Patrick Adams  00:32

Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast led by your hosts Andy Olrich and myself. Patrick Adams, how’s it going? Andy

 

Andy Olrich  00:40

G’day, Patrick, going great mate. How are you? Oh,

 

Patrick Adams  00:42

I’m doing great, enjoying, enjoying the summer here in Michigan. It’s it’s been hot the last last couple weeks, so

 

Andy Olrich  00:52

it’s the opposite down here. It’s thick coats and rain jackets. So that’ll do

 

Patrick Adams  00:58

alright. Well, hey Andy, today we have a really great topic for our listeners. We’ve we’ve touched on Toyota kata, on kind of thinking a number of times, but we have a special guest and expert in this area, who I’ve been had the opportunity to sit in on some of her workshops, and pretty amazing facilitator, to say the least. But for those listeners that are new to kata, you know, kata focuses on guiding individuals or teams to achieving desired outcomes while coaching, there’s two separate types of Kata, so we’ll probably get into both these, but improvement kata and coaching kata. Improvement kata provides the framework for problem solving, while the coaching kata actually helps guide individuals in achieving those outcomes. So I’m sure we’ll dive into this very specifically, but overall, the methodology helps drive innovation, improve efficiency cost helps foster this continuous improvement culture that we’re all seeking. So I’m excited for our guest today, Beth Carrington and Andy, why don’t you just give us a quick kind of intro for Beth before we bring her on.

 

Andy Olrich  02:11

I’d love today. So Beth. Beth Carrington is a season consultant, and since going back to 1999 and specializes in Lean transformations and coaching. And with over two decades experience in various industries, she founded Carrington consulting, Incorporated to focus on lean transformation. And since 2009 she has been a master coach in improvement Carter and coaching Carter, helping organizations enhance their scientific thinking for better performance and innovation that you spoke about. Patrick Beth’s expertise is very wide and broad, and it’s evident in her contributions to the Lean Enterprise Institute and their lean post. And this is where Beth shares insights on improvement and coaching Carter, and her work has been compiled into the fundamentals of improvement and coaching. Carter, amazing. Welcome to the show. Beth, how are you?

 

Beth Carrington  03:06

Oh, I’m great. Adam, or Andy, sorry, Andy, I’m so happy. I’m a little excited, so jump out of the gate. But yeah, Andy, it’s so thank you for the introduction. Patrick, always great to see you. We don’t see much of each other, but we have over the years. So good to see you again, and I’m so excited to talk about the subject that has consumed a lot of my cognitive energy over the last 15 plus years. I mean, this is a subject I love and love to explore and learn about and and practice. So great to be here. That’s awesome.

 

Andy Olrich  03:56

That’s awesome. Beth, I can we can feel the passion already. So I’m really looking forward to diving into this one, and don’t worry about the Adam thing I’ve been called way worse. So let’s, let’s, let’s go. There may be, depending on who’s listening now, there may be some people who have you know, familiar with your work and the and the process and methodology. Hopefully we’ve got some people who are checking out for the first time. So can I get you just to give us a high level pretend I know nothing about Toyota Carter. Can you give us a high level introduction to what it is? And yeah, really what it’s all about? All right,

 

