Mary Price  00:18

Welcome and thank you for joining us today. My name is Mary price. I’m the events and marketing manager at the Shingo Institute at Utah State University. I’m excited to have Patrick Adams with us today. Patrick is the author of the best selling book avoiding the continuous appearance trap, which received the Shingo publication award earlier this year. Patrick is an internationally recognized leadership coach, consultant and professional speaker. He is best known for his unique human approach to sound team building practices, creating consensus and enabling empowerment. If you haven’t had a chance to read the article, Patrick wrote on the topic we’re discussing today, I would encourage you to visit our website shingo.org. Click the media tab and select the blog, you’ll find the article there it’s titled avoiding continuous appearance. Patrick, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ll turn the time over to you.

Patrick Adams  01:25

All right, thank you, Mary, I so much appreciate it. And thank you for all you do at the Shingo Institute and for everything that the Shingo Institute does for all of us lean practitioners and coaches, consultants that are out there listening in. So thank you again. I’m excited to be here. Excited, thank you for the introduction, and also obviously very excited about the Shingo award for the book. Super excited to get out to Utah for the Shingo Shingo conference. So hopefully I’ll see some of you there. But again, my name is Patrick Adams. And I’m going to dive right in because we only have 2025 minutes for a presentation and then some time for questions. So let me let me move ahead. So avoiding the continuous appearance trap. I’ve had a lot of people ask me, you know, why the why the title? What where did this come from? What is continuous appearance? Right? Why? Why did why is this the title of your book, and what I what I want all of you to know is that just a little bit of my background, because I think that this will help you to understand a little bit more about the book and about continuous appearance versus continuous improvement. So earlier in my career, I worked for two companies. And these two companies were very, very similar at the surface level, right. So if you were to walk into either of these companies, both of them were very similar. Both companies would, would say that lean, or Six Sigma, where there were their continuous improvement methodology that they use, both had very similar visual management or like artifacts, what I call if you were to walk in, you would see five s activities going on, you’d see different colors, visual management, take on the floors, you’d see value stream maps on the walls, you’d see similar KPIs like safety, cost, quality delivery, and maybe cultural morale. Both had very similar org structures, right. So when walking through these two companies, they would look very, very similar at the surface level. However, underneath everything at the surface level, things were very different. In fact, one of those companies had a very terrible culture, the turnover was through the roof. The KPIs were in the dumps, right? people hated to work there. It was a just a terrible place for people to work at. And people could feel that right. The other company had an amazing culture. In fact, you know, they had what I would consider a true culture of continuous improvement to the core, right, their KPIs were right where they needed to be their turn, their turnover was very low. People loved working there, people stayed there long term, because they just enjoyed the culture. They love being a part of a company where they could use their minds, and they could be involved and engaged in the activities that were happening at that company. So you have to ask yourself, right, what was the difference? What was the difference between these two companies? I was fortunate enough to work under both of those companies. And I learned a lot about both of those companies, the cultures and what was underneath them. And that’s really what you find in the book avoiding the continuous appearance trap. So the one company, I would as I said, I would consider them having a true culture of continuous improvement. In the book, I call them company continuous improvement. The other company is had what I would consider a culture of continuous appearance, right where they appeared to have it all together at the surface level. But underneath, not so much, right. So that would be company continuous appearance. So many of you are probably thinking to yourself, Oh, I know exactly what you’re talking about. Because I’m either currently working in a company like that, or I’ve worked for a company or I’ve experienced that with another company, whatever it may be. There’s so many companies out there that are currently living in this culture of continuous appearance. And so that’s what I wrote the book about, called this culture of continuous appearance. Now,one of the things I want to mention to all of you is that there were three very simple truths that I would say, made the distinction between the two cultures. And I want to share  those three very simple truths with you. And then we’ll talk about why that’s important. So the first thing that I think is important for everyone to understand is that one company set very clear expectations, while the other company did not write one company enabled action. