Shayne Daughenbaugh  00:04

And I think it’s so much more beneficial to focus on that reframe, because if we continue to stay in the same mindset that doing the same things that we’ve that we’ve always done, we can get passed up by how things change. You could

Catherine McDonald  00:18

look at that as a failure, because it didn’t work and it stopped. But if we reframe failure and to be able to say, well, that’s okay if it didn’t work, but let’s talk back and let’s figure out how to do it again. Let’s keep going. You know, it’s this inspirational piece when you go, let’s keep but we can do this. You music. Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Catherine McDonald and I’m joined here today by my brilliant co host, Shane, easy,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  01:01

easy, easy. On the on the accolades, the brilliant.

Catherine McDonald  01:08

There’s no other word for you. How are you today? You know what I’m doing,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  01:11

all right. I’m doing all right. I can’t complain. I also don’t have a lot of reasons to raise up my hand and say woohoo. But I do love the journey that I’m on so good

Catherine McDonald  01:24

stuff. And isn’t that a normal day for most of us? What? What?

Shayne Daughenbaugh  01:27

Yes, let’s say that. Let’s say even in the podcast land, we still have normal days. There are some days that are better than others, and some days that we’re just here to, just try to figure our stuff out, learn something and improve upon it for the next

Catherine McDonald  01:41

day, that that is such a great way to think. I say that

Shayne Daughenbaugh  01:45

now, what am I saying inside? We won’t, we won’t talk about that. But what comes out, what comes out right now is this is what I want to believe in. So I’m going to continue to tell myself that as a I don’t know it’s active rebellion against, you know, a negative way of thinking, a way that that that is just stagnant, that’s, that’s, that’s what it is. Yes, I

Catherine McDonald  02:07

get you. I totally get you, and it’s very honest and open. So thank you for that, for being so honest and open. And today we are going to talk about failures. And for anybody who’s listening, you may have heard our last episode, which was part one of the three part series. So today is actually part two in a series where we’re talking about failures and failures in the workplace, overcoming failures, rethinking, reframing failures. That’s what this three part series is all about. So if you were listening to our our last episode, it was myself and Patrick and I know Shane, you weren’t there, but um, just to give our listeners a little bit of insights into in a little bit of a summary of what we covered, because you might want to go back and listen to that if you haven’t already, or you might need a reminder of what we talked about. So myself and Patrick talked a little bit about reframing failure. So what actually is failure, and is failure really a bad thing? Because a lot of people seem to think it is. There’s a very negative connotation around the word failure, and it’s something that a lot of people and organizations try to avoid. Actively try to avoid.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  03:20

I actively tried to

Catherine McDonald  03:24

Yes, we all do. We do because we think of it as negative, and oftentimes it feels negative, therefore it is negative to us, right? So Patrick and I talked a little bit about that, and you can go back and listen to that conversation. And Patrick also mentioned some of the really famous people out there, like Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb, Sarah Blakely, who invented Spanx, James Dyson, who invented, obviously, Dyson and all these people talk about all the failures and challenges that they’ve come up against in order to get to the success that they have today. So we know from listening to and he met, he mentioned multiple people, we know that extreme challenges and failures are definitely part of growing and learning and success. We know this, so our conversation today, I suppose, is just going to build on what myself and Patrick talked about, and myself and Patrick shared, Shane, you weren’t in there, but we shared a few personal stories around our experiences of coming up against challenges, sometimes failures, sometimes near failures. Patrick talked about his days as a young manager, and what you know he could have done differently or should have done differently. I did the same. I talked about a personal experience where I’ve overcome a real fear and a real challenge in terms of public speaking, not overcome it. Actually, I’ve never overcome it, but I’ve gotten a bit better to the point you have it, you have it like no longer controlled by it. Yes, that’s it, right? And that was a real challenge, right? But it made me stronger, and everything I had to go through to get to that point was awful. But I’m so glad I got through it and so well, yeah, you know, sometimes it feels awful it feels and that’s part of how we get through and manage and look at failures, is accepting that the feeling isn’t good and but trying to process that feeling, to understand the thoughts behind it, to get to the learning and understand that this is not just a negative emotion. It’s part of learning and trying to change our mindsets to think that way. Um, well, that’s that’s the way I look at it anyway. Um, Shane, you know, would you be in agreement in terms of the whole argument for reframing failure and is it something that even on a challenge perspective or near failure perspective? Is it something that you’ve ever come up against, and what was your experience of maybe trying to get through it? No. Catherine, I have never come up against failure.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  05:59

I don’t, I don’t need to reframe it, because it’s it’s just not there, and I’m completely lying right now.