04:29

so let me I’m going to delve back into history a bit, and then I’ll bring it to current day and current thoughts. I was lucky enough to engage with a gentleman by the name of Bill castino. He was my sensei for years while I was still in corporate America, we started with another company when I was in corporate a lean, uh. A consortium, and I was lucky enough to meet Bill, learn from Bill. He was a group leader at Georgetown Kentucky. I think the story goes he was like the first group leader hired in Georgetown Kentucky, and I learned so much from him. And then we partnered and started a lean consulting firm together. And my first job after I left corporate America, I was a automotive president of an automotive supply company. We supplied all tier one automotive companies across the world, and he and I started this venture, and I learned so much from him. But during the early days, he sent me a transcript of a book from a friend of his called Mike rather and this transcript, he’s like, read it, call me. I want to get your insights. So I read it, and I called them before I was done, and I just said, Oh my gosh. This is the missing link. This is what we in western world, outside of Toyota, have missed in terms of lean. You know, most people think of lean as a noun, I would say a thing, and it’s not, it’s it’s more like a verb, it’s a it’s a mindset. And so this is where we started to transform our practice in terms of Lean transformation. So Dylan, I started working together in 1999 this was about 2008 and it transformed my thinking, my practice around lean and so where this came from is a friend of Bill’s a gentleman by the name of Mike Rother comes out of University Michigan, one of Jeffrey likers graduate students, If you know Dr Jeffrey liker and the Toyota way. And Mike went and researched Toyota as many industrial engineers and engineers out of the University of Michigan did, but with a slightly different skew or approach to it, and he went with kind of two research questions. One was, what’s the leadership behaviors? Management, subordinate people leaders, subordinate relationship that drives their innovation, innovative solutions to problems. And the second one question he asked during his research is, can we operationalize it to teach others? And that was about a six year research that he was doing. And finally, he published this book called Toyota cada and in this book, it shows the operationalization of behaviors of people in being coached by their direct supervisor and not being coached to solutions, but being coached to a thought process that is very much around scientific thinking, and that’s the term we use today when we talk about Toyota kata. It’s about being able to think a bit more scientifically and run experiments to achieve a well defined objective, and being able to coach someone through that process. And there’s another element, when you get a bit more sophisticated about it, you have what’s called a second coach, or a coach’s coach, that helps that coach think about their role in in terms of a second coach. So someone coaching me on not how to improve the process, but how to coach someone to be more scientific thinking in their approach, and so in my head where I go is it’s about teaching people to step away from an implementation mindset and more towards an experimental mindset. And I know where I want to go. I mean, I can fully define that, whether you’re talking Value Stream Map or ocean Connery, goals and objectives, or simply in kata terms, we call it a target condition, the short term, state I want to be in, how I want my my process to flow, whether it’s an engineering, manufacturing, finance process, it doesn’t matter. I. But this is how I would envision better being. And now how to get there. I can learn how to experiment to achieve that. And and so that research, to me, was like eye opening. And back in the day when I was starting lean in the early aughts, you know, I was reading Steven spear and going, there’s something here, but I didn’t quite get it. And it took Mike and this concept of operationalizing the management system, so to speak, where I could actually begin to think about teaching someone to think more scientifically, to achieve their objectives. And that’s and at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. And that includes whether you want an army of frontline people solving problems, achieving new results being innovative in their results. Or engineers, industrial manufacturing product engineers being much more innovative around their process of design, or talking about managers trying to reach Hoshin Connery or, you know, C suite people driving huge results. Organizationally, it’s all focused around this way of scientific thinking and acting that Mike operationalized, and that became the improvement kata and the coaching kada, love it.

 

Patrick Adams  11:43

We’re going to dive into the tactical side of things, I’m sure. But I want to, want to cue in on something that you said earlier. You, you mentioned that you, you felt like this was the missing link. And I know that I’ve had conversations with Mike rather, and I’ve listened to him speak and and he talks about rewiring the brain into a different way of thinking. And I just, I want to ask you, like, Well, why? Why aren’t leaders, especially in in the Western world, or Western Come Why? Why? Why do we have to rewire the brain, and why is this the missing link? Like, what? What is the natural tendency for us, and why aren’t we doing it the right way? What would your thoughts be on that?

 

