GA 060 | Practical Problem Solving: Part One with John Miller

You're listening to episode 60 with John Miller. Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey there.

This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and your week to listen to the show and for watching our videos over@gembaacademy.com now, today, I'm happy to welcome John Miller back to the show. Now, John, as many listeners likely know, is one of the original co founders of Gemba Academy. Now, John was one of my first Lean teachers and continues to help me realize how much I still have to learn about authentic lean thinking. Now, John was born and raised in Japan and first learned about the Toyota production system while translating for some of the first Japanese lean consultants. And while I am a little biased, since he's my friend and business partner, I stand firm in my belief that John is one of the most profound Lean thinkers alive today. Now, with this said, John and I focus most of our Gemba Academy energy on content development. And one of the original courses we first collaborated on was focused on practical problem solving. And since we do our best to practice what we preach, we've recently started to go back and refresh or improve some of our original courses. And the most recent course that get this refresh is practical problem solving. Now, one of the main reasons we refresh courses is to improve them. And as it turns out, we had discovered some opportunities for improvement in several PPS modules. As such, we're very excited to release the latest and greatest version of our practical problem solving course in the very near future. So, since John and I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about pps, we decided to create a series of podcasts where we explore each of the eight steps. Now, in this first episode, John and I tackle the first three steps, which, as John shares, may just be the most important steps of all. Now, we plan to cover the other steps in future episodes, so please stay tuned for that. And if you're not already a subscriber to this podcast, please visit GembaPodcast.com to learn how to easily subscribe and never miss a new episode. Okay, well, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 60 and that's 60 for 60. So gembapodcast.com 60. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, John, well, thank you so much for coming back onto the show. It's been a while since we last talked, but where are you calling in from today, John?

I'm calling in from my home office in Washington state.

Nice. Nice. All right, well, you know, the last time we talked, we talked about creating a culture of Kaizen, or Kaizen culture, which was your book that you wrote some time ago. But a lot of things have changed with you since then. So why don't you give everybody an update on the latest happenings with John Miller?

Yeah, thanks. Well, since a couple months ago, I have left the consulting world, left the road warrior world. I resigned from my leadership position in Kaizen Institute Consulting Group and transitioned now to being full time with Gemba Academy. So this is a good decision for myself and my family. I've been traveling for, really nonstop for 20 plus years, first as a interpreter, translator, working with Japanese consultants, and then with Gemba Research, and then Kaizen Institute. And Kaizen Institute has 30 plus, maybe 33, 34 locations worldwide. And that was growing. So I saw the writing on the wall and said, you know what? I have a young family. I need to think about family life more than career at this point. So, yeah, they were very, very supportive and understanding, and so I made that change. So I am. I have not seen the inside of an airport for business purposes in about six months, and I'm happy with that. Hoping to extend that stretch a little more. Yeah.

Well, fantastic. It's so great to have you full time with Gambling Academy and working together. It's awesome. So. All right, John, well, let's go ahead. You know the drill. You've been on the show and listened to podcasts. Let's go ahead and. And start off with you sharing a quote. And as you know, we're going to kind of talk about problem solving today. So do you have a quote that related to that?

I do, yeah. And actually this is a quote that I would like some help from the listeners if they know the exact source of it. And it may not be. I may not be getting the quote right, but it's something I came across in translation recently attributed to Peter Drucker. And it goes something like, there's nothing so troublesome as the right answer to the wrong question, which I think is great because, you know, politicians, government leaders, business people, engineers. Well, we all have the right answer. It's the answer in our mind. But it's to the wrong question or it doesn't solve the right problem. But this was something that was in Japanese and so I just figured put it in English. But I haven't been able to find find it anywhere. And of course I've only looked on the Internet. But if anybody is a Peter Drucker geek nerd and knows the right quote, I can go with this one. This is fine with me. But I'd love to see the source of it. Which one of his books or speeches, See what else he said about it.

Say it again.

There is nothing so troublesome as the right answer to the wrong question.

That's pretty deep when you really think about it.

Yeah, yeah. That's what a lot of misguided and ineffective problem solving in the world is. Unintended consequences. We. We've got a solution. Looking for a problem. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Well John, today what we're going to focus on is the practical problem solving methodology. But you know, we've got, our time is limited on these podcasts so we're not going to get through all eight steps. I think what we're going to do is some follow up episodes. We'll take it and perhaps we'll go in three chunks. And today I think what our goal is to try to get through steps one, two and three. And then obviously, you know, if folks are interested in checking out more and learning more, they can go watch Gemba Academy's course that we are about to refresh and release. So depending on when you're listening to this episode, that will be available. But let's just start with just a general question, just to kind of level set and get everybody on the same plane here. What is practical problem solving?