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute. One company sustained the results, right? Now, again, I would say these are three very simple concepts, right? This isn’t rocket science. But what I will say is in spending time in both of these organizations, what I found at company continuous appearance was that it was very spotty with these three areas. So sometimes I would see an area or Department of the business that set very clear expectations, right. And they enabled action, they empowered people to actually do do the the continuous improvement work, they might even set apart time for them to step out of their normal roles and actually apply their learnings to, to check to improve the business, right. However, they didn’t sustain the actions, they had no sustainment plan in place, right. So so you know, a new leader would come in, and everything would change. And the current direction would then change to a new direction, right. So there was no sustainment. And when this happened, none of the change was sustained. Nothing that had been put in place, nothing that had had been laid out by the employees or the leaders of that organization was sustained, it would all just fall apart. And you hear the term labor of the month, right, there’s flavor of the month activities happening all the time at company continuous appearance. Another thing that I saw that happen, sometimes in certain departments or certain areas of the business, we would have that we would have an area where they would enable action, they would give the team members time to actually make improvements, they would set apart teams to be able to solve problems, right, they had a great sustainment plan in place in that particular department or that area of the business meeting, they would they have, you know, some type of audit, or they’d have a follow up a layered process audit of some sort that have leaders out there checking to make sure that some of the action that was happening was was actually sustained. However, in the beginning, they never set clear expectations. So you know, again, some of that work was, you know, kind of spotty all over the place, right? That we in the US, we call this the shotgun approach, right? Just go out there and just start fixing things, do whatever you can to make improvements, but there was no clear direction, no X, no clear expectations set upfront. And what happened was, we had a lack of organizational alignment when this when this was taking place. And those departments are areas of the business. And the last thing that I experienced that company continuous appearance was that sometimes leaders would set very clear expectations up front. And they would have that sustainment plan in place, they would have good follow up, they would have leaders out there making sure that that things were being sustained. However, they didn’t enable action, right? They were so busy that they said we don’t have time for continuous improvement. We don’t have time to SET set apart, you know, five minutes a day for a tear meeting, we don’t have time to allow you to be able to do some of these activities, right. So instead, what they had was mediocre results. Instead of having exponential results. They had mediocre results. Now the difference was that company continuous improvement, right, the company that had a true culture of continuous improvement, the difference there was leaders across the entire business. And this was a global organization. And I could go into a site in Michigan and I could see one thing happened. And I can go to a site in Poland. And I can see another thing happening. And both in both of the on both of those sites, they were very much aligned. Right? Both or both of those sites had set clear expectations, which were all aligned to the corporate goals, right. So they set clear expectations, they enabled actions at both of these organizations because they knew the power of of enabling team members to actually work on continuous improvement. They gave them time to be able to actually solve problems, right. So they enabled action and they had great sustainment in place. So they had labor process audits in place. They had team members across the entire business, from executive leaders, to mid managers, to frontline leaders to maintenance personnel that were involved in labor process audits, so they had great sustainment in place. And the result of that was a true culture of continuous improvement. Everyone this is Patrick, so sorry to interrupt this episode of the lean solutions podcast, but I felt it necessary to take a quick moment and personally invite you to the Lean Solutions Summit on October 2 to the fourth this fall 2023. The theme of this year’s Global Summit is leadership, people purpose, passion. You do not want to miss this amazing experience with a top process improvement experts from your industry. No matter what industry you’re working in this summit has value for you. The Summit offers four different industry tracks to include healthcare, corporate, higher education and nonprofit and finally, government. Our opening keynote is Chris McChesney, the lead author of the number one Wall Street Journal best selling business book, the four disciplines of execution. The Ops sisters, Kathy Miller and Shannon, Carol’s the authors of steel toes and stilettos will be joining us as well as yours truly, and over 20 other speakers. The final day of the summit is full of workshops, and there are limited seats for a tour of Menlo innovations with Richard Sheridan and Zingerman’s mail order with Dr. Jeff liker, author of the Toyota way earlybird pricing is now available at finding solutions forward slash summit dash 2023. Or you can check the show notes for a link. Now, back to the show. So, I want to share that with you. Again, it’s three very simple truths. But I want to go back to the book real quick, because in the book, instead of chapter titles, I actually use questions, which is interesting, right questions, why questions? I use 12 strategic questions that anyone can understand very simple questions. But anyone can understand what’s truly underneath their culture. Are you living in a culture of continuous appearance? Or are you living in a culture of continuous improvement? Right, the 12 questions give anyone the ability to assess their operations and begin taking action right away. But again, why questions? Right? Why would I ask questions? Why questions at all? Why not just if I worked in this this organization where they had a