12:27

I I’m not sure it’s not the right way, but there might be a different way, and it’s about this mindset. We as humans. It’s the way we’re pro we’re wired psychologically, physiologically. I should say, there we go. That as we want to know things for certain, that’s this is why optical illusions work, right? We look at something and oh, I just know I’m seeing a lamp, but someone else looks at it? No, it’s two faces. Right. As soon as we see something, we want to compartmentalize it into something we know. And this is what I call that, that implementation mindset, and in the Lean community, we’ve been focused in the 20th century on implementation. I go and study the tools of Lean and I implement those tools, as opposed to being able to describe a desired future state and experimenting your way to get there. And so it’s just the way we as humans are. Are physiologically programmed. You can see it in people as soon as they as soon as people think they have a solution to a problem they’re facing, whether they tested the solution or not, just the just the thought that I think I know the solution, they relax and now it becomes a task, as opposed to really saying, I don’t know how to get there, but I have recognized some obstacles preventing me from getting there, and now I can run some experiments to overcome those obstacles. So it’s that, that mindset, that the practice of the improvement kata, the practice of the coaching kata helps you rewire your brain into this experimental mode, and it’s often been referred to in young children exploring their world, right? And they’re touching things, they’re moving forward. What’s that? What’s that? What. You know, and and getting their footing through experience, we as adults, that’s kind of been beat out of us, that beat, but, you know, pushed out of our mindset. And many, particularly, I would say, business leaders, leaders in any organization, they’ve experienced a lot. So we think we know the solution to everything, and through scientific thinking, you can actually say to yourself and recognize, you know, maybe I’m not so sure, and I actually have a favorite sticker, a little card I keep on my desk over here that says, Don’t be so sure, right? And, and every idea is worth testing. And through that testing and experimentation, that’s the engine that drives innovation and and you can see that in scientific progress throughout the millennial sure it’s it’s maybe I don’t really know, or I maybe what I think I know might not be. So let’s run some experiments and and test that thinking. And so that’s, that’s a bit Patrick around, where that mindset shift and and it only comes through practice, because we as humans have been kind of deprogrammed from that and leadership clear in many instances, in my experience, has because it has to show vulnerability. It has to show. Maybe I don’t know all the answers where the common default is. I know

 

Andy Olrich  16:48

it’s a great call out connects. Thank you, Beth, and just jump in here if that’s I you know one of our regular guests and one of our great mates, Katie Anderson, I love Katie. Yeah, Katie, she’s greater. And those Katie, one of the most powerful stories or examples she gave me in one of the workshops I did with her was how doing some work with GE and and Larry kelp said he had to forget what he learned when it came to, you know, lean and and going into this space because of the traditional, as you said, kind of brought up a way where we’re taught to lead in a certain way or think in a certain way. And that was such a powerful example from someone in a, you know, pretty senior, senior place, to call that out openly and and I do find sort of one of the things down here in Australia, working where, traditionally, where I work now, in a large water utility, there’s a lot of scientists in the organization around water quality. And when I start showcasing, hey, we’ve got this, you want to try a bit of this lean and Lean Six Sigma type thing. A couple of them initially said, Oh, look, you know, that’s really manufacturing, and it’s not really there with things like Carter, when you actually talk them through and they’re like, well, that’s, that’s kind of what we do. That’s our job. And I’m going, there you go. So it’s yeah, that hypotheses and the experimentation, that’s all this stuff, is that we can so that was a little bit of a hurdle there. But when you when you actually put it in front of them, like you didn’t just in that simple way, they’re like, Oh yeah, okay, we might give it a go. So that was, I just wanted to drop that in around some experience. And in particular, Katie, you know, forgetting what you’ve learned and rewire the brain.

 

18:33

Yes, absolutely. And so when I work with engineering, and then in particular, and many others as well, is they, they tend to recognize I’m using the scientific way of thinking in my design work, in my coding work, in my software development, but where it comes to more powerful is in the process they’re using to develop new designs or develop new coding. It’s like, it’s that. It’s like agile and Kata, you know, I see those very much similar, where Agile is about changing and as well changing the way you develop new code and test new code, modularize it and make it you know, faster, simpler, quicker, feedback, affirming or refuting your hypothesis that it works. It’s not about what you’re developing, so to speak. It’s about the process you’re using to develop and and to be able to teach people to separate those two is very important. I think it’s the same with manufacturing, right? How I’m going to homeless? Piece isn’t as much typically the problem as the parts coming to be honed and then being sent to the next step. It’s it’s a system. That’s what Jeff leiker talks a lot about, is so many of the problems we’re facing our system level, right? They’re not this process level. And that point problem solving, eight step problem is really good for and they’re still experimenting, but on an isolated, recognized problem, when we start talking about system level stuff, it’s it’s a bit more complex than that, but we can apply that same scientific thinking to it

 

Patrick Adams  20:46

Beth on the on the more tactical side of things, thinking about it, or starter kata, yeah, listeners through the steps of what that looks like to to walk through a Kata, as far as the different steps that they Yeah,

 

