  37:31

Not happy. No, I

 

37:32

didn’t mean at the end it was, but

 

David McRaney  37:34

Okay, so it’s got this tone, violence, all right, and but you didn’t give it a four. What keeps it? What was keeping it from going down to a four hole? Liked it like, I know you liked it. That’s what we’re talking about. Like

 

37:50

the revenge part of it, not that I’m a vengeful person. I’m not a vengeful person,

 

David McRaney  37:54

okay, all right, Alicia, you’re telling me you’re not a vengeful person, but you really like watching vengeance play out in a movie. This isn’t for everybody, but it sure was for you. The you’re not a vengeful person. But the reason it doesn’t fall down to a four view is because of all the vengeance that’s in it. Am I hearing you correctly? So far? I don’t know anymore. It’s okay. Is there anything else about it that keep that, that keeps it from dropping down to a four for you? No, not at all. Nothing else, like, maybe, like, if this movie, if everybody in the movie was, like, wearing a clown outfit, would that make it go down to a fourth? Oh, definitely. So. So we can say, reasonably say, that the costuming was okay, so the production values were good enough to keep it from coming. Yeah, sure. And if it was, if everybody in the movie was over the age of 85 would that affect the score? Well, here’s something we could do to zero in on this. What if, is there another movie that has that’s well made, and has a bit of a violent tone to it, and has a vengeance. Since you’re an officiant audio of vengeance based films, is there any vengeance based movie you’d give a higher score than a five taken? All right, now we’re on to something. What would you give? Taken?

 

39:19

Probably a nine or a 10. Really good movie.

 

David McRaney  39:23

Okay, okay, all right, now we’re about to get somewhere. Okay, oh no, there’s no there are no wrong answers here. We’re just trying to get we’re just getting in there and helping you think about your thinking. Taken gets a nine. The beekeeper gets a five. What is the taken? What does taken do that the beekeeper doesn’t

 

39:40

taken’s got a father going after his daughter, family

 

David McRaney  39:43

stuff maybe, yeah, anything else

 

39:49

the daughter is put into a sex ring, which is really horrible, yeah,

 

David McRaney  39:52

what? How does that contribute to the score going up?

 

39:57

It’s the family values within me. It’s. Family

 

David McRaney  40:00

values within you, the beekeeper doesn’t have family values,

 

40:05

just a good friendship.

 

David McRaney  40:06

So in the beekeeper, the vengeance is based off of harming someone’s friend. But in taken, the vengeance is based off harming someone’s family, correct? And the family thing really bounces the score up for you. Are there any movies that aren’t based off vengeance that have a lot of strong familial, family bond, things in them that are your big I love

 

40:24

Disney movies, frozen Milano. I

 

David McRaney  40:28

like this. I like the idea like, as long as we’re talking about family, whether or not somebody gets stabbed right in the jugular, I’m probably gonna like that movie like you’ve seen taken, I’ve seen taken, it’s great. It’s good. It’s like, I just like the idea that, for Alicia, like, if somebody is enjoying a Thanksgiving dinner, and after that Thanksgiving dinner, they find out their true meaning of life, and they go on to to to maybe solve a problem in the world, or cure cancer or something. Love it also, if after that family dinner, they put a grenade directly in that person’s mouth and their head explodes, I also will like that movie because of the family things that have been illustrated. This is a great thing to discover about yourself, and it’s a way that you hope what you’re seeing here and what you’re seeing here is that these are things that were all inside you, but you may have never articulated and these were things that are driving they’re driving your behavior, they’re driving your emotions, they’re driving your attitudes. And at any time in your life, you could have discussed this stuff, but we had to have a conversation like this for you to get down in there. We’re just doing it based off movies, and it’s helping me understand, like, if I wanted to really get into moving that score around. If my my objective here was to get you to really, let’s take an event, let’s evaluate taken or let’s evaluate the beekeeper, and move them around, I would get deeper and deeper and try to elucidate all of these values. At no point in this conversation if I told you that you ought to be ashamed, at no point in this conversation if I told you that you’re wrong. At no point in this conversation have I even told you how I feel about those movies. I haven’t told you if I like them or not, and it’s not been the point of the conversation. And we could have been talking about gun control in exactly the same way. I could have said, Hey, how do you feel about gun control? Are you four or against it? You give me an answer, and then I say on a scale from one to 10, one being everybody in the United States if somebody says the word gun out loud, and they go to a federal prison if a cop hears it for the rest of their lives, but as at a tin, everybody gets a fully automatic machine gun in the mail once a month, regardless of their criminal history. Where would you put yourself? And we could have started having a conversation around that sort of thing, and I could have also never shamed you, never told you were wrong, and only attempted to get you to evoke from within yourself what it is that is motivating your thoughts and feelings on the matter, and that’s a way to have a conversation that’s different from the way we often have conversations. Thank you very much, Alicia. Everybody give Alicia a round of applause. This podcast is not funded by the makers of taken, but please do watch taken at your nearest convenience. Thank you.