true culture of continuous improvement? Why wouldn’t I just give you the roadmap? Why wouldn’t I just say, you know, take these five steps to develop a culture of continuous improvement or follow this 12 Step roadmap to develop your lean transformation? You know, why wouldn’t I do that? Well, there’s a reason. Right? So I want to give a quote by John shuck. If you’re, if you’re not familiar with John shuck, John was the he was the first American that worked at Toyota in Japan. He was also part of the the new meat project, which was, you know, a partnership with with Toyota. So John has a ton of experience. If you’re if you’re unfamiliar with him, and if you’re not familiar with new me, I would definitely recommend going and checking out numi. But John said, lead management is very much about asking the right questions and trying things or encouraging others to try things. Lean management itself is not about providing the right answers, but it’s very much about asking the right questions, right, you have to ask yourself, your organization, the right questions, and by asking yourself the right questions, right, it becomes a this process of learning, right, versus a process of correcting. So the point is, I want individuals who are reading the book, I want them to begin their own scientific thinking for their organization, right? I want them to start on this path of learning. So I want them to answer the questions for themselves rather than copying a roadmap or another organization, even copying Toyota, right? The solutions that Toyota created, were in response to very specific problems that Toyota was having, at a time in an industry, with a team and a culture that’s probably different than yours. So your solutions, or your answers to the questions are probably going to be different than someone else’s. So that’s why I use questions. So what I’d like to do today, is I want to ask all of you a question. And I want to use the answer to that question to kind of talk about a few other things before we before we end today. So the first question that I have for you, is what is culture? I want you to really think about the culture that you have, because everyone, everyone on this webinar, everyone listening to this podcast, has a culture, you already have a culture, whether you’ve worked on it or not. A culture is the result of very specific inputs. Okay, so culture is an output, culture happens. It happens based on your leaders, your mid management, your team leaders, your individuals, your frontline workers, it happens because of their behaviors, their actions, their beliefs, right, the things that they do, where they spend their time, all of those are very specific inputs to what then becomes an output your culture. Right, so so that’s how I really think about culture. Right? So for organizations or for leaders, that, that I’ve worked with many leaders who asked the question, you know, why? Why will we? Why is our culture not changing? I want a learning culture, I want a culture of continuous improvement. Let’s make it happen. Right? This is the vision that I have this is the end result that I’m looking for, why is it not happening? Right? And the problem is that they’re not changing the inputs. All they’re doing is trying to change the output, without make doing any work to the inputs upfront. Right. So what happened? What is the definition of insanity? Right? What’s the definition of insanity? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Right? So many leaders are out there saying I want a different culture, I want I want a learning culture, I want a different result, I want a different outcome. But they’re not changing the inputs. Right? That’s complete insanity. Leaders have to to rewind, they have to look back and they have to go, Okay, let’s look at the inputs. Let’s look at our behaviors. Let’s look at our actions. Let’s look at the beliefs, the areas where our leaders are spending their time. Right that that’s what we have to look at. Those are the inputs that we can change, right? If we want to change the culture. Now, I want to ask you another question based on what I just said, can you really change culture? Right? If culture is an output? Can you really change it? Do you believe that it’s possible to actually change your culture to actually change the outputs? If you did change the inputs? Would the output be different? That’s my question for you next. So you guys had a poll? I don’t I’m not sure what the results of that poll were yet at this point. But I want to share with you Oh, you have a poll. Now you, you have a poll. So I want to share with you a study that was done by McKinsey. And it we as leaders want to change the trajectory of a of an organization, if we want to change the culture, right? That means people will have to change. And this is very difficult. Humans are difficult sometimes to work with change is difficult for people. Right? So McKenzie did a really great study. And they they worked with a large number of individuals, and they asked them all the same question. They asked them, what would it take for you to change if we came into your organization? How what would it take for you to change? And these were the this was the results of the what the McKinsey found so they said, people said, I will change if, number one, I understand what’s being asked of me. And it makes sense. Right? I understand what’s being asked to me and it makes sense. So people seek congruence between their beliefs and their actions right believing in the why inspires them In support of change, right, they have to understand why. And it has to make sense to them. Number one, number two McKinsey found that people will change if I see my leaders, colleagues and staff behaving differently. This is a big one, right? Role modeling, people mimic individuals and leaders that surround them. Right? So, you know, leaders, they have to walk the walk, they can’t just ask people to do a certain thing, you know, they