Patrick Adams  00:00

Hello, and welcome to the Lean solutions podcast. My guest today is Paul Dunlop. And Paul brings with him over 20 years of management and manufacturing experience in a broad range of industries. In his operational management and consultancy roles, Paul has led successfully in implementation and transformations using the principles of the Toyota Production System. And this is actually Paul’s second time back. He was with us back in season one. So I’m excited to have you back on the show. Paul, we have lots to talk about and catch up with Welcome back to the show.

 

Paul Dunlop  01:02

Thank you, Patrick. Appreciate you having me back. I think this is actually my third time on the show.

 

Patrick Adams  01:07

Oh, you’re right. This is your you were on twice in season one. That’s right. I forgot. Yeah. Good deal. Oh, I will I will actually link both of those episodes in the show notes. So if anyone wants to go back and hear those, those are definitely very valuable sessions from from the conversations that we had back in season one. But yeah, I’m excited to have you back as a as a veteran here. That’s good.

 

01:33

I thought thank you so much, Patrick, it’s always always a great conversation, always. Great questions and discussions. So looking forward to it.

 

Patrick Adams  01:41

Good deal? Well, I’ve been I obviously, you know, we talked about this in the in the last couple of episodes, but I follow you on out on social media and LinkedIn, as I’m sure many of our listeners do. And you always post great value, add content, whether it’s videos, or pictures, or or whatever it may be. And, you know, one of the things that I think I appreciate the most about your posts is the power of visual management, you know, you’re always showing off these great examples of you know, how your clients and you know, different organizations that you’re working with how they’re utilizing visual management to really maximize the impact that they can have from a continuous improvement perspective. So in your experience, let’s just let’s dive into visual management, let’s talk about the Zuni. In your experience, what do you think, is the greatest value that visual management adds to an organization?

 

02:38

I think it’s, it’s a key factor. I mean, if I’m, I guess, when I’m talking to my clients, and I really start to describe and express what continuous improvement is about, I sort of say it’s three things. It’s about the exposure and the visual exposure of waste, it’s about, obviously, the reduction in the elimination of the waist, and it’s about respect for people. So you know, 20 years boils down, down down to that. But if we can’t see the waist and see the frustrations and see the problems, then we can’t fix them, obviously. So I think that’s the key element. And if you’re looking at, I think, any lean tool or any effective lean tool, it’s going to have a visual component, or it’s, it’s going to be solely a visual tool. So I think that that’s the importance and for me, you know, the daily huddles, the daily management system, and tiered visual boards are really a an absolute foundational aspect and key aspect of driving that problem solving conversation and creating that visibility. So I think that’s, for me, the important thing, like I said, once we’ve made that visual, then it’s, it’s about bringing people together to then have a conversation around how the process is performing. So bringing that standards to life, if you will, and looking again, at how what what the expectations are around a processes performance, where it’s actually happening. And then, as I said, collectively, inclusively bringing people together to have the problem solving conversation, and away we go.

 

Patrick Adams  04:23

Perfect. And if someone was to now obviously, there’s there’s lots of different types of visual management or, or levels of visual management. But if you were to identify maybe a couple of key elements that you would find, you know, in in Visual Management, anything specific come to mind around what would be some important pieces that need to be in place in order for your visual management to be effective.

 

