GA 074 | Creating a Culture of Kaizen with Ron Pereira

You're listening to episode 74 with Ron Pereira. 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 Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now then, today's episode is going to be a bit different. What we're going to do is we're going to actually share a recorded talk that I recently gave to one of our enterprise customers. And this particular customer invited me to speak to the leadership of their company in beautiful Upper Michigan. The topic of the discussion is how to create a culture of Kaizen. And so what I did was I actually pulled out bits and pieces from a few different Gemba Academy courses, in particular our Kaizen Wei course and then our most recent or one of our most recent courses, the Culture of Kaizen. And so we've kind of edited up a bit to take out any of the kind of personal stuff that happened with the. With that particular company. But for the most part it's the talk is exactly as I gave it and I hope it adds a lot of value to it. It was a ton of fun to. To give that talk. I don't do a lot of live talks like that, but when I do, I always enjoy engaging with audiences and things of that nature. Now then, show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 74 and that's 74 for 74. So gembapodcast.com 74 okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. So it was 7:30 on a Monday morning and I walked into the training room. And I've been in this training room probably 50 times before. It was one of those rooms. You ever been in a room where you just smell it and you know what room you're in? You know, good or bad, it's just it was kind of a stale smelling room. I remember it very, very clearly. But we had a lot of good training sessions in there and did a lot of good work and so I was pretty excited. So I come in and I stopped to get my computer ready. We were going to do a Kaizen event that week. A Smed Quick Changeover event was the plan. And I started to get my computer ready and I couldn't help but notice that there was some kind of weird vibe or bad energy or something in the room, but I couldn't figure out what it was. So I just kind of fought through it and I continued to get my computer ready and I kept feeling this bad vibe and it was starting to bug me, but I couldn't figure it out and so carried on. Some people started to show up and I started looking around the room and I looked into the back and there was a gentleman. He's probably in his 50s. I'll call him Derek for today. It's not his real name, but we'll say he's Derek. And Derek was sitting in the very back row. His arms were crossed and he had a look on his face that said, I'm not exactly thrilled to be here on a Monday morning. So I didn't really press it. I didn't want to make him feel uncomfortable. He was already uncomfortable, so I just kind of left him be. Other people started to show up and everything's going okay. First thing I like to do with all my training sessions, just have everybody kind of go around, introduce themselves and. And so everybody did. Said a little. I think we did a little fun thing to say a name, something your name, something somebody doesn't know about you and how long you've worked there. Something like that. Well, Derek was in the back, so he was the last to go. And he mumbled his name and then he mumbled something else. I couldn't really hear it. But again, I didn't want to push it because Derek was obviously not thrilled to be there. So we started to go through some training that was just way before Gemba Academy existed. So I had to do it the old fashioned way. So had a slide deck and we started going through the training and everything was going okay. Lots of good questions and, you know, everybody else was fully engaged and on board. Derek was not. He still had that sour look on his face and just wasn't. Wasn't feeling it. But I left him alone after the training, took a little break. And then we went to the Gemba, the place the work is done, to go see the machine that we were going to focus on that week. It was a milling machine, if I remember right. And this was in Derek's area, so that's why he was on the team. But I noticed something interesting soon as we Stepped out of the training room and onto the shop floor. Something happened to Derek and like a new energy came over him. Confidence. I don't know what it was, but this was his land. This is where he knew what was going on. And as it turns out, Derek had worked at this plant for almost 25 years. It was a union environment. It wasn't a confrontational union or anything like that, but it was a union environment nonetheless. But I just noticed an immediate change in Derek. I thought that was a good sign. So we went out there and he actually kind of showed some people the work area because he was kind of the subject matter expert of that machine. So thought that was good. We went back into the room and part of the pre work for this event was to videotape some actual changeovers on this machine. And so that first day after the training, we started to break the tape down, as they say. And so we were watching a video and we were documenting every little step of this changeover. And we had some forms and whatnot that we were breaking all the times out. And Derek, I noticed was he wasn't as engaged as all the other people were. But because it was his process and his machine, he helped us a little bit with understanding the basic elements of that changeover. So I thought that was good. Still not bought in yet. So that kind of finished up the first day. The second day we came back in and we started kind of brainstorm ideas for how we can make improvements. And slowly I noticed Derek changing and he started to get more engaged. He wasn't full of vinegar yet, but he was starting to kind of transform a little bit. Third day we came back in, we had some ideas for some improvements to make on this machine, some immediate improvements. So you know, we had some maintenance folks with us and whatnot. New fittings, new fixturings, all kinds of stuff that we were doing on the machine immediately that day. And now I noticed Derek was really engaged because now he was actually coming up with some