Beth Carrington  21:03

absolutely. It starts with recognizing what you are striving to achieve, and in kind of terms, we call that a challenge. You know, it’s not a goal where I’m pretty sure I can get there. This is a challenge, meaning, right off the bat, my mindset is I don’t know how I’m going to get there. I understand why it’s important to get there, and I understand that the context and the whys behind it, but you have to understand your challenge, and that means you’ve got a time based, metric based challenge you’re striving to achieve, and you you kind of go through, that’s the first thing. It’s called, understanding your whether that’s one by one flow at lowest cost, whether that’s 100% first time quality, whether that’s cash flow accuracy between, you know, plus or minus 5% month over month, it’s what you’re striving to achieve. And a learner, we call them Mike, and his original book called them a men T has to understand what they’re striving to achieve and articulate that in a very you know, time metric based fashion, once you know what you’re striving to achieve, the second routine of the planning phase of the group Mikado, we call it, this learner would grasp their current condition as it relates to that challenge. And you don’t have to know everything about your current condition, just enough as it relates to your challenge, so you can say, Okay, this is what I need to know next, or this is what I need to achieve next to get me closer to that challenge and that description of where we are now that’s grasping your current condition and where I want to be next. We call that a target condition, not a target which is just a metric, but a target condition, meaning pattern of work process characteristics, I’ll see observable facts. I’ll see in the future, process metrics. You know that in the moment, kind of metric to monitor progress, and then what outcome do I expect? So those four elements of a target condition you define that list what obstacles you think are preventing you from achieving that target condition, and then choose one of those obstacles and run an experiment to overcome it. And and that is now you’re ready to step into the execution mode of the improvement cada which means you and your coach have a conversation very specifically around a series of five categories of questions. You know, what’s your target condition? What’s your actual condition? Now, what obstacles, which one are you addressing? And then what’s your next step, and what do you expect? And then how quickly can we go and see? So there’s these five kind of categories of questions that drive the coaching exchange. So the learner gets a moment to, like, really think through the logic and the hypothesis they’ve developed, and then they run the experiment, and then you do another coaching cycle, and and so it becomes this go experiment, coaching cycle, experiment, coaching cycle with a lot of deep reflection happening for the learner. Of being driven by their coach into what did I what actually what did I expect to happen? You know, what was my step? What did I expect to happen? What actually happened? And what did I learn? And having learned that, what’s my next step? And so again, going from where I am now to this where I want to be next, and then once you get to that target condition, you set another one, and you’re always moving towards your challenge, whatever that challenge might be. Hello,

 

Patrick Adams  26:18

So you mentioned coaching in there, and it made me think about a question that maybe some listeners might have. So if they’re just starting kata within their organization, and they have the starter kata, they have a storyboard. They’re working through it, how do they find a coach like does the coach have to be an expert in kata in order to be a coach for a learner or like, I guess, which comes first

 

26:49

deep question. That’s a deep question. Patrick, so my short answer would be, I have swung a golf club maybe five times in my life, and I was told I’m doing it wrong. I hold it like a baseball bat and I don’t know. You know, I’m not I don’t know how to play golf. Short answer, I don’t know how to play golf. Are you gonna bring me in to teach you how to play golf?

 

Patrick Adams  27:21

Probably not. Yeah, exactly,

 

27:23

um, you know, there’s that, that Ted lasso story about he didn’t know anything about soccer, and he goes to Europe and coaches. He knows a lot about coaching, coaching sports, but he had a team that really knew soccer around him. So we can bust that bubble by bringing in team members. But the main thing is you have to know what your coaching and what you have to have a mental construct of what good looks like. So a coach kind of goes through three steps. At least in my experience, I’ve got a tennis coach, and I see her once a month, and she’s like, between now and next month, here’s the one maybe two things I want you to practice, and then I really hone in on those two doing reps and sessions around those one or two things. And then she assesses my movement, my skill when I see her the next month, and then she picks the next thing I need to work on. But she’s been a pro in golf or in tennis for years. She knows what good looks like, and that’s to your point. We really, we tend to find the best coaches around the improvement kind of being a Cata coach is that, you know, the improvement kind of been in that role as as a learner, and then you’re much better prepared to coach it and and then also, you’ve been a learner, a coach. Now you’re ready to help teach someone how to coach, meaning you’re a coach’s coach, or what we call, in kata terms, a second coach.