Catherine McDonald  06:06

I need a different I need a different co host. Come in here. No someone

Shayne Daughenbaugh  06:09

else really understands failure, because I don’t. It’s not part of I just reject that. I really love that idea of failure being reframed. And because, if the the the typical way, at least the way I think, and because this is how I think, and I’m, I’m in my own head, I assume that you also think the same thing. But I think a failure is a bad thing. I think of failure as, you know, there’s, there’s so much negativity to it, and man, that that word is just so powerful. I can’t even come up with another word to a synonym of failure, because it’s just like it is the epitome. It is the end all be. All of you’re horrible, and you suck, and there’s so much that can just spin through that that I really love the idea of, let’s reframe what failure means and understand, I think we also need to understand Catherine that, you know, there are different. There’s a spectrum of failure. I could completely fail, you know, God forbid I completely fail my relationship with my wife, and do some things to compromise that that’s a different failure than I had this project at work. And, you know, I wasn’t able to to meet whatever the goals are. You know, I failed at meeting those goals, different consequences and whatnot, but in the sense of, certainly in the sense of work, in the sense of, and I like to, I liked how you were talking about overcoming your challenges. You know, in that, in in my head, where I went with that is the idea of growth, yeah, you know, because those, it’s the challenges that that make us, that make us grow. You know, that in and without those, maybe we wouldn’t, you know, I’ve recently here in these last several years, had I challenged myself? I had a big, giant challenge that I wanted to walk 50 miles with 35 pounds on my back in less than 20 hours before I turned 50. So it was when I was 49 we’re not going to talk about how old I am right now. But that that challenge could have been a failure, because when I first started walking, that just even thinking what was possible, I was so limited. As soon as you know, I started with, hey, I can do this like it’s just walking, right? Anyone could just walk. I mean, yeah, it’s 50 miles, but I could just walk. And as soon as I started that first I remember the first couple of weeks, it took a huge reframe, because I was doing maybe four miles, maybe five miles, and thinking, holy cow, there is no way I’m going to be able to accomplish all the way there to 50. But reframing the whole conversation in my head about, hey, it’s, you know, it’s not about perfection now, but we’re striving for that perfection, you know. And I think we’ll, we’ll probably get into this later talk about Lean thinking. And what some of that Lean thinking is that is kind of a component of, you know, striving for perfection is a component of thinking differently and reframing this idea of failure and and I think it’s so much more beneficial to focus on that reframe and to see things, you know, for just to make it really kind of elementary, to see things as an experiment. You know, it’s a grand experiment. Let’s see what. What can happen if we do this? Yeah, what can happen if, if we do this, let’s try this. Let’s try this. Because if we continue to stay in in the same mindset that in doing the same things that we’ve that we’ve always done, we can get passed up by how things change, whether it be our customers. Is, you know, maybe we have a certain way that we’ve always marketed, and our customer base changes, and so that marketing, you know, that certain way we got to change that, or technology, you know, that was one of the huge things that we saw at the state, when I was working for the state, is dependence on archaic technology. Our systems and our processes were set up in such a way that they worked really well, you know, years back, but so much has changed that now, you know, we just had to just find ways to experiment and, you know, and try different things to catch up with whatever happens to be next or where we currently were, you know, in the current state of things,

Catherine McDonald  10:41

yes, and you know that your your word, their experiment, I think that’s that’s key, isn’t it? Because we had a LinkedIn live there lately. Shane, you and I and the other co hosts, Andy and Patrick, and we talked a lot about, I guess, uncertainty, that that’s coming our way in 2025 and but also opportunity, and all of the things like AI and technology that are out there that we are going to have to navigate and figure out how it’s going to help us, because we we have to use it because we don’t, we’re going to fall behind. But if we don’t experiment with it, we are never going to, I guess, use it or use it properly, because we’re only probably going to use a tiny little bit of it, and other will get passed out, because other people will figure out how to use it before us, and they will use it to get our customers to do the job faster, quicker, better, and we’ll fall behind. So this whole idea of experimenting without fear of failure, because there is going to be setbacks and challenges and things that don’t work, which could equate failure, you know, it just doesn’t work. So it’s, it’s going to be really, really important, this whole idea of reframing failure and thinking of it as a almost stepping stone, or part of improving and developing, isn’t it