04:54

That it’s very simple, I think is really important, I think You tend to see a lot of very pretty sign written boards and all the rest of it, I see lots of boards that have, you know, a multitude of printed charts and things like that quite complicated information. And I guess one of the things and the key points is tailor it to the audience. So if it’s, if it’s a shop floor Visual Management Board, with all due respect, that needs to be kept very, very simple. Definitely people on a on a shop floor and on a production line aren’t used to interpreting complex data. So it always needs to be simple. And I’d say that at all levels anyway. But I think we need to have a very clear target to actual that needs to be very clear to read. The information must be meaningful, again, to the people looking at that information. A lot of the time, there’ll be things that people can’t control per se. They also need to understand what the metric is how the metrics being measured. The metrics, of course, need to be realistic, and all of those sorts of things. I’ll go to a lot of huddles where I know damn, well, the people looking at the information, have no idea what the information is that they’re looking at. And so how can we have a conversation around that? So I think for me and entered, it is actual actually visible. Sometimes it’s it can be hidden, it can be numbers, it can be words, whatever it needs to be really, really simple. You know, colors, lines, whatever it needs to be. So I think there’s some of the key points this, this is about engagement, this is about access. And again, this is about really engaging people in that problem solving conversation. For me, the purpose of daily management is again around that exposure. So yes, we’re exposing the perhaps the process deviation, we’re also exposing where the process is working. And then it’s about I guess, the next part of exposure is really getting people to connect, to be candid, and to open up and discuss what they’re seeing and feeling and hearing in their job. And that’s, that’s where that I think, really the goal is to be found in those conversations. So nice to have the good looking visual board. But if it’s not driving that conversation and that level of conversation, then it’s not it’s not it’s not working the way it should.

 

Patrick Adams  07:36

Right. Right. Yeah. Make that makes. That makes sense. And obviously, there’s, there’s a lot of things, you talked about both sides of like things that are that make it successful. And also, you know, some of the things that make it that could cause it to fail. You know, if you have Visual Management out there, I’ve had similar experiences, anything specifically come to my like, if you were to say like the top, maybe one or two things that if you do this, it definitely is not going to work? The you know, what, on the opposite side, like what would be those kinds of those failure modes where you would say, this is number one, this is number two, like don’t don’t do these two things, or make sure you do these two things, or it will definitely not, you know, it won’t be used as as it intended to be.

 

08:24

So it must be kept up to date. As again, as simple and as obvious as that sounds, that’s really important. And I guess we need to be consistent and disciplined around having those daily huddles or communication meetings. I think they’re, they’re the two key things. And I mean, I’m sort of riffing on this, this discipline thing a lot lately, but yeah. Because people, often as well, when, when, when we’re starting to introduce daily management and and you know, and love this story, but it is difficult. It takes a lot of perseverance and time to find the groove, if you will, for people to feel comfortable with the process and all of those sort of things. And I see people that will, oh, well, we, you know, we didn’t bother having a meeting today, we’ll have you know, on Friday sort of thing and it can’t work like that. We’ve got to have that daily cadence that that repetition that focus that practice. So I think they’re probably two of the simple and again, as obvious as that might sound that they’re really crucial.

 

Patrick Adams  09:35

Yeah, and I have people ask me, Well, you know, what happens when I you know, as the leader, or as the the person that that’s responsible for this particular board, and I’m running daily huddle is what happens when you know, I’m sick or what happens when I take vacation? You know, do we just stop the meetings until I come back? You know, again, that’s something I see a lot too and it’s like, no, you need to have You know, a backup, you need to have someone else that can step in. This is a, this is a non negotiable meeting, it needs to happen consistently at whatever day or time that you’ve put in place. And if you don’t show up, someone else should step right in and be able to leave that meeting. And then that’s also developing the next generation of leaders as well. You’re coaching someone else to to step up into that role, and maybe down the road. So but yeah, I love love that consistency is definitely key. And obviously, like, like I mentioned earlier, there’s lots of different types of visual management. And we’re talking specifically more down the road of daily management type of visual management systems. And in specifically, what I, you know, comes to mind for me are SQ CD board safety, safety, quality, cost delivery, sometimes you see morale listed as a another, you know, one of those metrics, but what can you explain maybe, to the listeners that maybe are not familiar with an SQ CD board, what that is or how it’s used when it comes to daily management?

