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 McDonald from Ireland, Andy Ulrich from Australia and Shane got involved from the United States. Join us as we bring you guests and experiences of Lean practitioners from all over the world. Hello everybody and welcome. I appreciate everybody joining this session. I’m super excited to speak with all of you today about this very important topic, three points that are very important to me and should be important to you. And hopefully by the end of today you’ll you’ll have the same feeling that I do about these three points. Keep it simple, keep it visual, and continue to improve. If you’ve watched any of my LinkedIn videos. I guess I kind of view this as my tagline, like I just love to end every video with these three simple points, because I think they are. They’re key to any organizations, direction approach. I think if you keep these three simple points in mind, I think that you can go pretty far with with just these three areas. Keep it simple, keep it visual, and continue to improve. So I’m excited to speak with all of you today on this topic. I don’t have a ton of time today, but I am going to be covering a lot of information in a very short amount of time. With that said, I want to tell you just a quick story about a real life situation that that I was in when I was a young Production Supervisor at a production plant here in West Michigan. I was, I believe I was on second shift at the time, and I had, I was a new supervisor at this facility. I didn’t know a whole lot about the the rules, the the the culture. I was still learning everything here and and as I was walking around, you know, doing my daily walk with, with this, you know, I’m for my my this organization, I had a lady was kind of signaling me to come over, and she had a question for me, so of course, I went over and introduced myself to her and met her for the first time. And she said, Mr. Patrick, I would like to move this table. And I said, Okay, let’s, let’s move the table. Then what’s the reasoning behind wanting to move the table? And she said, Well, I really think that if we move this table, you know, 180 degrees the other way, I think that we’ll have a little bit more room, and we’ll be able to increase our output, you know, on this particular assembly process. And so I saw she said, Can I move the table? And, of course, me, being the young, naive supervisor that I was thinking about everything, she told me. I was like, Well, of course we can move the table. Let’s move the table, right? And she said, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Wait a minute, we can’t just move tables. And I was like, What do you mean we can’t just move tables? And she said, Well, there’s a process that we have to follow if we want to move this table. And I was like, Well, what do you mean by that? And she said, there’s this very specific process for a change request that has to be put in. And if you want to make any kind of change here, you have to follow the process and put in a change request. And I said, Okay, well, let’s, let’s see the process. Where’s the process at? I’ll put in a change request. So she went and pulled out a booklet and pulled out a sheet, and she handed me something that looked very similar to this. And I have to imagine that some of you are probably laughing in your seats, because for two reasons, maybe one, you’re thinking how ridiculous this is, right, that to move a table 180 degrees, that I have to follow a process that looks as complex as this does, and to put in a change request, right? And then the second group is saying, Yeah, we have that exact same process for our change request at our facility, right? So there’s two reasons why you’re probably chuckling in your seat, but this was a true story. I don’t know that the process looked as complex as this, but I just remember as a young supervisor thinking to myself, why does it have to be so complex? We just want to move a table 180 degrees. Why does it have to be so complex? And of course, when you have that level of complexity, how many, how many simple improvements do you think were implemented at this facility? Not very many, right? Because when you have to follow a process like this to turn a table 180 degrees. Who’s gonna do it? No one, right? And so what kind of culture are you creating? So I tell you this because it’s really my introduction to keep it simple, right? One of the biggest reasons that people fail to maintain a robust system is this desire for. Complexity. You know, most organizations, they begin simple enough, but then, you know, over time, we just keep adding more and more complexity until eventually we have a system that just takes far too long to maintain, right? And when we’re working with human beings, we really have to keep things as simple as possible, or it’s really going to fall apart. So let’s dive into this. As I mentioned already, we have three points under keep it simple that I want you to remember three points, and we’re going to hit on each one of these three points before we move on to keeping it visual. This is a picture of the North Country trail along the Manistee River Trail. It’s one of my most favorite backpacking places in northern Michigan. The entire loop is about 20 miles long, and it’s it’s located, again, like I said, right along the Manistee River, which is a, just a beautiful location in the northern Michigan area. But there was a time when I took my daughter with me on this hiking trip for the very first time, and I had hiked this trail many, many times, so I didn’t really need a map or anything like that to to travel along the trail, but this was my daughter’s first time there, and, you know, she had never been on the trail before, and I wanted to make sure that my daughter knew exactly where we Were going. So I pulled out this map of the Manistee River and the North Country trail along the Manistee River, and I laid it in front of her. And I said, Okay, Taylor, that’s my daughter’s name, Taylor, where would you like to go from here? We’re currently at red bridge, which is on the southern part of this particular map. And I said, Where do you