Shayne Daughenbaugh  12:00

Yes, yes, and, and I love you know what you’re what you’re kind of like beneath the surface of what you’re talking about. I love this idea of of Lean focuses on the possibility rather than the risk, because there’s always going to be risk, right? And we can try to find ways to mitigate it, and, and, and that’s great, but that shouldn’t be risk. I don’t think is, is a healthy way to go about it, like if, if all we were doing was being afraid of everything. You know, whether it be, if I step outside, it looks kind of icy out there, I might slip and fall, bump my head, and no one’s gonna find me in my backyard, and I could die out there, like it could, it could get that extreme to where I just lock myself in and I wonder, you know, I think we in businesses and organizations that that same kind of thinking could also be dominant, rather than the thinking of, what are the possibilities? Yeah, but what if, let’s try to mitigate those, acknowledge those understand that this is an experiment, and with experiments, there’s bound to be things that don’t work. That’s okay. We accept that. But it’s that progress and that positive outlook that says, hey, we’re not there yet. There’s still, guess what? There’s still more. Instead of thinking negativity like, Hey, we’re not, you know, we’re never going to be perfect. Oh, but there’s still more. There’s we may never be but look at this space that we can grow and then and more space and more space and more space, and just having that, that positive attitude of being more excited about the potential than being hindered by and fearful of the risk.

Catherine McDonald  13:37

Yes, exactly, exactly. So well put no, totally agree and yet, right? So we know that, we know that this will help us if we take this approach, because there is a bigger picture thinking here short term setbacks and little things that don’t go right get in our way. But we have to go through those to understand. We have to close that door and open another one that might work right. So we understand that this is important. But at the same time, I am well aware that there are organizations and people out there who don’t support, I guess that whole approach to mistakes, right? Sure, I guess what we’re saying is, we’re not going out there every day and saying to people you know, make mistakes. Make as many as you want. Right? We are saying that if Mistakes happen, and we expect that some will, when you try something new, it’s really important. And this is what Lean does. It gives us spaces to come into together, to share you know what has happened. Let’s together, understand it. Let’s learn from it. So obviously, avoid blame. That’s a big part of Lean leadership, is curiosity and collaboration. Yeah. So I think still, you know, there are some people who don’t maybe get the difference in what we’re saying that. They think that, Oh, we’re encouraging mistakes. Help people. It’s okay to make the we’re not really saying that we’re. Saying, if it happens, let’s understand why. Let’s not judge and say it’s a bad thing. So don’t make them I think there’s a very important distinction there. Have you seen that? Have you seen that kind of attitude to mistakes and failures, where people go, Oh no, you can’t be you can’t be having failures.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  15:17

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just that whole risk aversion. We’re just so afraid of that failure that we’ll do anything to avoid it. And typically, what that means is we’ll just stand still like, we’ll just like, Shore everything up and make sure that we have everything you know here and not have to be exposed to the possibility of whatever risk might be out there in, you know, when you you were mentioning that Lean Thinking provides space for that. The other thing, in regards to those that are afraid that we’re just saying, hey, just willy nilly, just go out and just throw everything to the wind, you know, just try whatever it is and but that’s not really the way Lean is. Lean give space for that because it it also has a structure to it. So so we’re not just throwing everything when just trying anything and casting the old aside. We’re using a very specific structure and a really simple structure to re imagine what could be, and again, reframing into rather than risk, what are the possibilities and potentials? And I’d be interested, Catherine, let’s talk about that right now, because I know brand new year, we’re probably, I’m hoping and assuming, that we have new listeners. You know that that are to the to us to this space, when we say Lean thinking, what are some things that come to mind? Like, let’s, let’s try to in in a simple way, as simple as we can just define what it means by Lean thinking,

Catherine McDonald  16:51

yes, okay, well, there is a few elements to it. It’s not just one thing, right? We know that. But in my mind, I suppose the most important things to understand are, well, first of all, for me anyway, maybe people have different definitions, but for me, it’s, it’s involving people doing the work in understanding how work is currently done and on and hearing and taken on board and working with people to put their ideas for improvement into practice. And it’s a cycle of doing this, whereby we do this over and over again. And within that, we have the whole concept of respect for people. So involving people, listening to them, understanding that these are the people who know the job best, and they should be treated that way, and they are the rules. Should be improving the work. So for me, that’s, that’s the whole area of respect for people. Involve people and do it is all about improving over time, and it is about when we say improvement, we have to break that down into, I guess improvement means getting rid of things that are in the way unnecessary. Some people use the word waste, or we talked about the word noise before. Or to improve. What do we need to do? So this is, this is where we go through and use our tools to as we, you know, there’s hundreds of them out there to help us understand where are the problems and opportunities. And then we use the structure like P, D, C, A, Plan, Do, Check, Act, and we create those spaces to bring people doing the work together to put those plans in place, and so that people, then, um, can go back out and make the changes to their work, and they have the autonomy to do that, and then they come back and we reflect on that, and we it’s a cycle of doing that over and over again. To me, that’s what Lean is. It’s it’s not that was probably longer than you expected, but

