Shayne Daughenbaugh  00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. My name is Shayne. I am one of the three new hosts along with Andy and Catherine, who will be joining Patrick, in season three of this podcast, I guess some of the things about me that that, that that people have said, is I ask a lot of questions. And oftentimes, those questions are fairly simple questions, because I really want to know, the essentials to whatever the subject is or whatever we’re talking about. But I’ve also been accused of being how do they put it aggressively optimistic or aggressively positive? Either one of those? And I think both of those things, combining the question asking, as well as the optimism and the positivity. I think those are great things to have when when we’re working in continuous improvement, because continuous improvement is usually making something better. And in order for something to be made better, there has to be a dissatisfaction with where it’s at right now. And you have to you have to believe that that you can make it better. But you also have to start asking questions about how you’re going to make it better. So I am here in Nebraska. I grew up in Colorado, my history, I haven’t always been in continuous improvement. In fact, I’m probably the newcomer in regards to this podcast as the host of this podcast and the newcomer there a little bit over five years. My previous employment was the majority of my career was a pastor. And then I did a little bit of a stint as an operations manager and outside sales for a small company of electricians. And then when in stepping into continuous improvement, that’s when I joined state government. And I joined the state of Nebraska, and was trained in continuous improvement in Lean Six Sigma in particular. And I remember looking at the at the job description. I when I found it online, and when I applied for it thinking, I don’t really know what this is about. There’s a whole bunch of words, I don’t know. But hey, this looks like something really cool. I love helping people and I love you know, making things better. So why not. And when I finally got the interview, I’m gonna let you know that I was cramming like college students on the day before finals, I got books out of the library, I was searching online for all kinds of lingo trying to understand, hey, what words do I need to say in this interview? What is Lean Six Sigma all about? This b m a i see thing? What’s up? What’s up with that. And so it was, it was a rush trying to trying to prepare for this probably I prepared the most for that interview that I have for anything else, any other interviews in my life. But I will say that my previous history, my previous work history, certainly added to the skills that I have for continuous improvement. I know that that one of the one of the core things that I pulled out of in, in skills that I pulled out of being a pastor was boiling things down to the essentials, you know, whether it be a certain subject or a topic, what are the essential points that people need to know about that? What are the essential things that are the most important to this subject or topic? And that is super important, I believe in continuous improvement as well. Because there’s so much whether it be data, whether it be process steps, whatever it whatever it is, what are the what are the essentials that we need this process to have. But also with that, when I was ops manager and outside sales was certainly that was all about customer service. It was understanding what the customer needed, whether they told you or not, but understanding what they needed, and how to meet those needs. And, and doing it in a way that they felt like almost like they were the most important person in the room. And then in working with state government. It was certainly one of the things that I gleaned from that that I’m taking into Mike, my own consulting work is breaking down the silos. I’ve worked in big giant agencies, for the state that that had all of these different divisions. But oftentimes these divisions even though they’re working on the same thing, ultimately serving the citizens here of Nebraska, they may not have understood the work that each of these different divisions or departments did. And so it was In a great thing, once I learned how to help break down those silos, how to connect the people in those different divisions and silos, and help them see the bigger picture and where they fit in that. So all of these things kind of have have built into who I am as a continuous improvement practitioner. But there were certain things from this and after, after this, what we ended up with was a very distinct process, where we knew all the steps going along the way, we were able to break down the process into four specific areas of how we were going to do this. And we involve all of these other people, this was not done in a silo, like I was mentioning before, but there were, I guess, you could say, three, three main takeaways, for me, for this working really well, or for things that I learned. And the first thing was leadership support, we needed the leadership support, to be able to do this. And the director of this agency, the directors of this agency, gave full support so that we had the resources that we wanted, so they knew, hey, we’re gonna be pulling people all over the place. And they say, they’re really busy. Can you put a little bug in their ear and tell them how important this is to you, so that we can get on their calendars and have them come in to this meeting. That was super important and very helpful. But it also gave us leadership support also give us perspective, in in seeing things from a higher level, like we were way in the weeds of how we were doing things. And when we brought leadership in after we mapped everything out, they knew what we were doing, they had been supporting us all along the way. We brought them in and had an executive report out, after we met with all the subject matter experts that had it as close as we were going to be able to have, you know, in the time that we had, they gave us a dim perspective, they let us know some of the political ramifications of certain things, or they let us know of things that were coming down from on high, you know that we’re going to be impacting how we would do certain things. But they also not only that, but they also got up and they engaged with a process. And that was that was amazing and super important, as well, to see them engage with the process and say, Hey, what about this and this, and they weren’t just there to critique what we were doing. But they were really there to be a part of what we were doing. In that the thing that I remember the most, because of how we did things, because we had, you know certain things in place. With this methodology, it’s really important that that you have a charter that you understand what the scope is that you that you’re able to collect some data, at least to understand what’s going on, and that you have a particular way of doing things, that is a logical progression, even if it’s iterative. But what what that gave the leadership was trust in the team. And so even though we are setting something up that we’ve never done before the leadership still, after we were done, and were able to show them, they trusted in the team that this process was going to work. And that was incredibly helpful and affirming to all the hard work that was done by everyone. And even when we were bringing in the subject matter experts, and we were kind of, you know, method and other people’s putting so to speak. They were incredibly helpful with with that no, no one really stood offensive Hey, no, that’s mine, leave it alone. Everyone worked together. And all of that gave us that trust, that what we’re doing was important. That was that was adequate. And And hey, you know, this is the way you say it’s gonna work. Let’s do it. We believe in you. I was super important to in affirming to the, to the people that were that were