 

11:10

Sure. And that’s a good question. So the SQ CD board is really, operationally typically, and it’s they the SQ CD is essentially the pillars of the business. I’ll often as you say, there might be a morale component, I usually tack a people bit onto the onto the start. So, you know, people safety, quality, cost delivery, it’s sort of, in some respects, the most important thing to the least important thing. So I sort of talked about it in that way. Then for me, you know that that’s often a tiered structure with tier one being a shop floor, tier two being, you know, middle management, tier three being executive and strategic. And essentially, we’re cascading the metrics up and down. So the tier one level, and that’s typically where I’m going to start with a client business, is that with those pillars, it’s really for me, I simply say, what, what does a good day look like? So if we’re going to visually represent what we’re trying to achieve as a, as a team, as a department as a function, whatever it might be? What what is that? What is that maybe that one key objective. So from a safety point of view, we want an incident or injury free day, from a quality point of view, that might be you know, under a particular defect rate, or, or whatever that might be. So we’re, we’re setting that clear, again, realistic target, and we’re visually representing our performance against that. So we can have, again, certainly, we’d like to have lead indicators in there just as much as as lag indicators. On a typical SQ CD board, I would like to say then, so you know, an hourly, daily focused, as well as, you know, maybe a week on week, month on month, a trend chart to see and as a link between the daily focus the daily problem solving conversations, and again, what effect that’s happening. That might then be typically you might have a threes as part of that. So the threes will then be coming out of the trends and patterns. So we’ll uncover underlying and chronic issues, reoccurring issues, and we’ll start that high level problem solving. So, you know, and that’s on a more mature board, let’s say, but very simply, we’ll have a simple daily target to actual. And really, the purpose of the board, like I said earlier, is to drive conversation has got to drive conversation. And then ultimately, it’s got to drive action through PDCA. So the real, I guess, the important part of the board is always that right hand side of the board, which is got got the issues and the follow up activity, there’s going to be a date, there’s going to be some responsibility there. And that’s really the marker. And at the end of the day, that’s the moniker of continuous improvement. How many? How many improvement ideas do we raise? How many do we action, and that’s what that’s what I really want to see happen out of that board, nice to have the conversation. But it’s got to drive action and experimentation. So then that’s just layered up, and it’s just really replicated at all levels just in a you know, in a different way.

 

Patrick Adams  14:36

Makes sense. And for an SQ CD board, you know, with things progressing like they have from a technology perspective. Would you recommend or do you prefer a physical board versus a digital board? Doesn’t matter which way you go, where you know, do you start with a physical then go to a digital again, does it matter? What do you think about that?

 

14:59

You So that’s a really good question. Because there’s obviously lots of conversation out there around digital, we see lots of digital implementations, I, I use both. So I use, you know, traditional board as well as work with technology and have digital boards. So it for me, it’s not a either or, it probably can and should be both. And where I’m using a digital solution or digital platform in my client businesses, there’s, that sits alongside a traditional visual board. So I think both play together in terms of you can be completely digital, and that’s fine, or you can be completely manual, and that’s fine. But I really do think that and we can talk about this, that there there is a large advantage in working towards a digital solution and incorporating digital, digital isn’t going to compromise the fundamentals of continuous improvement, I think it actually aids and elevates and accelerates your ability to, again, take take action and have those conversations, typically, and I think people just see a digital platform as just a display only. And a good digital platform will do much, much, much more than than just that it’s not just automating data collection, it’s not just a display. But really to answer the question. I think a hybrid of both is advantageous, and I say, huge benefits in my client businesses that are going down that track.

 

Patrick Adams  16:45

Yeah, yeah, I agree. It’s the same direction that I see many organizations going, I always recommend that they start out with a manual, just so that they understand, you know, what’s behind the charts, what’s behind the numbers, and, you know, putting pen to paper, there’s, there’s a, there’s something that happens there, you know, in our, in our minds, and when we’re doing that, so I always, you know, that’s always my recommendation. But But again, it’s, it’s not necessary for success. But it’s definitely, I see the benefits of that, because then you go to digital, and then you know, what’s behind the charge, you know, you know how to have conversations about things that you’re seeing that maybe aren’t looking like they should or, you know, something’s not working properly, whatever it may be. So just just something that I see what, what about steps, if someone’s listening in and they, they want to start from scratch, like they, they have no idea. This is the first time they’re hearing about sq CD boards, and they, they’d like to implement some type of visual management that will help them on their day to day journey. What would be, you know, some steps that they might take to develop a good SQ CD board,