Yeah, I don't remember the first time I heard about practical problem solving as such. You know, with those three words. Problem solving is been around since the dawn of humanity, dawn of history. I've always been involved with kaizen and continuous improvement, which is really problem solving. I think practical problem solving may be the part of it that's really interesting is the emphasis on practical. What does that mean? That means it's application oriented or action oriented. It's doing and it's practice. And I think a lot of people might miss that. And some people call it lean problem solving, some people call it a three, thinking a three problem solving solving. But I think the practical part of it means that it's something that you do, you learn from, you try. It doesn't work, you try again. And that's what practice is. Practice isn't performance. Practice isn't perfection. Practice is whether it's piano or anything. You try, you make a mistake and you have a coach and you reflect on what exercises you need to do to get better at it next time, and eventually you become very good at it. And that's true for problem solving. You become good at problem solving and you solve problems along the way. And that's, I think more, more people are realizing this and talking about it, that lean and problem solving within lean is really the engine of both continuous improvement and developing people. So for me, practical problem solving, the emphasis is on practical and really gaining an appreciation for the practice, the praxis. P R A X I S is actually a cooler word. I don't know if that's Latin or German, but that's the idea, the method, the law, the way you do it, I think is the most interesting thing about practical problem solving. And this is something I've been spending more time with, thinking about, reading about. In the eight steps we talk about the eight steps of practical problem solving. For the Gemba Academy course, we took that more or less straight out of the Toyota business practice Toyota method, which they took from TQM and they took from various other previous works. But I think going forward, I'm really interested in breaking that down a little more, going a little deeper and understanding within those eight steps, what are the things we must do and the things that are optional. Because I hear a lot of people say, well, there's more than one way to do problem solving and you don't have to follow Toyota's method exactly for anything. And I sort of agree and disagree with those kinds of comments. Don't copy Toyota. Of course not. You can't copy 100%. Nobody's suggesting that. But certain methods, certain approaches, I wouldn't mess with them very much. I would go 90%, 95, 99%, follow that recipe. And practical problem solving is one of those areas that I'm very close to saying. If we explain some of the assumptions and some of the context behind what's going on within the eight step process, and you can do exactly that, you really can't go wrong. Because a lot of what they put in place at Toyota and other companies that have pioneered practical problem solving, a lot of these things are based on what Deming said, a system of profound knowledge, a deep understanding of psychology and statistics and things like that. So the actions you're taking are in the problem solving process are in fact countermeasures to common errors of judgment and cognitive biases. That we have and the way we just don't understand statistics, we don't understand regression to the mean, we don't understand luck. So a lot of things that we do, a lot of actions and decisions we make are based on these faults that we have in the human mind. And by chance or by design, by practice, the problem solving approach does a great job of countering or being countermeasures to some of these things. And that's really interesting to me and I just like to make that more explicit going forward for people.

Well, you're going to write a book, aren't you, John? That puts you on the spot. But you hope to, don't you?

Well, I hope to write another book at some point. I'm certainly doing a lot of reading and thinking about this particular topic and taking some notes and so forth. So hopefully it turns into a book. But discussions like this are.

Yeah.

Are a good, stimulating way to see if there's interest out there in the.

Yeah.

In the world of people that are doing lean and if I'm onto something or, you know, if I'm just covering old, old ground others have already done. Yeah.

Okay. All right, well, let's just jump. Jump into it and let's start with, with step one and what we're going to do for each of these steps, just to give everybody some framework, is we're going to talk about what is it, why do we do it and what do people get wrong. So step one, what is it?

All right, step one is clarify the problem. And very simply you want to have an output which is a concise problem statement. And that's difficult for some people because in your mind is already a solution or you want to get to the analysis. But it's quite important, in fact, before we dive into the first three steps, just a fact or factoid, whichever it is, if it's. It's probably. We don't have the data to prove it. So it may be a factoid, but I would say, I venture to say 80% of success of problem solving is based on the level of sincere effort and energy you put in to the first four steps. I would say so through root cause analysis. And 70% of that is probably the first two steps. The third step sort of comes out of the first two steps. You could include the third step if you want, but step one and step two make such a large part of your success in problem solving that I can't under emphasize or I can't overemphasize the importance of this first step is to clarify the problem, is it safe.

To say that if you get it wrong, steps one and two wrong, the rest is going to be garbage?

Well, that's the beauty of it. Not as long as you come back to step one after, you know, falling on your face. In step five and six, if you do your check, if you say, well, that didn't work, why didn't it work? Did we follow the process? What can we learn from this? Let's go back to the first step. Oh, we have a horrible problem statement. That's why we forgot to. We didn't follow the checklist, or we jumped through. You know, we jumped through the. We skipped through the root cause analysis, and we just went with the one that we knew was right. We looked at each other, we went, nah, we don't have to do root cause analysis. We know what's going on here. We were wrong. So let's reflect on that and let's actually take some time and slow down and do the proper analysis. So as long as you stay in the cycle, as long as you stay in the PDCA cycle or the learning loop or whatever you want to call it, and as long as you don't treat this as a tunnel where you go from 1 to 8 and you exit and you're finished, then you're okay. But if you, if you, if you fall down on step one, two, and three and you give up, or you just ram it through and, you know, put a band aid on it, then, yeah, you're done. But as long as you keep coming back to it. Yeah, keep trying. That's a part of the beauty of practical problem solving is you get to keep practicing.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the problem statement, because I know you're passionate about really nailing this part of the equation. Talk a little bit about how to go about drafting or crafting a good problem statement.