 

Patrick Adams  43:08

So a couple things that I want to take away from that, and then I have a question as well, but I loved that you I saw you building rapport in the beginning. You guys didn’t know each other prior to that, so you took some time to build that rapport before you got into the conversation and you already explained the fact that you didn’t make her feel like her scoring was way off, or she was stupid, or whatever it was. I think as lean practitioners, as we think about ourselves going into going to help instill or create or promote positive change. It’s important for us to understand that that this is going to take time, and number one, time, to build rapport trust with the individuals as also, I can’t even imagine that conversation happening over email, like you have to go to the gemba and you have to have a conversation with the person and get to know them face to face and make sure that there’s good rapport that’s being built in that way. And I think that that was probably my biggest takeaway. The other thing, with a question that I that I heard a lot of was empathy, and you, you talked about this during your keynote cognitive empathy, and that people believe things for a certain reason is maybe something from their past or something that they experienced. And obviously, Alicia, you know, has very strong family values and would protect her family to the death, apparently, and would Yes, which most people

 

David McRaney  44:34

do not cross. Alicia, no, do not

 

Patrick Adams  44:37

but let’s talk about, you know, in the workplace, having empathy for others. Why is that important? And can you just maybe let’s dive into that one a little bit deeper and just talk. Let’s pick

 

David McRaney  44:51

that one, one way to kind of get it out. We’re talking about cognitive empathy, which is the idea that people believe things for reasons, like people have a motivation, a justification, when it came to. To take. And there’s a reason why taking gets a nine. There is a and to have cognitive empathy is to reflect upon we could have gone deeper into what created these, these feelings you have around family issues, and we could have gotten deeper and deeper and deeper and gotten really in sort of the source code of and the experiences that you have that got you there. And it’s to have empathy for that is to say, this is your life, this is your experience. This is this person’s story. This is their narrative moving through the world. And I if, if you’ve had a traumatic experience and you cannot help but be afraid of dogs, I have cognitive empathy for the fact that I don’t go, oh, what like if it was a poodle, it was a toy Chihuahua or something in the room, and you got so terrified you had to leave the building. I don’t say, God, what a weirdo. I go, Oh, I wonder what brought that upon that person. They have no help. They can’t help but feel that way. Yeah, would you imagine like, let’s say you’re having a conversation with a flat earther. And apologies to anyone who is an actual Flat Earther listening to the show or in the room right now. But let’s say you’re like, I hey, look, dude, or lady, I don’t believe that the earth is flat. And here, look, here, watch, here’s a YouTube video, here’s a book, here’s some websites. And you just dump a bunch of info on the person, a bunch of links, and say, look at that. Look at that. I want you to imagine this is that’s having no cognitive empathy for the other person I want, because I want because I want here’s what I want to imagine. What if they said, Come on, the earth is flat here. Watch this YouTube video, read this book and look at all these links. Do you think, first of all, are you going to do that? Are you going to read that book, watch that YouTube video, or click on those links and imagine yourself actually doing that? Do you think that’s going to change your mind? Do you think if you ingested all of that information, you’re going to go, oh, well, I was wrong about that. They’re at this flat. That is what I’m describing here. Is Imagine yourself in their position, right? And imagine if you were going to attempt the method that you’re about to employ on them. Imagine that being attempted on you for something you care about, something you feel strongly about, and if it starts to rub you is that’s kind of strange, then this is your entry into maybe you should build a little bit more cognitive empathy in your relations with other human beings, sure,

 

Patrick Adams  47:11

sure. And how does that relate to change management? So for those of us that are that are managing continuous change within organizations, why? How do we utilize that? Or, or, you know, bring empathy into the conversations, to to help, you know, in move change in the right direction. I

 

David McRaney  47:32

mean, it’s on you. Stop putting it on them. Like, if people are resisting change, there’s a reason for that that probably you’re responsible for, and if you’re, if you think that the reason they’re not changing because they’re stupid or they’re lazy, or they don’t care about the things you care about, or they are misinformed, or anything that involves, like, it’s not something I’ve done, it’s these are people that are broken in some way, And I have to deal with it. That’s that’s the wrong way to keep about doing it. There’s always, first of all, in a wide net view, like there are probably some ways that people resist change, the kind of change you’re trying to create, that just about everybody resists in just about the same way. So this is going to be something that is universal to the human behavior that you should recognize. And if it’s something like that, that’s something that you can turn the knobs on and adjust to make it less likely, or you can prepare people and say, Hey, most people find this part of this thing challenging, and I want to help you with that. So so you want to have that bird’s eye view of human behavior, and then you want to get down specific to certain individuals based off certain things that have happened in their in their maybe jobs they’ve had before, or situations they’ve experienced, or something that is specific to their life or their brain, that’s a unique form of resistance, and you want to drill down to okay, what is it that I’m doing, or what is it this organization is doing that is evoking That response from the individual, and how do we adjust what we’re doing so that is less likely they respond with that behavior, and the farther your way you get from oh my god, this person is dumb and or this person is unmanageable, the more likely you will get to something that actually will encourage change in the other person. Basically, it comes down to stop shirking the responsibility for being a good manager. Good managers recognize what the resistance is, and they deal with it, instead of saying, you deal with it.