 

17:57

find a piece of wall or a whiteboard and stick something up. I mean, ultimately, I’ve seen so many visual boards start with literally a piece of a4 paper, you know, sticky, sticky taped to the wall. So I’m sure every business is measuring something, you know, and data is rarely the issue was just setting that data free and making it visual. So it is as simple as that. And, you know, typically, when you see the things that I’ve posted the examples I posted on LinkedIn, they are very often rough and ready, they are from, you know, the very beginning. And showing that process. And often it takes, you know, 1218 months of evolution for a board to settle and get to the right place. Again, it’s it’s trial and error, it’s PDCA. Through that process, finding what works, what doesn’t, one of the things that we need to look at, the metrics will change. So what you might be focused on today is going to be different in six months. So again, it can just be as simple as one one chart, one target. One thing that just gets people together, gives them a focal point and starts that problem solving conversation. So don’t I don’t want people to feel like it needs to be anything fancy or complicated. Just something really simple, something very visual that helps people to focus on what they’re trying to achieve, and allows them to have a conversation around improving their process or improving their job.

 

Patrick Adams  19:33

Yeah, I’ve seen organizations that, you know, find a really nice, good looking visual board, in a magazine or on a website, and, you know, they go and spend a lot of money to buy something and get it shipped to them, and then they throw it up. And then after a few weeks, they’re like, this isn’t the right layout, or this is we’re not measuring the right stuff, or, you know, so I completely 100% are in agreement with what you’re saying, start with a blank slate piece of paper and a pen. You know, we used to put up whiteboards that we’d find you know, around the office area, put them out, and throw up, you know, markers and write up what we think. And then have the owners come out and and scribble it out, write something else up there, tear it down, put something out. And we do that for weeks, until eventually, we’d come to an agreement on exactly what needed to be measured how it needed to be measured, how often would it be updated? How would we, how often would we need to update it and all those things would come through, you know, PDCA cycles, like every second, to get to a point, and then I’ll be honest with you, even after that, we would still make adjustments to it, you know, going forward. So it’s like, at what point do you actually make it permanent? That’s a That’s a good question. I don’t know.

 

22:18

And maybe you never do. Right? So, you know, it’s got to be the embodiment of what we’re what we’re practicing here. So yeah, no, I have exactly the same experience. And I and often as well, it’s sort of speaks to, you know, top down, you know, that the boss or the CIO department, or come in here, here’s your visual board, everybody. And, you know, it doesn’t it doesn’t work. And so yeah, I think we just have to be prepared to go through that process, as long as it takes to arrive at the point we need to.

 

Patrick Adams  22:52

Yeah, yeah, no, good point. And and I think the point that you made earlier, I think you said it a few times is the real goal is just to get the team together and get them talking about, you know, the work that’s happening about some some metrics and how you’re measuring success for your area, and, and then digging into some of those problems that are being identified when you’re not hitting, you know, the metrics that you need to be hitting. So So what would you say, you know, from a sustainment perspective, I mean, if we were to throw up a board, you know, we got a team meeting there and regular basis, maybe we’ve set up at tier one and tier two, how do we ensure that this stick, how do we ensure that there’s a long term commitment to this, any recommendations on that?

 

23:43

I guess it then starts to come down to standardization. So you’re talking about before? Well, we’ve, we’ve we’ve got it back deep, so it can’t just rely on a single person or a leader, we have to develop people. And again, that’s part of that coaching learner methodology that we have. So we certainly have to have that. And certainly, that that needs to be part of, you know, Leader Standard Work is that those those meetings happening and that, you know, particularly, you know, in the, in the initial period, that leaders have to have to drive that they have to make sure that those things are happening, they have to make sure people are accountable, turning up at eight o’clock in the morning and doing all of that sometimes it’s it’s that simple. I think after enough time, it does become habitual. And that people provided that it’s, you know, it is a good quality meeting that they’re getting benefit and value from and that there’s good quality outcomes and activity, then people are going to be attracted to that it’s going to, you know, just become part of what we do and a really valuable part of the days so, I think over time it that’s just where it goes. You don’t need to necessarily push it people Looking forward to that, and, and expecting that. But yeah, so I would say, again comes back to that consistency, it comes back to standardizing that process, and like you said, making that a non negotiable?