Yeah. So I think the key point in the beginning is to understand at the higher level, to elevate your thinking to what's my ultimate purpose or goal in doing this work or this process or this effort or this situation? What is a really trying to do? And not simply what's the output of my machine or my process or my effort here, but at a higher level. So what's the whole point of our company? What am I trying to do? Where am I going with this? And then the next step is to say, or the next part of it is to say, so in order to move in that direction, what is the ideal process or ideal work look like. So let's say you want to become a great musician and that's your ultimate goal or purpose. Well, you would say, well, what are you really trying to do? Are you trying to entertain people or are you trying to make money doing this? So what is it you're really trying to do? What's your ultimate goal or purpose? And then to get to that, what's the ideal state? What does that look like when you're doing that? And what is the gap? What are you doing now? Well, I don't have enough time to practice or my albums aren't selling. And so this is a way it helps you to focus on not what you perceive the problem to be, immediately your dissatisfaction, which can be very subjective. But try to look at it a bit wider because of course it's going to be subjective. It's going to be what does the situation mean to you. But looking at it from a customer's point of view, the ultimate goal or purpose is ultimately to be connected to other people in society and to serve and to get benefit back from it. If you're talking about business or if you're talking about some sort of nonprofit environment or even art. So it helps you to, to come out of your own perspective or your own or inward lookingness, if you want to call it that, which is subjective and look at it as a little bit more from the outside or from the customer's point of view, try to be more objective and say what is the ultimate goal or purpose? And then what's the ideal look like? What does the ideal service or process look like? Once you do those two things, then you can say, well, here's the gap between where we are now, our current reality, and what the ideal would look like. And the ideal is sort of the engine that gets you towards your ultimate goal or purpose. So it's really those three elements of it in generating what that problem statement. That problem statement is what that pain area is.

Okay, so what do people do wrong during this first step, John?

Well, let's think about the output that we want from the first step, which is a clear problem statement. And to be honest, it doesn't really matter how you get there. What I mentioned in terms of reviewing your ultimate goal or purpose and comparing your ideal situation with your current situation, visualizing a gap, those are, those are the how to, those are the inputs, if you will. But what you want out of it is a concise, clear problem statement that doesn't contain a solution, it doesn't contain a cause, and it clearly Describes the gap between where you are and where you want to be. And that's if you can get to that intuitively or if you can get to that through some other method or process that's teachable and that's that you can duplicate, then it's fine. So it's not saying you must do these three or four things within that step to get there. It's these are the three that have. Let's say that these are the methods or steps that the sub steps that have been proven to be easiest to follow. But as long as you get a clear, concise couple sentence, maybe three sentence problem statement, that's free of bias, free of solutions, and everyone agrees with, at least that's the reality, then you're good, you're good to go to the next step.

I think the hardest part of this step for me personally is I'm always in such a rush that I had this natural tendency to want to include a cause or potential countermeasures just right out of the gate. When you just have to have that discipline to not go there yet. Right. Do you see that a lot?

I see that a lot. And it's how we reward in how we motivate people as well. We don't motivate people to bring us problems. We motivate and reward people for bringing a solution. So when we say let's do problem solving, people want to solve the problem and move on and get back to work and not have to worry about the headache. So naturally, if they have a plan or proposal, they need to walk up to their supervisor or boss and say, here's the problem, here's the analysis. Maybe it's on an A3 format, maybe it's just a discussion. They want to show that they're working on a solution as soon as possible. So the role of the coach or the supervisor, the manager, the boss, whatever is to say, look, this problem statement, tell me about your thinking behind it. What's the ultimate goal? What's the purpose of your team or your group or this process? What's the ideal situation of the process and where are we now? And how can you quantify the gap? How can you make that visual so everybody understands? And then how can you make sure that you write that in a concise way and that looks like a cause? I see because, or I see a solution, I see which of these things don't belong here and can you tell me why? And they go, oh yeah, you're right, I'm jumping ahead because that's the first Stumbling block. And it's really tough for coaches or managers to make that initial criticism. Right. Because it takes the air out of the balloon a little bit. Where, well, that's a bad problem statement right off the bat there. So you have to be really careful. But that's where the communication has to be really strong in both ways. The communication is just another whole thing that has to be rock solid all the way through this. Got it. In both directions. But anyway, that's for sure. It's a clear, simple, bias free problem statement is half the solution. I'll give you 50% right there.

Okay, got it. All right, step two, what is it?