amazing ideas as well as everybody else. So it was a great teamwork. Everything was coming together and. And so I was really, really happy. Fourth day, we started to pilot some of the changes and we made some pretty incredible improvements. Nearly 50% reduction in setup in just a few days. And we still had a laundry list of things to do on the Kaizen newspaper. We were documenting all the ideas. So it's going to be even better than 50% when it's all said and done. The fifth day rolls around and part of the end of all of our Events. We did a little report out to the leadership team. So plant manager, general manager, all these people start coming in, finance account. I mean, everybody, hr, the whole leadership team lines up in the front, and the operators who worked on the event come up and do a little bit of a presentation. Nothing fancy, Literally a flip chart. And they all kind of practiced. None of them liked doing it. None of them were professional speakers, but they fought through it. Derek also had a piece of the presentation, and as it turned out, he was the last one to speak. So he got up and flipped his flip chart over and he went through his stuff. He actually had a little fixture. I remember he was kind of showing off some of the improvements that we made. He was pretty proud of it. So he did a good job. So I thought, great, we're done. You know, it was success. Everybody's clapping. And then the general manager did something that I'll never forget. They looked right at Derek and said, derek, how did you feel about this event? And I thought, oh, my gosh. I didn't know what he was gonna say, right? I mean, I. You know, he was definitely more bought in at the end, but he wasn't jumping for joy. So I thought this could be really bad or maybe really good. So Derek, he actually looked down at the ground and he paused. And that pause was. It felt like 15 minutes to me. And then he looked up, and this is a true story. The man, grown man, had tears welling in his eyes, and he looked right at that general manager and said that never in the 25 years that I've worked here has anyone listened to me. Like this team listened to me this week. And we made improvements that I've wanted to make for years, but never could or just never was empowered to do. And this man was deeply moved. And I'll tell you, the leadership team was just sitting there with their jaw open like, wow. As they knew who Derek was, they knew he was a very experienced guy and so forth. And so my question is for you to ponder if you know any derricks in your facilities, and if you do know any derricks, next question is, what would happen if you could invest literally three, four days and to this person and literally change them forever? Because what happened with Derek is he went on to then lead many Kaizen events over the years, and I still stay in touch with him on LinkedIn. And I know he's continuing to do continuous improvement. We changed that man's life in four and a half days. And so what I want to do for the remainder of this presentation is just kind of walk you through a roadmap for, for how you can go about creating a similar culture. And I know you guys are well on your journey and many of you already have this culture. So a lot of this is going to be maybe a refresher for you. But perhaps some of you have an opportunity, I don't know. And if you do, this would be fantastic. What I want to do is just start with culture of kaizen. So we need to start with the word culture. So what is culture? There's really many ways to define it. You could say it's the way that we do things, you know, the way we work. Perhaps you have a culture of teamwork. Some great examples. I'm sure we have culture of teamwork here. Culture of competition can be very healthy. Culture of corruption. Unfortunately, in some companies, we all know of some that have gone under due to corruption. That's not a good thing. And then Herb Kelleher, who's the chairman of Southwest Airlines, this is one of his quotes and I love it. Culture is what people do when no one is looking. So I think that's a powerful statement. My second favorite one, Peter Drucker, and that is culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? So he has a lot of brilliant minds in this room right now creating some incredible strategies. But I can tell you what, you're not so incredible that a terrible culture isn't going to eat it alive, because it will. And so that's why culture and people are arguably far more important than any strategy you could come with today or this week. So what about kaizen? So Kaizen, Japanese word literally means change. The first word Kai means change Zen. It's not the same Zen as like Buddhism Zen, it's a different word, it's a different meaning. It means good, goodness, virtue. So a lot of times you'll hear kaizen is change for the better is kind of the loose definition. So at Gemba Academy, this is our kind of preferred definition of Kaizen. It's people centered, scientific problem solving directed towards the benefit of society, with particular interest on people centered. Again, really and truly, if you remember anything from my talk today, please remember that it is all about people. The that's what continuous improvement. The tools are not hard. My 12 year old and I kid you not, I'm not going to brag how smart my kid is, but she really could come in and teach many lean tools to anyone. But she can't lead people yet. One day she will, but right now she can't lead people. But she understands many, many tools. She knows 5s backwards and forwards. She understands point of use better than most industrial engineers because their laundry is point of use before by the bathroom. And she's always instructing her siblings about point of use. So this is what Kaizen is all about. People centered. Masaaki Imai, he's the founder of the Kaizen Institute. He wrote a book called Gemba Kaizen. And then also he was the first person to bring Taichi Yono, who is the, well, the chief architect of the Toyota production system. Mr. Imai brought him to America for the first time. Mr. Imai's definition of Kaizen is everyone improvement, everywhere improvement, everyday improvement. So you know everyone