want to go? She looked at the map, she looked at me. She’s like, Dad, I really don’t care where we go. Like, I don’t care. And so at this point, I had to take a moment, and I had to explain to my daughter the importance of charting a course prior to setting out, right? Because if we don’t chart the course, then we’re really walking with no end in mind, right? And if we have a team that we’re walking with, right? And if we have a team that we’re hiking with or traveling with, and we don’t communicate where we’re heading, then no one else in our group is going to know where we’re going, right? And again, how will we ever know when we’ve arrived? If we don’t know where we’re going, then you know, how do we know when we’re gonna actually get there, and what about all the things that we’ll miss along the way? Right? If we, if we have a particular course that we’ve charted, and we know there’s particular points along the way that we need to hit, you know, we we need to have that, that vision of where we’re heading in order for us to to chart that course and set out for many of us, we know this as our true north, right? We need to get closer to our true north. So when you’re reading a compass, anytime you’re out backpacking or hiking, you know many of us use a compass, and many of you may be familiar with the term true north, but you can always determine which way is north on a compass by knowing that you can determine you know whether you’re on the right path or you’re off path, right? So you know we we may not know exactly what’s along the trail, what’s on the course along the path, but at least we have direction. At least we know where we’re heading when we have our true north or our long term vision, right? So now maybe I didn’t get that detailed with my daughter, right, but I did explain to her the importance of charting the course. And I said, So where would you like to go on the map? And so she pointed at the suspension bridge, which is on the northernmost point of the Manistee River Trail. And if we hadn’t established that true north, that direction for ourselves, we would have missed many different things along the trail, and also we wouldn’t have been able to have this moment together at the suspension bridge when we actually arrived at the suspension bridge. Now, many of you know that as as true as we head towards true north, we may not reach our true north. Right? Toyota had a true north of you know, 100% on time, delivery, zero defects, zero safety incidents. We may never actually arrive there, but at least we have direction, right? At least we have a place to head to, and that’s what’s important. So the first point under keeping it simple is to communicate a simple vision. Be very clear about where we’re heading. What is the direction? It’s got to be simple. It cannot be complex. So the first point under keep it simple is communicate a simple vision. Marco mentioned that I served in the Marine Corps. While serving in the Marine Corps, I was taught a very valuable lesson about communicating strategy at all levels of the organization, and this lesson has come to be known as Napoleon’s Corporal. Maybe some of you have heard it, but Napoleon was recognized, as you know, having he was recognized for this particular point of having an enlisted member in the planning room when they were. Having a planning session or a strategy session, and while creating their battle plans, and there’s these war strategy, Napoleon made sure that a corporal was in the room. Okay? So then once he would complete, once all of the executive officers completed their planning process, he would turn to the corporal and he would say, do you understand the plan? And if the corporal said, No, sir, I don’t understand the plan, then they would spend more time breaking it down and making sure that the plan was simple enough that everyone can understand it, right? So they would look back at the corporal and say, do you understand the plan? Eventually the corporal would say yes, and then the general would carry out the plan, knowing that it could be cascaded all the way down to the troops on the ground, and that they would understand it well enough to execute it. So the other, the other concept that I want to mention too, which is a military concept with along with Napoleon’s corporal, is kiss, the acronym kiss. And that stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. Another term that you would learn in the military when communicating expectations to teams keeping really the meaning behind that is, again, just keeping it as simple as possible. So the second point that I want you to remember under simplicity is simple communication. Simple, clear communication. Need to go together, right? We want to keep our communication simple and be sure that we are actually communicating, that we’re not just creating plans and hoping that the message makes it through down to the troops on the floor or wherever it might be. I’m actually working with a client right now who is really struggling in this area over the years, they built some very complex systems, and without clear communication, the result for this organization is just mass chaos. You know, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, and without a good communication system, the message just it’s not consistent, and it’s very difficult for the organization to be able to pass anything down through the organization. I worked at Parker Hannifin for a number of years. Maybe some of you are familiar with Parker Hannifin. Parker had a VP of lean a group. They had group lean managers, they had division lean managers, they had plant lean managers, and again, and between all of them, when the strategy was laid out, or the long term vision was laid out by the VP of lean, it was cascaded very easily through simple communication methods all the way through and down to the plant lean managers, and then out to the production floors. And when new leadership was introduced, we didn’t change the communication method. We didn’t change the system, right? Leadership was new. Leadership would adapt to the system. They would adapt to the communication methods. And so things