Yeah, steps to what we call breaking down the problem or problem breakdown. And this is where this is most useful. If you have a large complex problem that has multiple parts to it. Typical business problem could be something like customer complaints or customer satisfaction rating, right? So if you think about customer satisfaction, that might be a KPI or a measurement that's made up of some aggregate measurements. It could be people are unhappy with quality of the product, with delivery or availability. It could be the customer service response times. So you have to break down the problem saying so what are the things that we know from our customers or from the data? How do we break this up and put it into different chunks? Because you can't solve the whole problem at once. A huge problem like that you have to address piece by piece. So you might start with a Pareto analysis 80, 20 rule and say this particular piece of it, the quality piece of it, that's half the problem, that's 50% of our complaints, that's really dragging our rating down. And then maybe another 10%, 20% or two or three other factors helps you to focus on the biggest things for analysis purposes down the road. And then once you've chosen one of those or as you're going through and asking what the elements of the or the sub problems, the smaller, more concrete problems, what those are. This is where you don't want to ask the why question. And a lot of people do this in the breakdown. They start slipping into root cause analysis. But I like to call this the 4W. Not why, which is what, where, who, when, but not why. Do not ask why yet, because that again begins to bias or prejudice your thinking. So what kind of a product or service or thing are we talking about? You might have multiple different services or products that customers purchase and they may have different performances, lower, let's say tendencies in terms of quality. So high end products, people, you might have a lot More complaints than low end products or low end products. You might have many more complaints for whatever reason. And then where, what part of the country, the world? Which retail stores? What does your data tell you? Where are you having your problems the most? Where are you seeing this problem the most? Is it a certain seasonal thing? Is it, you get all the problems at Christmas in your retail stores, Is it during the slow months? Is it Saturdays and Sundays, Mondays, who knows? And what kind of customer, who or what kind of supplier? So by breaking down your data, it's called stratifying the data or stratification by taking that same information, looking for characteristics that can vary. You can group it and then begin to say, all right, the biggest problem here we have or the large problem here we have is customer complaints or customer satisfaction. Breaking that into several things. We know it's related to quality, timing, after service. And then within those, we look at a particular area like product quality and then break that into what are the things that affect it. So it's really getting a good understanding of the context of the problem, the surrounding of the problem. Saying let's now focus on a small piece of it and not saying you're going to ignore all the rest of it, but you're saying to make something that's really practical, that we can really do something about. Specifically, let's look at this retail store of this product, this customer segment and how they, how they react to our promotions or what have you during this particular season. And then you learn something in the, in the process of doing this that you can segment and stratify your problem by how your process is set up. Yeah, so that, so you've broken it down and then you select tentatively what you're going to go after.

So that's prioritization, right? Kind of.

That's the next part of it. Yeah, the prioritization part, which is again, it can be like you do with an fmea. You could have a risk priority number rpn. You could do whatever characteristics, typically they're how severe is the problem? How often does it happen? What's the chance of it spreading? Or is it under control or not? And so once you do that, you pick your problem. And what people forget at this point is that you have to actually confirm your assumptions. Because until now you're largely in a conference room or looking at data, looking at data, or in a video conference or voice conference looking at data, talking about the problem, trying to come up with what are we going to go after? Or you're presenting something based on Analysis. Now you have to say, okay, we're going to go after this, so let's go to that retail store or go to that process or go to where that problem happens, a point of cause and walk through the process, map it out, understand it. And this is where people start doing root cause analysis. But you still can't really start. This is where you look and you listen to.

Yes.

So you look at what's going on, you listen to people, you interview people, you try to get as broad a perspective on the problem to confirm or disconfirm what you believe and understand to be the problem. So far, yes. And this is where if you don't have any surprises and you come away from this sort of Gemba walk or Gemba Genshi Genbutsu process, the go see process, you come away with it saying, yeah, we're dead on, we've got exactly what we need to be working on and you rush into the next phase. You should worry a little bit because that means either you're lucky, you're brilliant or you're really hiding some truth from yourselves. And I would say 80% you're not the first to. You may be, but this is where if you don't find something that goes, hmm, yeah, that wasn't part of. Yeah, we learned something there. We didn't expect that. So we're a little bit off or we need to broaden the search a little bit or narrow down the search so you're not trying to confirm. It is called sort of confirmation or go seek confirmation or verification of the process. But it's really also to check where you might be making assumptions that are not matched by reality on the scene or on the floor. So the breakdown process, I think we've probably as a consulting world, a training world or even Yumba Academy as a provider of this kind of learning content. We've not spent enough time on it or explained it in enough detail because a lot of us that come from the background of doing this have assumptions and know and have shortcuts and we haven't laid it out, made it really explicit and detailed and say, look, this is what you do. So we've got some good customer questions about this and I think that's one of the areas that we'll be beefing up in the next. Next release.

Yeah, no, exactly. I mean we, everybody, you know, John, but so everybody else. This is the step that I think in the original version of our PPS course that we, I would say we got some, I don't know, wrong. It might Be too strong of a word, but could have been greatly improved. So this module, this breaking down the, the problem module has been radically overhauled in the refreshed version of this course. So, yeah, so this review, just to kind of bring it up back home before we move on. So what we've talked about with within step two is basically stratification, breaking the problem down, visualizing the data, prioritizing what we just learned through stratification, and then go to Gemba, go see, identify points of cause. Is that basically it?

Yeah, and that's basically it. You can obviously go to Gemba early and often. Please go to Gemba in step one. When you're clarifying the problem, don't hesitate. But it's necessary after making that initial prioritization and selection to go back through the process and say, okay, this is a specific, narrow down, localized process.

Yes.

And we want to walk through it, map it out, listen to the people that are engaged in that process, and then make sure that we haven't either overlooked something or imposed our own wishes into the thought process or prejudices into the thought process. Yes. So that part of it just digging into a little bit more of.

Yes.

That slowly slowing down the first two steps and slowing down. People don't like to talk about slowing down, but it's being really thorough before you, before you go to step three and four. Got it.

Okay, well, let's go to step three then.