everywhere, every day. Not just a select group of people, not just a select group of leaders, but everyone. Now with that said, when we think about Kaizen, there's actually two types of Kaizen that I want to kind of talk about here. Now, this is a picture of a value stream map. So this is a current state value stream map is what it is. This is our process today, not as it should be, or we want it to be, but just as it is today. That's our current state value stream map. So then in a typical value stream mapping initiative or workshop, you might spend a day or two creating this current state value stream map. Then that same week or perhaps the following week, you get that same team together and you start brainstorming ideas of how we would like this to look. Maybe in three to six months, something like that. And then we'll call this our future state value stream map. Now you can do these within a factory, or you can do an extended value stream of your whole business, or perhaps even including your suppliers and customers, so forth. But the same concept applies. Once we have that future state value stream app, then it's when we're going to start coming up with ideas. Kaizen newspaper is a really common way to just document your ideas. Big board like that, out on the shop or in the office, wherever you're working. Just so everyone sees what we're going to do, who's going to do it, when it's going to be done, that sort of thing. Now when we take all this together and we look at the whole thing, this is what we would call System Kaizen. So it's literally the whole business System Kaizen. And it's really important to have an understanding of the whole system. But then what's going to happen is you're going to work with your team and you're going to say in order to get to this future state, we need to do some smaller, more specific events. So perhaps we need to do some SMED in this area, some quick changeover in this area. Perhaps we need to do total productive maintenance as well. We're having some machine breakdown or whatever it might be. Perhaps we need to do some measurement, system analysis, gage R and R, something like that over in this area. And Maybe there's some 5s just generally in certain areas. So what we are doing is we are identifying very specific point kaizen. Okay? So you start at the system level and then you drill in. In order to get to that future state, we must do point kaizen. So then the natural question, it always comes is, well, which is better, system kaizen or point kaizen? And the answer is, you need them both. Okay? What's very common is many people will run and just do point kaizen like crazy. They'll run around, they'll say, oh, that area is disorganized. Let's do 5s. Okay? Or, man, it's taking a long time to changeover here. Let's do that. Let's do a quick changeover event. Okay, that's nice, but why? So when someone comes to me and says, hey, Ron, we want to buy some Gemba Academy videos, we need to do 5s, that's great, happy to have you as our customer. But if you don't mind me asking, why do you want to do 5s? Well, what do you mean, why do you want to do 5s? It's a 5s. It's the foundation of Lean. I get it. Yeah, I understand. I've read that too. I said it in a video. But really, why do you want to do it? And I just really pushed them, why? What problem are you trying to solve? And a lot of times they don't know. They don't know why they want to do 5s. Maybe they went to a workshop, maybe they went to a three day seminar with all their colleagues and someone told them about 5s, and they said, we really got to do 5s. Go do 5s. Okay? But ultimately you have to answer this question. What problem are you trying to solve? Okay, so all of your continuous improvement efforts should be directed at problems that help you get closer to an ideal state or a future state, whatever that might be. Okay? If you're running around and just doing point kaizen for the sake of being busy or whatever it might be, it's not bad necessarily. Any improvement is good, but it could be so much better if you focus it on a specific problem. So back to 5s. When someone says I want to do 5s and I push them, really, they know why they want to do it. Maybe they have safety issues or maybe they have, you know, they just can't find things so they're losing inefficiencies or productivity, whatever it might be. And I say, well, now you're onto something. So when you roll this out to your organization, don't just say, well, oh, we're going to start doing 5s because people are going to be like, yeah, whatever. If we persevere, this will pass, the corporate guys will leave and then we can get on and run our business if you take that approach. But if you go and say, listen, here's some very specific problems that we're facing as an organization and we feel that if we apply this principle called 5s or SMED or whatever, insert the name of the tool, that we'll be able to improve, improve that situation or counter that root cause. Now you're going to start getting people bought in, or at least they'll be willing to try with an open heart. I talked about Derek and what we did with that Kaizen event. So what I want to do is I want to walk through the mechanics and we have a course called the Kaizen Way. Little commercial, you're already customers, but go watch the whole course and have your folks who are going to run events watch it because it covers everything you need to know for how to run a Kaizen event. I'm just going to give you a highlight here, but what is a Kaizen event? So a Kaizen event is an aggressive and accelerated application of Kaizen techniques in a specific area. So to be sure, it's more than likely a point Kaizen event that has been identified through a larger system Kaizen initiative. What about there's different types of improvement, the different types of Kaizen. Okay, the first one is what we call project based. So this is technology robotics. So these are good. They take a long time and you know, they help, you know, but it's, you know, it just, it's not a massive change necessarily. Okay, then we might have a Kaizen idea suggestion system. So this is a really good thing. And so this is going to be maybe small daily improvements. My