 

29:17

Got it. Got

 

Andy Olrich  29:19

it, excellent. So yeah, and ongoing coaching of the coach, right? So that,

 

29:25

yeah, and in the Toyota model, it’s very much a chain of command. It isn’t what I would call a sideways, like a a lean, or an HR, or, you know, someone outside of the chain. It’s, it’s a people leader their next level, you know, plus one or minus one, minus two. And so as this people leader, I’m a second coach. I’m really honed in on teaching my next level. Managers how to coach their next level. So the pattern is, as a learner, a coach and a second coach, you all come together at the artifact you mentioned it, we call a storyboard, which is the learners, never ending story of continuous improvement towards their challenge. And it’s got the target condition, the current condition, the obstacle list, and the PDCA, the the experimental steps they’re going to take to overcome those obstacles. And that’s that’s called an artifact. And we also have a coaching card that the coach would use to very specifically ask a series of questions with interesting questions in between. You know, the major sweeping categories on the coaching card, and they use those two artifacts to do the routine we that’s where the name kata comes from. It’s a routine you practice over and over again until you habitualize it. And then over time, the artifacts can disappear, but the thought process stays behind. Yeah, and and so a lot of my time is spent teaching people how to use the artifacts with the ultimate goal in mind that the artifacts can disappear and it’s just now the way I think, right, I can lay out a challenge. I can grasp my current condition. I can set an initial target condition. List those obstacles, run experiments to overcome the obstacles, achieve my target condition, and then set another one. And that’s kind of the the cadence of a learner and their coaches. There every experiment, every step, helping them just think more critically. And critical thinking is So, you know, valuable in so many processes.

 

Patrick Adams  32:11

Yeah, I think you said there. I just want to call that out how important that is with the starter kata, versus understanding and learning the process. And then some of those artifacts start to get artifacts start to get removed. I think a lot of companies miss that point, and they try to keep everything in place, for which, I mean, maybe isn’t a bad thing, but just understanding that the idea is that we’re trying to learn a new way to to problem solve, to approach obstacles, and to move us closer to our desired objectives. And the other thing I’ll mention just briefly is Mike Rother also has all of those artifacts for free on his UMich website. So you can google Mike rather Toyota, cada University of Michigan or however, and you’ll, you’ll find that website, and he, he has all those artifacts absolutely free out there. Maybe we’ll drop to that in the show notes as well. Yeah.

 

33:04

And I have many of those. Like, I do these Cata bursts. I call them. They’re one pagers, like, what is a good target condition look like, what is a good challenge look like. And then katamatters.com you can go and find many of those examples of artifacts that you know perfect

 

Patrick Adams  33:29

in the show notes too. And because that would be good to know, especially you just mentioned how to how to choose a good challenge, that’s a lot. That’s one of the most difficult things for people to understand. What does make a good challenge? So I guess I’ll just ask you, what, how would someone choose a good challenge for their team? Yeah, oh, that

 

33:51

that’s, that’s a deep, deep question. Um, so with, I’m working with a lot of business leaders at this point, and many of them have an annual planning process, or a strategic planning process, or in in Lean terminology, ocean, right? And it’s a definition of goals and objectives, typically on an annual basis, and many times it’s, I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but this is where we want to be, and that challenge is very much this idea that it’s beyond our People’s threshold of knowledge. We’re stepping into unknown territory, meaning I just don’t want my process to run at status quo, like daily management just kind of brings you back to status quo. It recognizes deviations from status quo. This is about study setting a whole new status quo for your performance. Of your process, or developing brand new capability we’ve never done before, and so it isn’t something I can just implement my way towards. I have to be able to learn and experiment. And sometimes that’s a setback, sometimes that’s a step sideways, but the North Star, the objective I’m striving for, doesn’t change. So there’s key things I look at when helping someone develop a challenge. It’s time based, it’s metric based. It’s beyond my threshold of knowledge. It’s aspirational. It’s relevant to the organization I’m working within. So the contacts, meaning, it’s important to the organization, it’s important to the second coach, it’s important to the coach, it’s important to the learner, and relevant to the team. So simple as possible metrics. You know, sometimes we make metrics way too complicated, and it’s like a team member needs to know at the end of the day, hey, was today a good day towards our objective, or wasn’t it? And so the simplest of measures are the best and the shortest increment of time. So if you think about hour by hour, performance charts, manufacturing it, hey, I can know was this hour a good hour or not, and if it wasn’t, what are the obstacles? What are the problems that occurred? What are the things I need to solve so that my next hour is a better hour and and that all of that drives into developing a great challenge statement. And there’s one someone brought to my attention the other day, and she said, Beth, you all have said, and is it important to my customer, right? So it’s that inward, so much looking. It can be, you know, I always often ask, like plant managers, you know, what keeps you up at night? That might be a good challenge, but it’s also typically involving a customer. So it’s oftentimes customer facing, got it