Sure. Yeah. Step three is. This is interesting because it's really. It's simply setting a target. But this is where translation from Japanese to English sometimes is lost in Japanese. It's literally setting a target to be achieved. So it's setting achieve target. What is an achieve target? An achieve target is something that we will achieve. It's not a target. Like, it'd be nice if we got out there. It's saying, this is a commitment I'm going to make. We're going to get through this. You know, it's like, you know, no man left behind, no soldier left behind. That's the kind of thing, this is what we commit to. We will not let this happen. And that's the commitment first you have to make because you've gone through clarification, you've gone through selection and breakdown, you've gone through and you verified it. So you should be comfortable at this point saying, yeah, we commit to 20% improvement or closing this particular gap on this particular. This piece of the problem that we just walked through and verified. So the commitment is the first part. And this is this is also something that a lot of people fail to do in lean, continuous improvement, Kaizen problem solving, whatever you call. In fact, remember a conversation from last year where some mid level managers in a. I have to be careful in a company, any company. There you go. The company, they, they were very reluctant to make a commitment and it was because. And they said, you know, we get burned when we make a commitment. And I said, what does that mean? Well, you make a commitment and then it's, it's locked into the budget at a senior level. So the people at the, at the corporate level, CEO level, back in another country, another continent, they see it in their dashboard and then they, they pressure the people that are beneath them. Have you gotten this number yet? And then it comes all the way down to the middle manager who's, who wants to do their best and wants to achieve this target. But sometimes it's not possible or it takes time and quarter to quarter, if they don't hit it that next quarter, they get burned. Like why didn't you hit your commitment? Well, you know what, that's not Kaizen culture. That is sort of typical traditional fear based pressure culture. So you have to be so part of, just to take a step back. Part of what we need in practical problem solving is the ecosystem or the environment or the corporate context that allows it to work. Because if you've got a fear based, stifling, quarter to quarter results driven context, practical problem solving, a lot of these steps might struggle, then the commit is the one of them. Because if you commit to something that might mean something different in a true lean culture than it might mean in a financially focused quarter to quarter culture where people are getting huge bonuses based on, on what? The stock market. What the stock market, how the stock market rewards the performance. So commitment is saying yeah, this is a target we can hit. And the setting the target part is just being, making that specifically how much by when. It's the what when and how much in terms of the gap that you've described in the first process. But I think the key part here is again communication. It's being, it's verifying the numbers and people skip the. Not skip, but they skip through or they speed through the setting a target sometimes and people might sandbag it, sandbag it or let's say put some slack in there saying yeah, we know we can do 40% but we'll commit to 30. Which. Okay, that's another question of how much trust there is between the management team and the people who work for them or work with Them, but committing, regardless of how you get there, what you need as an output of that third step is a specific target that everyone is committed to hitting, that everyone believes strongly in and has energy and motivation to go after. So part of that as an input has to be the management team giving the resources, giving good support, looking at the information and data that's come through the first two processes to make sure people are comfortable, people on the team or people doing the problem solving are quite comfortable making that commitment. But I think that's something that has been neglected as well.

Now what? Okay, so let's set the scenario. Let's say that we're on a problem solving team. We've done a good job through steps one and two, and now we're setting a target and we commit to a target. 10% reduction, whatever, just 10%. That's what we're going to do and we're going to achieve it. It we're committed, management's committed, everybody's committed. And let's just say, hypothetically, we work through the rest of the process, John, Steps four through eight. And we've done everything possible and we've done the very best that we can, but we didn't quite get there. Then what? We didn't hit it, but we tried. Then what? Is it a failure?

Well, sure, sure, it's a failure, but what was the failure? We don't know yet. If you stop there and give up and go cry in your milk, then it's a complete failure. If you get to step seven and you say our efforts, our best efforts and full commitment and so forth was not enough, we got the 7%, why did we follow the process? Yes, we did. Did we identify good root causes and have countermeasures towards them? Yes, we did. Was our breakdown sufficient? Did we break it down the right way or was it not by seasonality? We should have looked at it instead by region or by product. This is where you get back to, why did we not hit the target? And as long as you do that, and as long as you find some kind of an answer that puts you on a correction course, you're okay. If you completely can't find it, it's a complete mystery and this does happen, then you might say, well, we'll have to get that saving from someplace else. Or you might say that we can do this. We know how to get to 10%, but with the current technology and our current capital budgets, we can't put in a new design or a new process or new machine cost effectively. Maybe in A couple of years, that happens. Maybe new technology comes along and we can replace that machine and boom, we don't ever have that defect again. So that's where you would say, okay, what did we learn? We learned that we made assumptions about available technologies or we didn't do a proper upfront discussion about what's our budget to solve this problem. Or in the stratification we could have said let's look at products that are highly technical versus not highly technical in terms of the equipment that we use. Because we just know as a fact that we're not going to build new machine lines. So don't even think about products that have machine line based defects because those things are going to be just a fact of nature for the next year as long as the root cause is in the old and rickety equipment. So you could say that's something we can put into our thinking for future products. Problem solving and go back again and say we still need 10%. That's still a big, big problem we have. It's got multiple parts to. Let's tackle something else.

Yes.

So that's the part of it is that it's not used. You succeed or you fail. It's not a black or white. Well, it is black or white. You do fail, but it's not a, it's not a win or lose.