did. There wasn’t this when you know, in change of guards, the same thing with the military, when a new military officer is brought in, they’re falling into a system that they follow, that they support. And so it removes that chaos and creates that level of stability that’s needed in a true culture of continuous improvement. So again, keep your communication Simple. Simple does not mean easy, though. Thomas Edison gave this quote opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like hard work, right? Many of us know Paul Akers. He wrote the book two second lean. Two second lean seems pretty simple, right? But if you know anything about Paul Akers, you know how hard he works, how passionate he is about driving the message of simple lean, right? It’s not easy. It’s hard work, but lean can be simple. So Paul goes out to his production floor. Every morning, he goes to the floor, he talks to people as the CEO of the company. He’s videotaping simple improvements. He’s putting them out to the company. But again, that takes work that’s not easy for the CEO of a very large company to do so simple, simple does not necessarily mean easy. And that’s the the third point point under, keep it simple. So the three points communicate a simple vision, simple communication, and simple does not necessarily mean easy. Those are the three points under, keep it simple. The next thing I want to talk about is keeping it visual, keeping it visual. So again, we have three points under keeping it visual. I want to ask all of you, as you as you’re watching the screen right now, I’m going to put up a couple words here, and I want you to maybe there’s some of you that will understand these, but I want you to tell me, what does this mean. Want you to just think about it. What does this one mean? Some of you don’t know. Some of you have no idea. Maybe some of you read Chinese. Maybe not sure. How about Russian, Japanese? This is the same word, same words. Who knows what it means? Here’s English. It means no smoking. Okay, if you. Reading English. Now, depending on where we’re from, what our background is, who we are, we may or may not be able to read each one of these phrases, right? But what about this? Anybody can read a picture, right? I mean, we all it’s a universal understanding that a red circle with a line through it means no, means nothing. Do not, right? It’s an understood language that we we do not smoke here, right when you see this picture. So visuals are need to be understood by all. We have to be very careful about this. I actually implemented a kanban system at one time, and found out at a later time, after we were the cards were not getting ran like they should, the signals were not getting ran. We found out that one of the individuals along the process was actually colorblind. You couldn’t see the difference between red and green, and didn’t know where the trigger point was on the Kanban board. Again, even visuals, you have to make sure that everyone that’s working in the in the area and in the process understands the visuals. So make sure that you, your your visuals are understood by all. And this definitely is a deeper thought process than just going out there and putting something up that you think everyone understands. So really, really ask yourself, does the team understand what visuals that we’re putting out there. The next thing, this is a quote many of you know, tai chi. Oh, no, but the quote is, having no problems is the biggest problem of all having no problems is the biggest problem of all. Right, this is a great quote, because there’s so many people out there. And again, I’ve worked with many leaders at multiple organizations, many military leaders as well, that, you know, think that they don’t have problems. They think everything’s perfect, right? And that is a huge problem. When we don’t think we have problems. That is the biggest problem of all, right. Many of you have seen this, the iceberg of ignorance. Many of you are familiar with this. Organizations miss this golden opportunity when they fail to ask employees about problems, right? Those people that are closest to the value add work, they’re the real experts in the process. They understand the ins and outs of the machine, of the equipment, of whatever it might be the process. So we are missing a huge benefit when we don’t ask the team members that are closest to the value add work, right? If we have one person in our organization, one really good problem solver that goes after every problem, we were really missing the boat, right? Employees, they may know how to fix the problem. They may even offer a cheaper solution than what management can come up with or what engineers can come up with. So it’s really a win, win approach. When we go out to the gemba, to the place where the work is being done, and we actually ask team members for their input, right? 13% of problems are known by upper management when you start to engage the team members that are closest to the work, you’re starting to get into 100% of understood problems, right? I mean, why would we not want to access 100% and again, it’s a win, win approach, because employees feel valued, and the problem gets solved at the root if we follow the right process, right? So let’s not make decisions based on 13% let’s make decisions based on 100% this is a really great exercise that that we do, and it’s it’s one of those things that helps make problems visible. Whenever we go into an organization, we we start out with an assessment, and we like to ask each team member. I like to sit down with 100% of the people in the organization, and I ask them all the same exact questions. The first question that I ask them is, what’s going really, really good in your area, in your process, in your work, in your organization, what’s one thing that’s going really, really well? The second question that I ask them is, what’s not going very well. It’s a problem that’s happening in your department, in your area, in your company. And we write these down on post it notes, one problem per post it note and and we stick those up on the wall. The third question that I ask is, what’s one opportunity? What’s