 

Patrick Adams  49:35

Yeah, yeah, it’s good. So we have a number of listeners and people in the audience that are maybe earlier in their career or even in college and getting ready to head out and start a career, maybe in lean manufacturing or maybe in any industry, but they’re going to be working in lean or continuous improvement. Any advice? You would give for someone beginning a career, they’re heading out into the workforce, knowing that they are going to face like what we talked about earlier, difficult conversations, resistance to change. You know, tough, hard things in the workplace. In as far as change management goes, any advice that you would give if you were sitting down with a student and giving them kind of, here’s what I here’s what I would take out into the workplace that’s going to help you to be successful working with other human beings. I

 

David McRaney  50:28

mean, first things, first, create a safe environment for you to fail a bunch and then go fail a bunch you need to screw up as quickly as possible so that you can learn what it’s like to screw up, and if you need to create a nice, safe space for failing in a way that will not destroy your career or your livelihood or your reputation, and then do that. Fail, hard, fail, often, do it as much as you can, so that you get that out of the way and you’re not afraid of it, then you’re not going to learn the most important stuff from books or from any sort of lean, some sort of like cheat sheet or stepwise manual or YouTube video or whatever you’re going to learn it from face to face interactions with people who are have similar passion to what you have. So find people who are obsessed or passionate or care about the thing that you are obsessed and passionate care about and meet them face to face and try to find the mentors that you’re going to be able to come to over and over again, the you want to and what you want to ask about is not your their greatest successes again. Come back to what are some of the what are some of the most tremendous failures you’ve experienced in your career up to this point? Why did why did you fail? What led up to that? What did you learn from it? What are you going to do in the future based upon that? And don’t get caught up in trying to learn that specific story. What you’re trying to learn is that meta thing that that bird’s eye view of, oh, this is how that person deals with those kinds of situations. And the more people you talk to, the more you’ll start noticing a pattern of like, Oh, okay. The people who seem to be doing it the way I want to be doing it seem to respond to these problems in this way, and the problems can be irrelevant after a certain point. What you’re trying to figure out is like, what is sort of the the what is trying to create your own user manual for how this person deals with setbacks and deals with challenges and deals with their their own inefficiencies, their own things that they can’t help about themselves. And that way you can feel, because the worst thing can feel starting out is like, Oh man, I I am the first person to feel this feeling. I am the first person to to be scared in this way. I’m the first person to think this is you want to realize as quickly as possible you’re just part of a grand human drama, and you the closer you can get to feeling that and noticing it in other people, the better. So you do that through face to face interactions, face to face conversations with people who eventually become mentors. And in that process, you’re going to meet people you’re like, I don’t like I don’t like that person, that person sucks, and that way. So you’re kind of a B, testing the kind of people you would like to be mentors for the rest of your life, and put them over, throw them in the garbage bin, and have this nice little cadre of these are the people that I can go to when I have issues and problems and have thoughts and feelings, and notice again, pull back. Why is that, though? Why do I think that person sucks? Why do I think that person’s awesome? What is it about me that is connecting with those people, and why is it that? Why is that a thing that seems to be true in every situation that I engage in? So that’s what I’d suggest. I’m kidding.

 

Patrick Adams  53:35

I like it. Great advice. So, David, as we wrap up here, just a couple minutes, if anyone’s interested to get a copy of your book, or if they have questions and want to follow, follow up with you. What’s the best way for them to contact you?

 

David McRaney  53:47

I’ll, I’ll freely give away my email address. It’s David mccraney@gmail.com m, c, r, a, n, e, y, my website, I have a David mccraney.com but my a lot of stuff that I do when it comes to my podcast and books and stuff that’s under the you are not so smart is that you are not so smart.com. My most recent book is how minds change. Easy to find. And my all my social media handles are at David mcgraney, so and I, I will be happy to talk to you endlessly about topics, as I have evidence through this conversation, perfect.

 

Patrick Adams  54:21

Well, make sure we drop all those links in the show notes. So if anyone’s listening in and wants to reach out or grab your book, they can go right to the show notes and grab a link from there. So David, it’s been great again, lots of other things we could talk about, and here, here at the Michigan lean consortium annual conference, we have some more time to be able to network and discuss. So if anybody does have questions that they’d like to ask David, we will. We’ll do that after we cut the recording here. So again, thanks again for for being on and appreciate you being here as the keynote speaker at the

 

David McRaney  54:55

conference. I want to say wholeheartedly thank. You so much for having me and I will 100% this weekend watch taken and beekeeper back to back.

 

55:10

All right. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe this way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please give us a review. Thank you so much. You.