You're not a bad person. Right?

No, no, no. It's always, it's about the process. Always. It's about win or lose.

Yes.

Then you'd say, no, it's not win or lose. It's that the last time around, these are the things that didn't go as planned. Maybe it came around.

We'll do plus or deltas maybe. Right. Instead of winning, losing. Right. Something like that.

Yeah. You have to be, you have to be careful with the language because it's. Yeah. You don't want to, you don't want to shy away from the fact that you missed the target. It was a failure and you need to close the gap. But you don't want to make it. You don't want to blame people. You don't want to create fear in people that says we can't ever commit. Right. If there's a risk to not meeting our commitment or your commitments become so, so easy and so small that people never learn anything because they're just, they're just doing very easy problem solving.

Well, to your point, I think the only true way to fail is to quit.

Right.

I mean as long as you're moving forward and you're and you're turning the PDCA cycle, then, you know, I think success will, will, will come eventually if we persevere.

Yeah, it's a small F failure and the capital F with a period at the end, failure, you know, where you close the book and you walk away. As long as, as long as you're failing small and often and learning from it and doing, not failing for the same reason, for the same problem, then it's quite acceptable.

Great. All right, well, let's go ahead and stop the PPS discussion at this point. So we've talked about clarifying the problem, break down the problem and set a target and our neck when we will do some future episodes here down the road. And the next one, I think we'll talk about step four, which is analyze root cause. Step five, develop countermeasures. And that's a big topic. Right. So we'll focus on those two. And then in a third episode, we'll do steps six through eight, See countermeasures through, evaluate process and results and then standardize success. So does that sound like a plan, John?

Sounds like a plan, but plans may change, as you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead then. And to wrap up this episode and kind of go through the reflection section. So as you know, we've. You've greatly impacted this section and you named it. We used to call it the Quickfire. And you remember, you emailed me and said, say, Ron, it's not really quick Fire, it's more of a reflection. I said, yeah, great. So it's now the reflection questions, and we've got some new ones in here that again, you helped create. So now I'm going to put you on the hot seat and make you answer your own questions. How's that?

Fair enough. I haven't prepared much, but let's see.

That's great. All right, so the first one is one that you've answered before, but perhaps you can put a different spin on it. What does respect for people mean to you, John?

Yeah, I don't know what it means to me, but maybe I'll answer the question a different way. I've been questioning the idea of respect for people as part of lean. Of course, I question sort of the lean and the definition of lean to begin with. This gets into. Because respect for people is part of.

Or respect for humanity, perhaps respect for.

Humanity, but it's part of the Toyota way. Continuous improvement and respect for people and the turret away is not the same thing as lean. And it's not the same thing as the Toyota production system. And it's rare that I hear people say we're adopting the Toyota Way. So really, when we talk about respect for people as part of Lean, where did that come from? That comes from the Toyota Way document that Toyota came out with in the early 2000s. So it's, it's sort of an arbitrary link. It's a weak link, frankly. So in what way is respect for people really part of Lean? Where in TPS does it appear? And if you don't base Lean on tps, what do you base it on? You can base it on something else, but then if you base it on some other structure, then where does respect for people appear within that? So I'm kind of questioning it. From the origin point of view, I fully believe in respect for humanity, this idea that what we're doing is buy and for people. And if we do it in a way that's fair and sustainable for future generations, then the long term cost and quality that is going to be better than if we mistreat the land and the resources and the people just for short term profit. I think that remains obvious and important to me as always. So I guess I can answer the question in two ways. One is sort of questioning this notion that respect for people is a key part of Lean. Where did that come from? And do you really believe that? Because if you say you believe that, then you're sort of either saying that respect for people came from someplace else and it's part of Lean. And I haven't found a reference other than the third away document. And if you're saying that we believe in the Toyota Way document, do you believe in all of it or just part of it? If you believe in just part of it, then what's your thought process? You're picking and choosing again and saying this is my version of Lean. I don't question the quality of it. I question do people really understand where it comes from and what they're saying when they talk about this? And the second part of the answer is that the context of respect for humanity within a Japanese corporation is different than that of a, let's say an American corporation, because an American publicly traded company is very focused on the short term financially as a, as a stereotype. You may say where the Japanese company, traditionally maybe they're moving in this direction of the Western company, American company, but has been much less concerned about quarter to quarter performance and much more concerned about how they're viewed by society and the impact they're having on Society and so forth. So in that context, what respect for people means is more deeply embedded in the history and the way business is done, let's say, than in a Western company? So can you really get to respect for people in a Western publicly traded company in the way that it was originally intended? In the third way and deeper, coming from that, let's say Japanese business background. Now that's not to say that Americans or Europeans or people in Africa don't respect people and don't have businesses and business philosophies that are long term oriented. Absolutely everyone is that and has that to some degree. But the financial sector, the financial system, the way we motivate our top leaders to run their big companies in US versus Japan are very different, very different. And so that's why I wonder, with this respect for people notion, how well has it been tested within the context of Western corporation? I don't have the answer. So that's kind of what I'm thinking about, but I don't.