involved. And I really appreciated the leadership that they did that. So that was the first thing was leadership support, that really helped out this case. And the other thing that I learned is making it visual. And this was something I already knew. But it’s it strikes me every time I do a Kaizen or a process map or anything in continuous improvement, when we can make it visual, it makes it real. Not only that, but it makes us it gives us opportunity to better critique the process that we have to better critique the steps that we have to ask questions and go, Hey, why don’t we do it this way? I know we’ve done it this way for so long. Or maybe we haven’t done it this way at all. But why would we do that? And is is that the best way to do it. If you’re not looking at it visually if you’re if you’re not putting it out there. There’s so many opportunities that you’re likely to miss. Because you didn’t make it visual that may be ugly. That may be all over the place and there were sticky notes that were falling off. We moved them so many times. They didn’t even stick anymore. We started taping things on but just doing that we like I said we had a room full of paper. All the walls were full of paper and scribbles and writings And we had flip charts that were just going everywhere. But doing all of that making it visual gave, gave everyone a handle to be able to grab on to. And to tackle this, this brand new thing that no one knew how this was going to work. So that was the second thing, making it visual. So the first thing that I really appreciated and learned was the leadership support the importance of that. The second thing was making it visual, and how great that was. And then the third thing that I’ve already mentioned, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna bring it up again, bring it to the surface here is involving stakeholders, having an open discussion with all the people that were involved. Like I said, each of those swimlanes that we had on that process map represented a different division or a different responsibility. And we didn’t just assume that we knew everything there was about that we didn’t just assume that because leadership gave us support, that we could just tell these people what to do and how to do it. We had an open discussion, we involve all these people, continuous improvement needs to needs to have everyone involved that it makes sense, upstream and downstream, and those that are the subject matter experts I met that’s very important for for the longevity and the sustainability of any improvements that we make. So involving the stakeholders, was the other thing that I really appreciated about this process. In the end, like I said, it was, it was super fun. For me, I loved facilitating it, I knew nothing about it, other than a little bit that it told me, but I really knew nothing about anything in this process. But my job really wasn’t to tell people what to do, it was simply to ask questions, and to give them the tools to be able to do that, whether whether that be would be in impact effort matrix, to figure out of all these solutions that we have, which one is going to give us the best bang for our buck. in state government, and I’m sure in many other organizations, you have limited resources. And the reality is not all problems need to be solved. Because we only have so much time and money and people to be able to solve them. So what are the things we can solve that are going to give us, you know, the best result for for the money and resources that we’re putting in? So, you know, that was that was amazing how things turned out in I really, I really had a great time doing it. In fact, I didn’t even like I said, I mean, I wasn’t there to to know everything about the process. In fact, this was one of the few cases where I probably spoke the least, you know, once once I was able to get the team thinking and be able to express some of the the continuous improvement principles, you know, talking about waste and rework, and Poka Yoke and making sure that we mistake proof this and involving the other people, the basic principles of making changes for the better, which is what Kaizen means. Once Once I was able to, to express that the team and they really, they were really able to grasp it and and take that they pretty much ran the meeting themselves. And they would look to me every now and then and say, hey, does this make sense? You know, what would you say about this? You know, and, and I was able to give my little input. But to be honest, the team is really the one that made this, I felt like, you know, I had the easy gig of just sitting and watching the magic happen is all of these people work together and made something out of nothing. And that was super fun to see. So that’s just a little bit about me. Again, my name is Shane, and I am super excited to be able to be on this journey with you as season three of these podcasts. I’m sure we will talk about a lot of things, possibly some of the things we talked about that I talked about here today. But I’m super excited about what this next season has for us. And I look forward to connecting with you. If you if you’re on LinkedIn, I’d love to connect with you, Shane dauphinois is my name and my last name starts with da u g h. So there probably won’t be a lot of names. It’s a long name, but the problem is not going to be a lot of them out there. SHA yne is my first name. Thanks for your time, and I look forward to engaging with you later. Have a great day.

Patrick Adams  14:23

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 tape, on the floors, you’d see value stream maps on the walls, you’d see similar KPIs like safety, cost, quality, delivery, you know, maybe culture 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 enjoy 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 appear 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 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 that 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 flavor 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 happened 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, they’d 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 spotted 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 or 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 happening and I can go to a site in Poland. And I could see another thing happening. And both in both 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 impact 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 layer 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. 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 our 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? I wouldn’t 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, Chuck, 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 out and checking out new me. But John said, lead management is very much about asking the right questions and trying things or encouraging others to try things. Lead 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, you know, 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, 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 me doing any work to the inputs upfront. Right. So what 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 to learn 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 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. And I’m not sure what the results of that poll were yet at this point. But I want to share with you, or 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 if we as leaders want to change the 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 McKinsey did a really great study, and 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 for 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 your 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 add work is being done. Maybe today, you’re going to block time every morning to go out and attend a huddle. You know, at 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.