Shayne Daughenbaugh  18:38

I wanted a bullet, bulleted list. I didn’t want all this application stuff.

Catherine McDonald  18:42

I have to explain that without, gosh, that’s a really hard thing to do. Like, I could just give you a one word, oh, sorry, a one sentence on what is lean, but I wouldn’t be doing it justice, because I agree with the linkages between the people, the process, the improvement, the value, and of course, the customer comes in there, but it’s the people that understand the customer, because they’re closest to the customer. So it’s not simple, but at the same time, you know, I guess it’s important for people to have that understanding in their own minds of what Lean is before you go out and do the work, right? Yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  19:14

and to have context to what we’re talking about, you know, and I appreciate there’s a couple things you mentioned that I’m going to, I’m going to grab on to, and then I’m going to actually share a story of this application. But, you know, my definition, if I were, and I think your definition was fantastic, it was spot on. I loved you. You actually brought it to life, you know, because what, what you could think about is, you know, Lean thinking has to do with, you know, the customer, what the customer values. It has to do with visualizing the, you know, the value stream, or how the work is done, that it goes from what the customer wants to how I’m going to provide it, you know, creating a smooth way of going about things and not. Doing things until it’s actually necessary. That’s, that’s the idea of pull, but also pursuing perfection, like those are, are very they’re very sterile. Can be very words, but you put it in, in this very fantastic way of of actually connecting it to the life of people. And there are two things that I loved you said. One, you mentioned customer and two, you mentioned empowerment. And so let me tell a story. When I was working for the state, there was a process that we were looking at, and I was, I was given a team, or I should say, a team was empowered to look at the work that they did and reimagine how it could be done. You know, it’s again, it’s again, it’s that possibility, like, let’s not worry about the risk right now, because we have things in place that can mitigate that risk. But what’s, what are the possibilities that we could change? You know, reimagine however this process is done. And to give context, this was a, it was a permitting process for this, for the Department of Transportation, where other utilities have to use the right of way to put the you know, the cable company or the telephone company, the power company may have to use the right of way to lay some lines or stuff like that. And there was a permitting process for this. And it was really the feedback we were getting from our customers, from those utilities, was, this is taking way too long. Why does this take too long? And and it was, it took about 19 days on average. But there were some times where for them to get a permit, it would go into 3060, 90 days for whatever reason there. There’s lots of reasons, not all on the D, o, t, but anyways, it was too we felt like it was too long of a process. So we had a group of people that were empowered to to change this and to reimagine how we could do this process. And I had them in the room for three days, and by day two we had, we had maybe a day and a half left, and we were coming up against some roadblocks that really made it difficult to for me to see that this was going to be success, you know, because I was, I was hoping that we would be able to chop this process down, remove some of the steps. And there was, like 125 different steps to this process again, 19 days. And I was hoping to get it, you know, at least in half for each of those things. But the thing we were running up against was the state statutes that that required us to keep some of these process or these steps in. You know, there’s just certain things that we couldn’t change and couldn’t do when the team was getting very I guess, I guess you could say kind of not frustrated was one, but they were also kind of feeling down about this, and I certainly didn’t want that, you know, in regard to this, to this experience for them. So what we did, we went back to that first, the first concept of Lean thinking, and what is the customer value. So we spent some time thinking about, what is the customer value like I we just the team just started talking about that. And in talking about that, we used that idea of what the customer valued to look at all of our steps, and some of them, again, we couldn’t change because of statute, but there was a big, huge chunk of steps in the middle that had to do with some kind of a deposit, getting some kind of a talk to make sure the utilities cleaned up their you know, whatever it was they were doing, the dirt was back in the hole, or whatever it was, but that deposit step, or that deposit section, could take a week or more to try to process, to try to give it, then on the back end, to try to give that money back. Did the customer value that? Do they see this as valuable in the team said, Well, probably not. No, like it wasn’t anything that they valued. So coming at it from the customer’s perspective of this process, this is non valuable to the customer. Okay, so let’s talk about it for us internally. Do we need this? Well, no, we just have it as as a way to mitigate risk. And so then we asked, well, how often have you had to use this? Have you had to keep this deposit? And I think it was in, like, the last 10 years, it was twice. And so we’re like, so why are we doing this? Well, at one point it made sense, but things, times have changed. You know, however, however they it was different now. So these people, empowered with the idea of what is valuable to the customer, decided, hey, what if we tried to take this out, and what if we reimagine this process without this section of it, and what we’re able to and what we finally able to do after even piloting it again, trying to mitigate, let’s try. Let’s try something new. And if we fail, fantastic. We’ll do it in a way that was safe to fail, or, I should say, to experiment. Let’s change that word, to experiment. The team. Now the team is super alive, because now they’re very excited about, oh. Hand, because this is a huge pain point for us to have to go through to collect it, to deposit it. We had an account that just had deposits in it that was over a million dollars that was just sitting there that we needed to just give back anyways. And that’s if you’re in any kind of accounting, or, you know, the the accounts receivable or whatnot. The controller of an organization, you know, like giving money back is it’s easy to collect. Giving money back is a whole nother thing, yeah, but, but doing this in experiment, this experiment, we were able to cut the time down from 19 days to two days. We were able to process this permit. You would give it in on Wednesday. We’d get it back to you before the end of Thursday. I mean, it was amazing, but again, I say I share this story to highlight what you were talking about. In regards to what is lean thinking. Lean Thinking is empowerment. Lean Thinking is putting the customer first. Lean Thinking is understanding that there are things we can change. Let’s see what it is. Let’s experiment. Let’s reframe and reimagine. Yeah, I have a lot of breeze in my mind. So