 

Patrick Adams  25:14

What you mentioned Leader Standard Work earlier, what what kind of involvement would you see from, you know, leaders at different levels in the organization? Exactly, you know, executive or C suite, mid level mid level managers, team leaders, I mean, what what, how would they set up their Leader Standard Work? Or what would their commitment or, you know, their involvement be with, you know, an SQ CD process or daily management in general?

 

25:43

I think everybody has to have some involvement at all levels. So certainly, again, it depends on the size of the business, and all of these sorts of things. But certainly, I encourage senior managers to attend tier one meetings at least once a week, you know, executives into the tier two and those sorts of things. So whatever, you know, works fortnightly or weekly, at least there’s a presence there. I think, you know, part of that is bringing, we want to bring everybody close together. And I think that that is really important. And the tiered, the tiered daily management system is really that the conduit that facilitates that, that flow of can, you know, we talked about the flow of information and materials through a process. This is the flow and the good quality flow of communication through our hierarchy and our functions, both vertically and horizontally. So that bring those people closer through that those daily communication meetings, because they’re going to, we can we can look at the metrics, we can look at the reports, but really getting it from from the horse’s mouth and seeing and feeling those conversations, I think, is absolutely critical. So definitely encouraging people to have a again, what that is for an individual, you know, I don’t know, but really prescribing something and regular contact into into those lower tier meetings. Perfect.

 

Patrick Adams  27:15

How do we how do we measure success here? What what is the success look like for an SQ CD board? For this type of process? How would you how would you make sure that you know that your SQ CD boards are working, or they’re giving you the value or the or you’re getting the results that you’re looking for from this?

 

27:36

I think a couple of things, I think, like I said before, is just the volume of output in terms of the the ideas, the problems and frustrations that are being escalated and the action through that. So that’s definitely the first thing, it’s probably looking at the and something I always will say in clients before there’s actual tangible and measurable change, I’ll hear the conversation begin to change, it’ll become more positive, it’ll become more constructive, people will begin to cooperate and, and be more open. So I’ll say that so I think the how you define that, but just the the tone of it and positivity around the conversation, I think is really important starts to become a cultural shift, I think we have to be realistic as well, that the daily management system, as good as it is, it’s still there’s people that still won’t engage in that there’ll be still people that are uncomfortable to speak up in front of the group or, or whatever. So there has to be other layers to that conversation too. And that’s often where I think less later Standard Work starts to come into play. Again, go to gamba. So part of as I say, because because what you’ll say sometimes is that the huddle will stop, and people will turn and walk off and then start talking. And they’ll be talking about the things that they should be talking about in the meeting. So there’s not been, you know, maybe hidden barriers or barriers that we haven’t uncovered yet, because you can’t just expect that we have the meeting and everything’s going to come out. So you know, I really encourage leaders to at least on the on their gimble walks, they’re they’re catching up intentionally with people, they’re having those one on one conversations, they’re building, you know, human relationships with people and connecting on that level. But they’re also then, you know, seeing people in the wild, they’re probably more likely then to be engaged in a meaningful conversation. It’s in real time, often while people are doing their jobs and they can start to open up again, around problems, frustrations, ideas, opportunities, and that that can be brought back into the daily management system. So I think there’s a few different ways of tackling it. It’s not it’s not perfect. It’s the It just, it just isn’t as good as good as it can be, there’s still going to have deficiencies and gaps, and we need to ensure that we’re covering all bases, again, that then we can talk about wider cultural issues and fear in the environment, that prevailing leadership style, all of those sorts of things, we have to be thinking about those ultimately, again, we want to get people to feel safe to open up into and engage meaningfully, because that’s that’s the only way we improve.