 

Andy Olrich  37:25

That’s great. And I guess we’ve talked about, you know, the measures, the targets, that type of approach, yeah, how do we just a little bit of detail there on how we would then break that into a target condition? So, yeah, if you can talk us through an example of that,

 

37:39

yeah, if I’m looking at, let’s say, just a simple first time quality. That sounds simple, but I’ve got a process of this is a real case out of a site they had a brazing problem, and this one part number was bouncing around between 2050, 30/41, time quality. I mean, just horrible. And then it wasn’t a huge pain point, wasn’t a catastrophic pain point, because they would just rerun it through this brazing process and try it again, and they’d get their and then the yield would go up, and they they could rerun these products, like two or three times, so they’d ultimately get there, but the cost was out of the roof. You know, at 40% first time quality, that means 60% are being reworked. Okay, so they chose the part number. So if I’m looking at 100% first time braise quality, they just selected one part number and said, I want to learn about how to make that one part number better, and then what I learned from that, I can apply to others. So it’s called selecting a focus. I’m just going to focus in on this part number, and that’s that’s a really helpful way on your journey to setting a target condition. And then the journey became a measurement system that they used to determine first time braise quality. It was horrible. They had three different databases. One was this adaptive machining. One was the brazing operation, and one was final inspection. And the learner, person trying to improve this would spend hours trying to gather data on what our what the relationship of the that data was. So the first target condition was simply, I need to improve my data collection system so this person can learn everything they need to know within like five minutes of the batches they ran from the day before. So. Uh, it didn’t change anything in the process, but it allowed the learner to learn. So if I make a change, I can get feedback from my process. Did that change? Help or hurt? And so that became their first target condition. Then the second target condition was, they did a refurb on a furnace that they vacuum, furnace that they use for brazing because they had leaks in the seal and blah, blah. So that became their second target condition. The third target condition is they found out that they were trying to look at the data from Final Inspection. But final inspection, we’re doing inspections randomly. And they said we really need this first in, first out. So if I run an experiment, I can learn the rate the feedback that was like their third target condition. And then they found experiments they could run in their process to start improving the metric of the types of defects being found and where they were being found on the park. And that led them to like 98% of their defects were in was in one joint that was two un machined parks like these little surfaces coming together, and that’s where voids were occurring. And they’ve learned how to clean those surfaces, non machine surfaces. And then they got 100% adherence of the brace. And it was a six month story that was so great because, I mean, their first three, four target conditions had nothing to do with improving the process. Was just developing the ability to affirm or refute hypotheses around improving the brazing process and and it it was such for me, it’s held over for years, like three years ago, as a really cool learning journey. And that’s what the improvement kata coaching kata are about, is helping people through that learning journey, and they were able to take that learning and apply it across a multitude of part numbers, they were brazing and really learned how to improve that process. So they went from this 5030, 20% first time brace up to a consistent, you know, 99% first time quality brazing on a multitude of part numbers, and so we often hear. And I just heard Steven spear speak a couple of weeks ago in Detroit, and he talked about learning organizations, and this stuff takes time to develop, and I often. So here’s I’m going to expose a pet peeve I have sorry when I hear leaders talk about we empower our people to make improvements. That is not enough. They need skill to be able to do that, and they need time to be able to do that. And you can’t squeeze this stuff in in a 10 minute break. It’s got to become part of my day that when I do the work, I improve the work, and I’m constantly in and so Steven spear’s latest book, which I haven’t read yet, but I just picked up wiring the winning organization, slowification, simplification and amplification, meaning You need to put time in people’s day, slow ification. To solve complex problems, you need to simplify the process so you can see the pro the problems, and then amplify those problems when they occur. So I recognize there’s a problem we Patrick and and Andy. I’m sure you’ve heard the the story out of Toyota, if everything is green there, if you don’t have a problem, that’s a problem, right? And that’s what he was taught in my interpretation of what he was talking about, and and the improvement kata coaching, kata just gives you the mechanisms to to actually do what Steven spear is talking about in his latest book.