Catherine McDonald  26:08

much of what you said there in terms of its people coming together, who understand what the customer wants, what the process is. So if we try one thing as a group, and it doesn’t work, instead, you know, we are together. We can, we can resolve this. We can keep working on it. It’s that. It’s that kind of team motivation I get as well that’s part of Lean thinking and a lean approach whereby it’s not just it’s this shared idea of shared responsibility. It’s not just me. I make a mistake. That’s my problem. It’s this thing of, what are we gonna do? Let’s go out and try this. Let’s bring our experiences back to the group. And if one of us is saying something doesn’t work, right, let’s put our heads together and figure out how to resolve that. So it’s this whole idea of working together. And look what you guys did. I mean, it didn’t work the first time you came back. And which is the key, which is those check cycles you came back after you did something to check in to see, did it work, or would it work? Okay, no, then let’s go back and let’s go back to our actions and and revisit them, and think again and plan again and do again. And that, I think, is so key to lean I think I’m delighted that you expanded on my thinking, original thinking, because I do always start with the people and involving people, but the system you work in and the structures you use, and the way that you facilitate and collaborate, that is so crucial to lean, I guess, being a success, and being able to take into account failures and challenges and manage them. So that’s an I think it’s an excellent example, and it’s, I just think so many of us out there, it happens to that kind of thing happens, but often we don’t do what you guys did. We don’t come back to the drawing board and look for a different way. We just stop

Shayne Daughenbaugh  27:56

and say, Oh, I guess, I guess, I guess we can’t change it. And maybe there’s some things that you can’t but I will also say that lean isn’t about solving every problem, because there are some problems that aren’t worth solving, like it’s just going to take either too much resources, too much time, or the spending the time on it for the results you’re going to get isn’t worth it. There’s probably better things that we could try to resolve and try to reimagine, you know, I think you know, one of the things that comes to mind, you know, in regards to our listening audience, you know, is okay, how do you how do you set this up? How do you reframe failure to experiments and immediately, the the buzzword, but also it’s super powerful, is psychological safety, making it okay like that. You just have to be okay with Hey, this, this could just fall flat on its face like and that’s and that’s okay. Because the second thing that, if you know, if we’re talking to leaders, or those that are, you know, work with, with teams, creating that, that psychological space, but also some kind of a structure, you know, you’ve, you we’ve mentioned it several times, you know, and that could be in the tools that you use. It could be in just, you know, some one of the structures for that experience that I just talked about with the permitting, we had a pilot that was, that was a structure, those, those were boundaries that the pilot basically means. We tried a small experiment. Okay, here’s a new way of doing things, and we specifically chose who’s going to do it. We didn’t cast it out to the whole agency, you know, everybody. We chose a small group, we chose a time frame, we gave them what they needed. So that was the structure. It wasn’t just, hey, go figure out how to do this differently. You know, the team empowered, coming together said, Okay, let’s do it this way. Okay, we gave that. We created kind of that SOP, you know, that standard operating procedure, hey, try it. This way for this long, you know, to get this many through to see and let’s, let’s track it. Let’s make sure that it does, in fact, improve, and not make it worse. Because if we don’t have metrics, then you know, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. But that was, that was the structure to it. So, so the two things that I think of, and maybe you have some others for in regards to leadership and teams. You know, how they can work this in regards to lean thinking, whatnot, psychological safety and a systemized problem solving, you know, some kind of a structure for solving your problems. What else would you add to that?