an opportunity that that you think can make things better here. What’s one thing that can remove a headache for you, that can eliminate a roadblock, a problem that you have on a continuous basis? What’s one idea? And we throw that up there in the opportunity section. And then what we do after I meet with these people one on one is we, we cluster the post. It notes right? Because you can imagine, if I’m meeting with multiple people in an organization and I’m asking them the same questions, I’m probably going to get some of the same answers. And as a data minded person who uses data to drive me towards solutions and problems, imagine the power that I have when I start to get these. Clusters of the same answer that I’m getting when I’m meeting with people at different times, you know, by themselves, but I get the same answer. So I end up with these big clusters. And that’s the area that I want to go after, because I know that it’s probably truth, right? Because it’s I’ve seen it multiple times. So let me show you some of those clusters. So this is a question that I ask, what? What’s one thing that’s really, really good in your organization? For this particular company, it came out that trust within shifts was a really, really good thing. The team was very much aligned with the team’s purpose. And they also had a really, really great safety program, a really great safety program. They had true ownership, decision making authority. There was voice in the groups around decisions. So these were a couple of their larger clusters that came around. What do we do really, really good in the organization? So then, if you remember, I also asked them, what’s not going really good, right? And these were two of the areas that came out. So one of them was that they need better communication between shifts, right? So communication within shifts was really good, but communication between the shifts was not very good. There was a huge breakdown there. They also had a really big red flag around leadership, right? Leadership breakdown, miscommunication, distrust, slow, decision making, favoritism, and this was a, this was a huge red flag. And when leadership sat down and saw the report on this, you know, they could have responded in two different ways. One, they could have got really upset, right? Really upset and mad, because this is, this is not the truth. You know, we don’t treat our people this way, right? Or they could have did what this organization did, and they could have accepted this as truth, because this is what their team is saying, right? These are multiple post it notes about the same thing. So that’s what this this leadership team decided to do. They decided to present the findings to the entire company and apologize, and also present a plan for change. They were going to change these things, and that’s exactly what they did, and the result of that was amazing for this organization. The next thing that I want to show you is an empowerment chart. So this empowerment chart you can see on the far left is where management is in full control, and the farther that you go to the right is where there’s more shared control, and this is specific to decision making. So how do we feel from an empowerment perspective when it comes to making decisions? I asked them three questions. Where were we five to seven years ago? You can see the results very much management and control, the decisions, telling directing. Management’s in control. Employees are told about decisions after they’re made. So this was five to seven years ago. The next question I ask is, where are we today? You can see that the dots have actually changed the data. The data is actually moving towards more shared control. So managers are actually going out and harnessing the ideas of team members. They’re actually asking team members for their input. And then the last question I ask is, where would you like us to be? You know, are we where we need to be, or where would you like us to be? And you can see where the team says we want to move farther to the right. We want more shared control. We want more account, shared accountability as an organization when it comes to decision making. Now just flip through those real quick. Go back to the five to seven years ago today, and then where, where would you like us to be? And you can see how the data points actually move towards having more shared control. This is a great visual for leadership to see whether their team is ready to be more involved in decision making. Now here’s another really, really cool output of this particular assessment. One of the questions with this assessment, we asked the third shift team as well. You can see they’re broken down in colors by different shifts. We asked the third shift team, and we separated out the the colors and just looked at third shift. And this is really interesting, because the the entire shift. Felt like management was in complete control of decisions, but the purple dot, which is the farthest to the right, is the supervisor of third shift. And so when the third supervisor saw this, the supervisor said, Oh, my goodness. Like I thought that I was a sharing account, but I thought that I was engaging the team in decisions, but in reality, the team showed the supervisor that that was not the case, right? And so again, this supervisor, you know, had to, had to take me make a decision, what am I going to do with this information? And luckily, the supervisor went back to the team and made some significant changes in engaging the team towards towards decisions. So this was a really great exercise. And the reason why I show you this exercise is because of point number two, make problems visible. Whatever you can do make it visible, right? If you can get that information out of the team members head and put it onto the board, put it onto a screen, decisions can be made so much quicker. Because the abnormalities are made visual, right? And so again, that that’s that’s a very important concept that needs to be shared here, is that we want to make problems visible. Now, point number three, you didn’t think you were going to come to a lean conference and not hear anything