 

Andy Olrich  44:54

Yeah, we had a sign up in one of the plants I used to work in there where we’d have our daily stand ups. And I. And tiered meetings, and it was red is good. And it was, yeah, we definitely, we would, really, we’d look hard at those reds, obviously, but we’d look even harder at the ones that stayed green for more than 30 to 60 days, in some cases, because, yeah, we’re not, either we’re not stretching, or maybe that’s not the right because some other things out there doesn’t, doesn’t line up. So that’s exactly correct. Yeah, so true.

 

Patrick Adams  45:25

Bethan, you you not to just kind of wrap us up here, but you mentioned that needing the time, dedicating the time and learning the skills. So just to kind of bring us to a close here, you speaking of time and skills. You have a workshop coming up in Yeah, that, yeah. Maybe if people have want to dedicate the time and they want to learn the skills, this would be a great opportunity, right? Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that?

 

45:52

Oh, I’m so excited. This is probably my seventh, eighth. It’s an online workshop. I’m Lei, so I’m part of the lei faculty and Lean Enterprise Institute. In case you don’t know, Lei and I, I created online class. And so it’s eight days over two weeks. So four days in one week, four days the next, Tuesday through Friday is typical, and it’s two and a half hours a day, so it can be done in your work day, right? You don’t have to travel anywhere. It’s all remote, but it’s really fun. It’s a lot of interaction. The first week is a lot of introduction and mechanical stuff, but the next week is all about coaching and applying that coaching to the students real live situations. So I’ve had a group of psychiatrists come from a behavioral health organization in California to chemical processing folks to any you imagine it, they’ve come through the class, and we they’re able to share their their artifacts, build a storyboard, share it, get immediate coaching, and the participants get to see what coaching looks like and how we kind of develop a challenge and a target can, you know, grasp the current condition, set a target condition, and so on. And so there’s an lei Lean Enterprise Institute class coming up late October, early, actually, I think it’s actually in early November, mid November, sorry, the November 12 through November 19. And it’s a, it’s an online class. I i lead it so it’s not at your own pace, but every session is recorded, so if you miss a day, you can watch it that evening to prep for the next day. And I it’s just been such a fun course to help people kick off their kata practice, and that’s my goal. When I teach that class, I want to prep them so they can start their skill development practice, sure, and we talk about strategies on how to do that. I really encourage people to come to that class with, like two, two co workers. So you’ve got people who can step into a learner, a coach, a second coach, role and learn together after you know, and practice together after the class.

 

Patrick Adams  48:57

Perfect. So where would someone go to to to register for that

 

49:01

if they Lean Enterprise, Institute, you know, lei.com, and and the registration is, is open there. I also have some introductory videos where I talk about the class. I talk about the improvement kata coaching, kada and the artifacts and and so on. Perfect.

 

Patrick Adams  49:21

And then if anyone wants to reach out to you, if they have questions, where would they go to to connect with you? Beth, LinkedIn

 

49:28

is really great. I’m on, you know, Beth Carrington at kadamatters. And I also have a website, katamatters.com

 

Patrick Adams  49:42

nice. Perfect. Well, we’ll put those in the show notes, so if anyone wants to reach out to you, they can go right to the show notes and find those links and connect with you. Well. Beth, it’s been great to have you on as always. Love connecting with you and and you’re doing for the Lean community, specifically around. I’m kind of thinking, and just appreciate, appreciate your energy and appreciate your continued dedication to the Lean community. So thank you. All

 

50:09

right, Patrick, always great to see you. Scientific thinking, I believe, is the engine that drives lean and and you talk, you mentioned Larry cult earlier, you know he, he did a huge LinkedIn video series around lean mindset, and to me, that all translated into the scientific thinking mindset. So it’s a powerful subject to be able to delve into so great to see you. Patrick, good to see you again. Andy,

 

Andy Olrich  50:42

thanks. Beth, yeah. Really enjoyed it. Thank you very much. See you soon.