Patrick Adams  30:37

Hello, everyone. I am sorry to interrupt this episode of the lean solutions podcast, but I wanted to take a moment to invite you to pick up a copy of my Shingo award winning book, avoiding the continuous appearance trap. In the book, I contrast the cultures of two companies I work for, and though each started with similar lean models, one was mechanistic and only gave the appearance of lean, while the other developed a true culture of continuous improvement. The contrast provides a vivid example of the difference between fake lean and true lean. You can find the book on Amazon simply search by name or the title of the book. You aren’t a reader. No worries, the audio book is also available on Audible. Now back to the show. Okay,

Catherine McDonald  31:19

I do agree on psychological safety. Well, so much of what you talked about was about leadership, setting the scene, telling people it’s okay, expecting the failures and challenges, all of that I totally agree with, I guess, anything else I could add to that, what I was thinking when you were talking was about what I often hear from leaders in organizations who are trying to be lean and do things like, like very lean practices, like huddles or GEMBA walks, right and often, often when I meet them, and I bring up the concept, these people I work With wouldn’t be new to lean they would have some sort of lean training or background, but often, when I say to them, oh, so Okay, where are we with huddles? Have you tried huddles? And so much of the time, I’ll get the answer, Yeah, we tried those, but you know that they didn’t really work, or demo walk, yeah, you know, we tried them, but no, we don’t do them anymore, right? So in my mind, okay, it’s sort of, you could look at that as a failure, because it didn’t work and it stopped, right? So in my mind, I guess that’s what they felt it was, was a failure, right? So, but if we reframe failure, and you know, this tells me that leaders, especially who are working with people to drive this lean methodology and lean approach, they really need to understand failure. They really need to understand that failure doesn’t mean we tried it and and stopped. You know what doesn’t that’s not what we do when we come up against something that doesn’t work. What we do is we reflect on why it didn’t work, and we look to say, Well, what tweaks or adaptations can we make and try it again? Because we know that the hood was would be a great thing to have. We can understand the benefits of them. They just didn’t work for us. But that’s the part for me that’s missing. It’s this, I guess, continuous approach to development, which I feel is really, really important. So as well as the making people feel safe enough to speak up and understand and define the problems and failures, as well as putting a structure in place, the plan to do the check the act, it’s also about motivating people from the external I suppose to be able to say, well, that’s okay. It didn’t work, but let’s let’s track back, and let’s figure out how to do it again. Let’s keep going. You know, it’s this inspirational piece where you go, let’s keep go. We can do this. And I know, I know we mentioned Ryan Tierney a lot, but I think when you listen to him speak, he does that so well. He explains that so well. He was on the podcast a few episodes ago, and he he does that so he’s able to say, Okay, right? That’s where we’re at. Let’s, let’s see what we need to do to make it work. It’s okay if it doesn’t work now. And I think it’s this kind of optimism, maybe, is that what I’m

Shayne Daughenbaugh  34:21

getting to Yeah, yeah. Optimism works. Yeah. It’s this

Catherine McDonald  34:25

sense of, we can do it. You know, if we want it badly enough, and we want something to work and we want to find a better way, we will find a better way. So it’s attitude, it’s optimism, beyond telling people, you know, it’s okay. And beyond putting in structure, it’s what you bring as yourself to the table, how you present yourself to people, and what you say to keep their spirits up. And I think that’s actually an important part of managing challenges in my experience. But also, yeah, my beliefs,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  34:58