 

Patrick Adams  30:31

Sure, sure. It makes sense completely. When it comes to you mentioned, you know, problem solving, and obviously, the a three piece and we talked a little bit about that. Would you maybe walk us through, you know, like a huddle agenda or talk to me about because I think there’s different camps on this whether you, you know, do you do active problem solving during a huddle meeting? Is it something you do outside of that meeting? Is it you know, again, part of your daily standup or not? What do you feel on that?

 

31:10

It’s probably not going into a deep dive. So just in terms of an agenda, like I said, I think we’re just focused on those those key daily metrics. Again, daily, daily, huddles can often drift off to a half hour talk fest, and then it becomes very problematic. So we have to keep it very tight. We have to keep it on point on agenda. And, you know, other conversations that need to happen offline need to happen offline. I think it’s always a case of okay, let’s let’s review, you know, the last cycle or the last 24 hours, what was our plan? What did we actually achieve? What went well, what didn’t, we need to look at, at that plan for the current cycle? Are there any watch outs or potential problems, and it might be a little bit of a looking ahead to the next day or two, and be proactive in that space, again, raise any of the issues, ideas, opportunities that we need to, I think there’s an initial action, and then away we go, I don’t think it needs to go any more than that. Because yeah, we can, we can disappear down the rabbit hole, very quickly. There’s only only so much time and again, then we start to go down that path, I think we can lose a lot of value. Often we don’t have the facts, either. So then we get into that whole assumptions, jumping to conclusions, and all the rest of it. And that’s not getting us anywhere. So I think we need to be pointed, sometimes those action points are just going to be go get more information, get more, get more facts.

 

Patrick Adams  32:51

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I normally tell, you know, individuals that you know, if a problem is brought up or identified, you know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be discussed or solved at that point. But, you know, you can identify who the individuals are, and, you know, identify a time or when you’re going to follow up on that particular issue. Because you also probably have people that are standing in the huddle that maybe don’t have anything to do with that particular problem or issue that was brought up. So, you know, you don’t want to waste their time, either. But But you you mentioned, I think, three points specifically that that make up a good huddle agenda. You said, you know, what happened yesterday? Did we did we hit our plan? Did we not enter plan? How did we do? Right? And then you said, what are we doing today or tomorrow? Like, what’s the plan? Now? The going forward plan? probably talk about, you know, what, if we didn’t hit our plan yesterday, what are we going to do today to make sure we do hit our plan? And then I think I heard one other thing was, you know, just, or roadblocks are any, any issues, anything that we need to talk about or know about problems that might take us from meeting the goal, whatever it may be? I mean, that’s a simple agenda shouldn’t take that long, right? Makes sense? It

 

34:09

just, it keeps people focused and on track and think like said before, really also looking from a problem solving point of view is really what’s the next step? Yeah. That that’s it and we go away with that, that action. Again, if we’re just looking at last cycle current cycle, looking ahead. That gives us enough often as well, Patrick with tier one type meetings, we might book in the day, sometimes. Some businesses have two meetings. So they’ll have one in the morning, one in the afternoon as as a wrap up, so they’ll, they’ll, they’ll finish off and sometimes they’re actually really good quality meetings because the day is still fresh, you know, and we can have probably better quality conversations, and they’re setting themselves up again and being proactive looking looking ahead to the next shift or the next days. So, again, there’s no hard and fast rules, you can have one, you can have three, it doesn’t, whatever is going to work for you and your process and deliver value. Again, it can be a five minute conversation can really add so much. Again, focus value to die, just taking that little bit of time.

 

Patrick Adams  35:21

Yeah, you’d be surprised if I’m talking to our listeners here, because I know you know this, Paul, but you’d be surprised how many organizations that we go to. And you know, the, the number one issue is a breakdown or a lack of communication. And just that five minutes a day, just adds so much to that team in understanding, you know, how they’re doing, what the plan is, for the day, they’re given a voice and opportunity to be heard, respected. It’s just there’s so much value there. And, obviously, you know, very much something that both you and I promote with with many organizations, Paul, what’s been maybe some of the challenges that you’ve had, you know, in rolling out Sq, CD boards with some of your clients?