about 5s right? I mean, of course we have to talk about 5s so 5s is one of those fundamental tools that’s necessary to establish an efficient workplace. And you know the reason why this is so important? We talk about the importance of standard work, right? And how standard work creates stability for an organization. Well, what does 5s do for us? 5s it also creates stability, right? If we’re coming into complete chaos in an organization, complete unorganized chaos, if we’re coming in every single day, day in and day out, then how can we how can we think that we’re going to be able to see problems in in complete disorganization and chaos, and think about the level of stress that we have when we come into an unorganized area. I mean, most people spend more time at work than they do at their own homes. So I can’t imagine that someone would be walking into their home with dirt all over the floor, oil drips in the kitchen, pig mat around the the sink in the in the living you know, in the in the kitchen area? No, of course not. So why would we expect our team members to work in an unorganized, chaotic environment like that? You know, at their work. So 5s is so foundational, you can improve on chaos. You need standard stability, even in your organization, in order to make improvements and see abnormalities. You know, with 5s everything has a place, and everything is in its place. And it helps us again, to see abnormal versus normal. So the last point under, under keep it visual, is that organized is efficient. A clean workplace is an efficient workplace and a safe workplace. And that is point number three. Now we’re moving into Continue, continue to improve, which is the last of the three areas. So what small things are you doing to build the right culture in your organization? I want you to ask yourself that, what are the small things that are happening in your organization to build the right culture? Are they? Are you only working on big projects, you know, six month Green Belt projects? Or do you have small, simple improvements that are, that are creating a huge advantage for your organization? Small improvements matter, right? The unfortunate thing is that many organizations devalue them because they’re so small, right? They’re like, ah, two second improvement. That’s nothing, right? But here’s what I want to tell you. This is a really great quote, but it reminds me of my trip to the Grand Canyon a couple years ago, where the Colorado River snakes through the Grand Canyon and, you know, you can’t, can’t stop, but, but think about how the Grand Canyon started, right? And just the you think about erosion with water, and the fact that just one drop of water over time, consistently, that small little drop of water, consistently over time, is going to break away rock, it’s going to erode, it’s going to start to create a stream, and then it’s going to turn into a creek, and then it’s going to turn into a river, and then who knows, it could turn into the Grand Canyon, right? Small drips of water are what start that, right? So small things can grow and build into large, enormous change within an organization, right? So let’s talk about three points here. I want to run a quick video to show you an example at an organization how they’re using small improvements to change the culture. Hey, everybody, this is Patrick Adams, and I’m here at group vertical and Grand Rapids, and I wanted to share with you a best practice that this team is using to create a culture of continuous improvement. A few months ago, I shared a video about a suggestion pyramid that helps the team to visually track ideas and also create a manageable process for for developing and following a suggestion system. So this team has that process in place right here. It’s an amazing process that works really well for this team, and what I really want to show you is the celebration that they have here on a weekly and a monthly basis, on all of the ideas that are being implemented here at group vertical. They’re tracking each of their ideas per month. They actually have a monthly goal of 25 suggestions each month. Each month, they have a monthly participant award that goes out to one or two people per per month. This last month, in May, they had 74 suggestions that were implemented that month. Wow, that’s amazing. So amazing work by group Vern. Grand Rapids. But I tell you that because I want you to understand the importance of learning to build culture using small improvements, right? Small improvements and that, and that brings us to the second point as well. You know, this is just a quick example, but out of 2000 opportunities for improvement, identified over 300 different employees. That’s an average of six ideas per person, right? That adds up to 91% of the improvements completed. 93% of the completed opportunities resulted in a change. 755 ideas improved quality. 216 ideas improved safety. 893 ideas improved satisfaction. But those 837 resulted in over $7 million in financial impact, right? That’s huge. It’s huge. It’s It’s massive. And that’s why you have to find your big in the small. It’s important that you support those small, simple improvements, that because they’ll lead to large financial improve, you know, financial impact, but also they help build that culture. So the last thing that I want to hit on is the the last point, and there’s three areas here, set the expectation. We talked about communicating your vision in the beginning, but even talking about it with sustaining improvements, we want to make sure that we communicate the vision, communicate the why, set that expectation, inspect the expectation. As leaders, you have to inspect what you expect, and then finally, you have to reinforce the expectation, make sure that you’re going out and either celebrating or asking why, if things are not continuing the way that they should so the last of the three and continue to improve is to sustain the improvements. Sustain the improvements. Super All right. Well, I think we’re out of time, so super job. Appreciate it Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

31:53

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