you know, I summer. That. Because I think of all those things you just mentioned, the optimism and all of that, the word that comes to mind is pursuit, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s that, that, Oh, man, we’re gonna, you know, there’s something there, not, not pursuit in the more like tiring sense, but pursuit in that excited sense, you know, like, Yeah, I mean, this is really cheesy and childish, because we’re going to talk about children, but remember playing tag as a kid, you know, really simple goal. We just chase after people and and, you know, it was, it was that excitement of, hey, there could be something else out there. And I think in the business we, in the business world and in organizations, to recapture that, and to have that, you know, reminder of what our Why is, who our customers, how we’re serving them, and to once again, get excited about reinventing whatever it is we’re doing so that we can continue to do that, so that we can continue to improve that pursuit of whatever the goal is, whatever perfection is. I love that idea and that positivity that that goes with that, and just that, that childhood glee of chasing after something. Yeah, you know, we’re not sure if you’re gonna get it or not, but you’re gonna chase after. It’s gonna be like wild wind blowing your hair. You just going after,

Catherine McDonald  36:27

actually, you know, Shane, like I do remember reading a study about what fun and so workplaces are not typically fun, right? Unless you work in I don’t know, park or something, and you’re, I don’t know, but it’s typically not. But for people, a group of people were surveyed about what they thought was fun in the workplace, and the most common answer was solving problems together, this whole idea of innovation, coming up with something new and ideas. So, you know, there is something in this. There is something in this about, I guess, the tone that you set as a leader with your people around all of this. So I guess you’re going from one end of the scale to, you know, solve that problem, you know, improve that don’t make mistakes while you’re doing it. Get it right up to, you know, okay, mistakes are probably part of the process. Let’s do our best if it happens, come on. And I’m like, let’s have a bit of fun while we’re doing this, and work together. And there’s, like you said earlier, there’s a bit of a scale there. And I guess neither, none of us are maybe at the bottom or the top. We all fall somewhere. So maybe the question is, what can we where are we on that scale? And could we do anything to move the scale maybe to where it needs to be. Maybe it doesn’t need to be at the very top, where we’re all, you know, positive about these things. And maybe people don’t really go for that in our organization or company, but maybe we could do it a little bit more positivity and a little bit more enthusiasm and a little bit more, you know, support around when mistakes happen. So it’s just about sliding the scale a little bit to understand if that would have a positive impact on the company, and I think it would if we all did that exercise. You know,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  38:07

you know, I don’t have data for this, and I could be just, I am just talking off the top of my head, but I wonder if our management style that we’ve continued to hold on to. And I’m speaking in generalities, not everyone does this, but the management style seems to be almost like the industrial management style, where we’re just working with machines and we’re just producing widgets and just pull the handle and push it along, rather than understanding, hey, my business is actually made of people, you know, in all of the and so what is it that, what is it that’s going to excite my people? What is it’s going to inspire my people? You know, because these are human beings, just like I am. What excites me, what inspires me? You know, maybe there’s something similar that I can do with my team in that empowerment, that getting involved, that giving agency and ownership to be able to make the changes, you know, that’s that’s really, as you mentioned before, those that is so foundational to what Lean Thinking is just that, you know, that that little experiment put on your lab coat, get your beakers and let’s just kind of, you know, do some things and try, try some, try some kind of things. Come up with a hypothesis. I think if we do this, this is going to happen. Okay, let’s see

Catherine McDonald  39:29

it. Well, we know, like, lean is science. It is supposed to be scientific thinking. We just don’t practice that a lot, a lot, you know. Um, so, yeah, that scientific part, I think, is the key to managing failures or challenges, isn’t it, really, it does. Yeah, have to come back to that, like it’s because

Shayne Daughenbaugh  39:47

science, science doesn’t look at failure as a negative thing, right? Science looks at failure as okay, we tried this, what’s next, yeah, and that’s kind of what failure is, is what’s next?

Catherine McDonald  39:59

What’s next? Yeah. Should be, yeah, so maybe that’s, it’s that little step that’s missing in a lot of organizations and and, yeah, I think there’s, there’s a lot of food for thought in that chain, and I hope there’s some people listening in who are looking at their own position, whether it’s a leader or part of a team, and considering, how do we view failures? You know, do we think of failure as a bad thing? Do we do we beat down on it? Do we try to avoid it? How do we talk about it? I know these are really important questions. I really hope people are asking themselves, because, as we said, with the incoming, you know, the next year, couple of years, we’re gonna have to get used to the fact that there will be more setbacks, challenges, there is more uncharted territory. Yes, exactly. So I really hope that people are considering this another