 

36:09

So, like we talked about before? Yeah, so the time thing is often an issue. The consistency thing is often an issue, a lack of engagement, you know, you a lot of businesses will struggle, it’s like pulling teeth, to get people to talk and engage that probably then starts to uncover other issues in the business deeper, deeper cultural or leadership type issues, I think they’re sort of typically the biggest, like I talked about before that perhaps sometimes the metrics, people go a bit crazy with that, it becomes too complicated or too visually overwhelming. Again, the visual board should be visual, it should be, again, we’re talking about reducing barriers to entry and allowing people to access information. And so we need to ensure that that is as simple and as easy as possible. So we can get the most out of that. So I think they’re probably some of the key things. Again, simply the consistency part. And the discipline around that, I think, is paramount. Because if you approach it in the right way, over a long enough period of time, and you be patient with it, and you learn as you’re going, then you will get the benefits from that.

 

Patrick Adams  37:35

Absolutely. I agree. Obviously, good discussion here, Paul, as we kind of wrap things up, I guess I want to ask you anything, anything at all that you would say kind of lat last advice that you might have for anyone listening in, if they’re, again, hearing about sq CD boards for the first time thinking about visual management, maybe early on their Lean journey. Any advice that you would give to listeners about, you know, first steps, or maybe what should they do next? What should be their next step coming out of this?

 

38:14

Probably not a lot more to add. But it’s really just to, you know, again, my first question is what does a good day look like? So, again, just really simply expressing those things, if it’s one, two or three things, and just just starting as soon as you can make make that time, like you said before, so many? Well, every certainly every organization that I walk into communication is by far and large, the biggest issue, communication and engagement with with their people. This is the tool that really opens that up. Like I said, it’s not it’s not a communication utopia, but it makes a huge difference. And it makes a huge difference when you do that every single day. That that is that is meaningful, and I think as well from a business or organizational commitment. That’s, that’s huge. To have the discipline around that. So again, don’t don’t overthink it. Don’t overcomplicate it, keep it simple. But do it, do it in the in the right way. In terms of using that as a vehicle or a mechanism to open up conversation, sometimes that conversation and particularly in the early days, it’s going to be a little bit unpleasant, it’s going to be a little bit confronting, because there’s going to be stuff that starts to come to the surface that perhaps as a leader, you don’t want to hear. But we need to uncover the truth of the matter. So maybe sometimes I think leaders or organizations avoid that because they kind of know what’s coming. So you’ve got to rip that band aid off and just just do it. There’s no I mean, you and I know but There’s just no other way. Yeah,

 

Patrick Adams  40:02

yeah. And you said this, but don’t, don’t be afraid. You know, don’t don’t feel like you have to have it perfect in the beginning, you know, just do it and then be willing to just adjust as you go learn, adjust, it doesn’t need to be perfect. Just just start with something, get it going, don’t give up, stay consistent. I mean, all those things are so important. As always, well, third time on the show you clearly appreciate you appreciate everything that you do for the Lean community, love having these conversations, it’s always good. I am a lifelong learner. And so the you know, these are great opportunities for me to keep my skills sharp and the learning from from you and obviously, continuing to follow you on social media. So thank you for all you do. If there is anything, anyone that wants to reach out to you, what’s the best place for them to contact you?

 

40:59

As always, it’s going to be on LinkedIn. So yeah, please reach out and connect lots of people do, I will and do respond and happy to engage and support and help. So yeah, please, please reach out that way. That’d be great.

 

Patrick Adams  41:16

Perfect. And along with your your past two episodes, we’ll we’ll make sure we put your your LinkedIn profile link in the show notes. So if anyone’s interested to get a hold of Paul, you can go right to the show notes and see those links there. And then again, Paul, we’ll have you back another time here down the road. We’ll we’ll come up with another really good topic to dive into and have have a chat about so again, thanks for being on the show. Appreciate your time and appreciate everything that you do for the Lean community.

 

Paul Dunlop  41:46

Patrick. Appreciate that. Thank you.