have to actually walk the walk. They can’t just talk the talk, they, they have to do what they say. Right. So that’s an important one. Number three, they said, I will change if I have the skills and opportunities to behave in a new way, right? The old saying, you can’t teach a dog new tricks, throw that out the window, you can teach a dog new tricks, give them the skills, give them the abilities, teach them help develop them, coach them, because that’s what they need in order to accept the change that you’re offering to them. Number four, they said, I will change if I see our structures, processes and systems support the changes I am being asked to make, right? We can shape behavior. But all too often organizations, because of the structure or the systems, they reinforce the wrong things. People come to work, they want to do a good job. They don’t come to work to sabotage the business intentionally. They come to work and they’re working in broken systems, we need to fix the systems and give people an opportunity for success. All right. So I want to ask you a question before we close up today. Last question that I have for you. What are your next steps? Right? This has been 20 minutes of your time. And I don’t want it to be wasted. I want you to really ask yourself, in fact, I would recommend writing it down. What’s one thing that you will do differently after this 30 minutes that you’ve spent in this webinar? What’s one thing just write it down, put it on your computer screen, put it on a post it note, put it on your desk? What’s one thing that you will do differently today, that will change the trajectory of where you’re heading? Remember, culture is an output. It’s a result of certain behaviors, certain beliefs, certain actions, right? So ask yourself, Where are you spending your time as a leader in your organization, maybe the one thing that you write down on your post it note is that you’re going to spend more time at the gamba, the place where the value at work is being done. Maybe today, you’re going to block time every morning to go out and attend a huddle. You know, to your meeting in your business, maybe you’re gonna attend one every single day, maybe you’re gonna go do a layer process audit once a week, maybe that’s the one thing that you’re going to do differently, the one input that you’re going to change that’s going to affect the culture, the result, right? Don’t live in this constant state of insanity. Be ready to change yourself. Right? Take those steps yourself, so that you can see the change in your organization. So with that, Mary, I want to open it up for questions. Perfect. Thank you so much, Patrick. Before we go to our q&a, I just wanted to mention that you mentioned it already at the beginning, but you will be teaching a workshop at the 35th annual Shingo conference, it’s going to going to be on May 24. It’s in Provo, Utah. You can learn more about the workshop at shingle.org/events. The workshops included in your registration fee for the conference. Great, we have a question from Ken, he asks, What is the easiest way to get my leaders to read your book? Ah, good. Good question. Um, I would say first and foremost, again, you have to walk the walk, right? So I would say get the book yourself. First, read the book yourself. There’s an assessment, there’s a free assessment that you can actually download as well. So do the assessment yourself. score your yourself, your organization, read the book, get grab a couple of those nuggets, those good nuggets yourself, and then share them with your team. Talk about the learnings that you had from the book, and how you’re going to apply them yourself. And then go out there and start talking about it being an ambassador for change. Right. The other thing that I would suggest is start a book study. There’s many organizations that will do book studies. Using the book we’re actually working on a workbook to go along with the book itself that’ll come out later this year. But start a book study and reach out to me I’d love to come in and talk to your group. After you’ve done the book study or right in the middle answer some questions. Maybe talk about specific examples from the book on how those apply to your business. That’s another great way to get leaders to read your book, or to read my book. Oh, I did see a couple of questions pop in here real quick. Where’s the assessment? So the assessment is, every chapter in the book adds very specific questions to the assessment. And then at the end of the book is the full assessment, you can also go to our website at finding solutions.com. And you can download the assessment there. So either way, rather, whether you get the book or you download it on our website, it’s, it’s free on our website, so just go there and grab it. The other question is, is there any? Or is there value added value in putting your expectations sustainability plan in action in writing, there’s always value in putting, putting thoughts in writing, putting there’s power in pen to paper, right? So definitely power in that, I would say, not only you but also your your team, or those around you suggesting it to them, you know, let’s write down our expectations. Let’s write down our sustainability plan. Let’s write down let’s Let’s actually create a timeline of when I’m going to do these things, right, a very specific plan, and then due dates, right? And what I’m going to do that then hold yourself accountable, have your own PDCA cycle on creating a plan, doing it checking to make sure that you’re actually moving forward with it, and then reflecting and taking some kind of action on that. 

Mary Price  26:22

I think that’s all the questions that we have right now. We’ll go ahead and say goodbye. Thank you so much for presenting today, Patrick, and they still all of our attendees. I hope you enjoyed it. Please make sure to go check out the blog the article that Patrick wrote sheknows.org/blog blog, and we will see you next month.