It's pretty deep, you know, I mean it's, it's because there is a huge difference in motivations. And you know, even running our own company, you know, sometimes it's very, very easy to see what kind of month you're having when in fact you should be thinking about what kind of 2016 and 17 are we going to be having. Right. And it's much easier said than done. Right?

Yeah. And it's both and right, it's not either or, it's both. And, and if you only think about the long term and don't think about being solvent as many Japanese banks didn't in the 1990s and more recently they kept loaning money to companies and corporations in Japan just so that they could stay afloat, just so that hopefully someday they would grow and they would be able to pay them back. Because otherwise it's embarrassing and disruptive to society to have companies going belly up and firing tens of thousands of people. And that isn't sustainable as we've seen. But the other extreme isn't sustainable also. So what we're really looking for is to say respect for people, respect for humanity is what type of world do we want to have? And how do businesses, how does the running of a business or design of a capitalist system, how does that help us achieve those things? And if we only think about the long term or only think about the short term, you know, we can't really answer that question effectively. Or at least those are two data points. I mean, maybe you have to study this Issue more. And I'm just thinking about it. I'm not an expert in it, but love it.

All right, John, what's the best advice you've ever received?

So the best advice I've received in the, in the recent past is not exactly something to do with business, but I guess you could, you could link to that. And this is. Obviously I've received lots of advice and it's been great, but lately I've been splitting firewood. Okay. Moved to a different house. We've got a wood stove and so some downed trees in the area picked them up. And so I like to split firewood with a metal wedge and a sledgehammer. It's good exercise and it's quite satisfying when something round splits into wedges. And my dad saw me splitting the firewood and noticed that at the head of the sledgehammer, close to where the metal head of it meets the wood stock, there was a bit of splintering or splitting of the wood. Just some damage, probably from some time that I missed the wedge and I hit the metal wedge on the wood stock. And it wasn't dangerous, but I just kept working with it and I've gotten better at it than I haven't missed in a long time. But he said, you know, you had to put a donut on that. A donut just like a rubber sleeve, you put all the way up close to the head. So if you do completely miss the, miss the metal wedge that you're, you're hammering on and you hit your wood, you don't snap the wood handle into the thing doesn't come flying at you, just bounces right off. And this is not a part of the design. You know, this isn't something that people who make sledgehammers built into the sledgehammer. For whatever reason, somebody else came up with this good idea to protect that part of the sledgehammer from a common, common mistake. But here I was doing something that was fun and useful. And every time I whack it, you know, I can see that there's a bit of the wood that's, that's chipped away there. And I don't do anything about it. It doesn't bother me or I'm not safety minded enough to put a little bit of extra cushion on that so it doesn't ever possibly break. And somebody who's got more experience, my father, who's chopped a lot of wood in his life, points that out to me. And I think that that's the kind of advice that is easy to ignore. Right. It's small things that people. People can observe the work you're doing. Something that you're doing is not safe. Something that was. That looks like a good, normal process, but they know a slightly better way, and they say, well, why don't you. Why don't you put that there and make your job a little safer? I think that's. It's interesting because I haven't gone out and bought one yet, but it's been in the back of my mind. So as you asked me the question, first of all, why haven't I gone out and bought one yet? And second of all, what's the lesson for me here? I guess I just haven't been getting a lot of advice lately. That's the best advice I've gotten.

Okay. So the natural question that I have is, why are you using a sledgehammer and a wedge and not just an axe?

Just an axe? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't have an axe that's that long. I've got a hatchet, but I don't have a wood splitting ax, and I could go buy one for 25 or 30 bucks, but I've got a perfectly good sledgehammer and in a wedge. And to be honest, if you're breaking up a really big, tall round of wood like we can sometimes get here in the Northwest, you're not going to get through it without either a hydraulic wood splitter or going at it with a sledgehammer and a wedge to split it into half and then into quarters and then into smaller pieces. I'm not talking about small pieces of wood. So that's the reason why. But there's the right tool for the right job, right?

Big Seattle wood, not Little Texas wood, right?

No, that's exactly right. All right.

So, John, over the last year or so of practicing lean, has there been anything that surprised you?

Hmm. Over the last year of practicing lean, I'm continually surprised at how much more of the world there is out there that is new to lean. And this is the type of thing that when you're in the lean business, if you will, and you're talking to people who are in the lean business or learning, or you sort of get to thinking that most people must heard about it by now, and that's not a conscious thought. But when you. When I move into a new neighborhood and they ask, what do you do? And you explain, and that person is a doctor or something. Oh, yeah, I've heard about lean or I've heard about kaizen. It gets to be more and More part of, at least in the United States. Maybe, just maybe it's the northwest part of the United States. It's more and more common. More people hear about it. And with lean startup and with that becoming very popular, a lot of young people, people are hearing about it and it's sort of morphing into something else. But still there's just so much, so many people after 50, 60 years after, after Deming and Toyota and decades after books have come out and all that. There's just such an immense amount of learning and opportunity for people to, to make their lives and make their work better. That's just. Yeah, that's encouraging. I mean, on the one hand it's sort of staggering because there's, you read the news or watch the news or whatever, and there's just so much stupidity and so much poor problem solving and human failings going on in the world and a little bit of lean thinking and problem solving would go a long, long, long way. So I think that's, that's something that sort of every now and then opens my eyes or I have to remind myself to. It gives me hope. It still surprises me that it's not, it's not everywhere. And it makes me think, still have some work to do to help get the, get the word out, get the message out. Give people practical tools to keep learning and spreading this. But yeah, that's, I think that's it. It's not so much. The more, the more I work with it, the more I go sort of back to the basics and back to the basic lessons and not less and less curious about anything that's advanced or that's sophisticated. And more and more, why aren't more people doing lesson one and lesson two? Why aren't more people doing just basic stand in the circle waste identification, engaging people? What's keeping them from that? How can we change that? Right, Right.