Shayne Daughenbaugh  40:54

way as and we can wrap up here, because I don’t need to ramble. But as you were talking about reframing failure. It made me think of something I heard a couple months back in regard to the daily huddles, which, if those of you that don’t know, daily huddle is basically a time where the team can come together to kind of share information, express any kind of concerns, and make a plan for how we can continue to make things better. But a daily huddle sometimes has a board on it, and there’s often a, you know, a color scheme of green, we met our goal. Yellow, we don’t have enough information. Or red, we didn’t meet our goal. And instead of thinking of red, what I heard from this person I was listening to, instead of thinking of red as a failure, didn’t meet our goal. Red means, hey, focus on here. Here’s some attention this. It’s blinking red for our to get our attention not to say, you loser, I can’t believe you did this. You’re supposed to avoid this. It’s hey, here’s Focus over here. Pick Me. Pick me, pick me, because here is an opportunity to improve.

Catherine McDonald  41:56

Yes, yeah. Great example, yeah, yeah. And it’s all it is all about our approach to it, isn’t it? It is. It’s our approach to it makes the world of difference to the people working in the organization around us.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  42:07

And I think that’s that’s huge, and it’s something that I know we try to communicate through the podcast, and hopefully you, the listening and watching audience, have picked up on this. Is it lean? Is a practice. It’s a mindset. It’s, it’s not, it has tools, but that’s not lean. Tools don’t make the lean. Lean is the mindset. Lean is the practice of continuing. You know, your PDCA that you talked about earlier, Catherine, you know, it’s, it’s not just, well, we’ll just pull a book off the shelf and, oh, there’s this tool and this tool and this tool. Let’s see if we can use it. But you have to have that mindset first. Yeah,

Catherine McDonald  42:44

you do? You do? Yeah. So at the end of our last episode, Patrick said to me, so you know, any last words, Katherine and I was, you know, thinking for a second. I was saying, Oh, my God, you know what? I feel like I haven’t, haven’t. If we could use the word failure, or I feel like I haven’t experimented enough. Now I use the word failure, but now I use the word but now I use the word experiment, because I love your word. I feel like I haven’t experimented enough, because these people who are really successful, they’ve been through massive experiments, you know, and it didn’t always go their way. So the bigger the experiment, the bigger the risk, sometimes the more rewarding the end, as long as you keep experimenting. And so I was saying to Patrick, I feel like, Oh, my God, I just haven’t done enough now, because, like them, like, I just, I just need more, more failures, more experiments. And it makes me think that way, which is good, which is the way you need to think if you’re going to actually come out of, you know, growth, especially if you big goals, right? So, yeah, so what any kind of suppose last thoughts from yourself. Shane, like, how does this, all of this, impact how you go into the future as a lean practitioner, you know, how does it influence you? And I

Shayne Daughenbaugh  43:51

mean as a lean practitioner, that also means that I need to do, I need to do Lean, not just teach lean, not just help, help other companies and organizations, you know, do Lean activities and and the word that comes to mind, which it’s because of where we’re at in this time of year, is intentionality. You know, I need to be intentional. And for me, intentionality means I keep, you know, one eye on that goal, like, what’s that ultimate goal? And then adjust intentionally, not just going through the motions with my sometimes you just have to put your head down, but other times you have to look up and be reminded, oh, my intention is this okay? Let’s continue toward that. And that’s the experimentation and the practice and the grinding, you know, and sometimes it is, I say grinding, because really I go back to that, that 50 before 50, that’s real. That’s really what it was like. I had to keep that goal, that 50, I need to do 50 miles. And I will wrap up by saying this, it was, it was a grind, but I went from three to four miles. Hours to five miles to eight miles to I was doing 20 miles a day, just trying to get this down. And I ended up doing the 50 before 50 in 17 hours, just like I wanted to do, just like I planned to do, with the help of support staff and, you know, again, bringing people in. I mean, we have this scientific thinking. We use it all the time in our lives. Please, let’s start using it in our organizations and how we work with people as well.

Catherine McDonald  45:26

Definitely couldn’t agree more. Well, said Shane, and we did actually touch on that in the first episode around our passion and purpose and how important that is to drive us to get through setbacks. And we did touch on that so you could anybody listening. You could listen back to that as well. But Shane’s last point, I think, was, was very much in line with that type of point as well. So Shane, thank you very much. It’s a pleasure, as always. The time always flies. When we chat, you’re just your insights are amazing, your stories are amazing. And I will say goodbye, and also we’ll say goodbye to our listeners, and we’ll see you soon. Take care. All

Shayne Daughenbaugh  45:58

right. Thanks guys.