All right, so besides splitting wood, can't use that one. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow when things aren't going well and you need to recharge and refocus?

Yeah, I have a routine or let's say a daily routine now that I've been working on six, seven months. And it's actually a little, I guess I'll call it a Kamishibai type board. It's a piece of paper with some slots cut in it and some little post it shaped card. So what I've done is I've taped an orange post it on one side to a green post it on the other. Side, so it's a two sided. Post it with the sticky sides sticking to each other. And I keep the orange side up facing me so that it's red. Basically it's not done. And I flip it over when it's done and that's green. And on this I write in pencil. And it's been pretty stable now for a couple of months. The things that I need to do every day to feel good, it's basic things like get some exercise, take a walk, clean up around the house, write something, meditate, reflect on the day and prepare for tomorrow. And there's a few other things on there, but it's about a dozen things and it's a, it's a pretty high bar to try to get a dozen things done every day. And altogether, if I were to diligently do everything on there, it takes me about eight hours. And then that's, that's plus, you know, sleeping and everything else that you have to do and all the unexpected things. But that gives me kind of an anchor where if I get those things done, then I feel pretty good about my day because if I chip away at it day after day like that, some days I only get, you know, 10, 15 minutes of working on a project. Some days I get a couple hours. And some days you just take a day off and say, I'm not going to do that because I'm tired today. So instead of having a bad day, you just sort of acknowledge, well, this would be a good day if I could do this. That's my standard, that's my target. But today I'm not going to be able to do it. So you leave it, you flip it over and you turn it from red to green, say, done, it's off. I'm not worrying about it anymore. You know, so that's been, that's been an effective way for me to sort of transition from being in a higher stress, always on the road kind of a situation to needing to structure my own routine and try to have a good day every day and be productive and so forth. But that was. Yeah, that's, that's probably my current thing.

And I understand your getting pretty good at making rhubarb pie. Is that true?

Well, I've made it twice in the last 15, 20 years and the third time it should be better.

Well, the next time I come out there, I expect to have some. All right, so let's, let's work on that.

We'll freeze some rhubarb for you.

All right, so the last question I have for you, John, is. Is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel that you need to improve on in order to be more successful at practicing lean?

At practicing lean or problem solving or.

Being a better person or anything, you.

Know, Sure, I think what I need to do better, and this may have been the same answer I gave before, but I think what I need to do better in order to practice lean and be a better problem solver is what I said earlier in the show about thinking from a higher level or ultimate goal or purpose and from the customer's point of view is to really get in the other person's shoes or see things from the other person's perspective. Because I think I have a certain amount of knowledge and insight and expertise into what I know and what I know about lean, but I have much less of that about what's in the other person's mind and their experience. So that doesn't really help as a teacher if, if you know your subject really well but you don't understand your pupils, you're not going to be very successful. And I think that's not to say that I don't have anything more about lean. That's not the message at all. But I think the returns there are going to be diminishing If I read 100 more books about lean and so forth, or take seminars or go practice on the floor. The benefit of that for me as a person who can be useful teaching or doing lean, is much smaller compared to if I can, if I can be more attentive to or be more exposed to what people out there. And this goes back to your question about what surprised me the most. Is what surprised me the most that it's still a big world out there. Most of it ain't heard of lean and I know the reasons why. But it's how do we get inside the minds and ears and eyes of those people? And it's communication, it's media, it's those kinds of things. But that's, that's the part is understanding other people.

So maybe, perhaps it calls for a good dose of practical problem solving, huh?

For. Yeah, yeah.

Forgive the academy to clarify the problem and break it down.

Go for it, Ron.

Well, all right, maybe we'll try, right? All right. Well, John, thanks again for taking time out of your day to visit with us. I don't know if we're one of your commission back cards or not, but perhaps, hopefully this helps turn something to green screen because I think it was time well spent. Let's go ahead and just wrap the show up with you telling people how they can connect with you.

Yeah, I don't know if there's a link.

Yeah, we'll link to it in our show notes. Yeah, yeah, we'll put all of our Gemba Academy links and whatnot, but sure. Are you on LinkedIn and stuff like that, John?

I'm on LinkedIn, I am on Twitter and I can be reached by other means. I have a blog that I write for Gemba Academy and other people and maybe there's an email on there someplace.

Yeah.

Reach me that way.

Yeah. And so the show notes for everybody listening to this are going to be GembaPodcast.com 6660. So go ahead and check out all of John's links. And it's J O N Miller, right, Jon? No H. So all right. All right, John, well, thanks again and I look forward to a follow up episode where we look at the other steps of pps.

Okay, talk to you soon.

Take care.

Take care, Mom.

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