friend Paul Aker is over at FastCap. We did a Gemba Live episode with those guys. They're really, really cool company. He does something called 2 second lean. So every day he tasks himself, he's a president and all their associates to make a 2 second improvement every day. And this is what they're doing. So you make every day doing small changes, and that's good, really good. But then if you do Kaizen and you do it properly, okay, you see step change. This is what Kaizen can do. Because, see, that week, I keep coming back to that story. That week we made big improvements on the machine. Don't get me wrong, that was awesome. Productivity helped. It was definitely a bottleneck in his cell. That was good. But the big change was him, okay? And empowering him to go on and lead others through this. Because some might say Derek was. I don't mean this in a condescending way, but might have been a cave person before this event. And cave stands for citizen against virtually everything. Okay, Derek could have been called a cave person, citizen against virtually everything. But by the end of that week, he was no longer a cave person. He had seen the light, so to speak, and now he was leading others through this continuous improvement journey. But you guys ever hear of the broken window theory? Malcolm Gladwell wrote about it in the Tipping Point. New York City, when they had huge crime problems. When was it? Giuliani was the mayor, and so he started this initiative. And in the subways, there was all the graffiti and broken windows everywhere. And so he tasked the city guys to remove the graffiti and fix all the broken windows. And the next day they came back, graffiti was back, broken windows were back. So he said, take it down again. They kept doing that. People were jumping to turnstiles to just jump on the subway without paying. So one day he said, line them up and arrest them all when they do it. So that one day they were just lining them up on the wall, just shuttling him into buses, arresting them all. And then what happened was eventually this thing tipped. That's the point of the book, Tipping Point. And crime plummeted in New York City. And many behavioral scientists attribute it to the broken window theory that if you treat people like they're in a zoo or animals, then they're going to behave like animals. But if you treat them like this, then they're going to behave better. They're going to feel better. So the most important thing about all those pictures is nice. But again, Kaizen has to be part of your strategy. It really shouldn't be just an initiative by one person or something like that. It just needs to be part of the way we do our business. The best companies, the strongest lean thinking companies that I've seen, they don't talk about any program or initiative. It's just that everyone does it. Everyone from the president down to the, you know, janitor, they're all thinking this way and they're all making improvements to their work. And when you have that, it's something pretty special. Let's walk through the days of a typical Kaizen event at a high level. Again, we cover this in much more detail in our Kaizen Way course, so check that out. But day one is a day of learning with Gemba Academy. Many of our customers obviously are using our video, so if it's a. I don't know, they're going to do some waste identification. They may say your homework before you come to the, you know, to the event next week is to watch the 7 deadly waste course or the 5s course, or the Quick Changeover course, whatever it might be, whatever the topic of your event is, have them watch those videos ahead of time. And that way, when you come in, you can still do a quick refresher review, answer any questions, but everybody comes in armed with that knowledge. And that's. We have many consultants that use Gemba Academy. They don't want to come in and teach anymore. They want to come in and do so. They'd rather you watch videos ahead of time to learn the knowledge. Then they can come in and help you facilitate change. So that's what you should also do. In my opinion, we have access to Gemba Academy is have your practitioners who are invoking and leading change leverage our videos to help them be more efficient and not spend four hours training when you can be out on the shop making change. Okay, day two, go to Gemba, or even day one, okay? Whenever you can, go to Gemba, go. You cannot stay in a conference room or a boardroom like this and solve problems. You can strategize and talk and plan, but you're never going to make any changes until you actually go see the problem with your own eyes and talk to the people who are having the problems, okay? The people doing the work on a daily basis. You know, this is a real example. This is one of Gambit Academy's customers. And so why is this leaking? You know, this machine, as the story went, had been leaking for, unfortunately, far too long. And they just kept dealing with it, okay? So they just went out and they started pulling covers off and looking at, trying to figure out what was going on, okay? Instead of just keep filling it up with fluid and cleaning up the mess after. Videotaping is another powerful tool. And like I said, with the Quick Changeover event, we did that. It was part of the homework. Just set up a Video camera have operators video each other, because videotaping can create extreme anxiety. If Francisco shows up with his video camera and mics and all that, the operators are going to be like, what the heck is going on here? But if one of their colleagues grabs a camera and says, come on, you knucklehead, let's go do it, then it's fun, right? And now they're engaged. There's no more. They're not nervous anymore. So don't send your senior industrial engineer out with a video camera, okay? That's just going to freak people out. But nothing beats video. When you want to take step back and just watch and observe what's going on. Hit pause, rewind. Oh, look at that. Look at how he's reaching. How many steps did it take to go from there to there? I don't know. Rewind it. Let's count them. You know, it's very powerful to use video now. You can also observe with your own eyes, and you should, but you can't rewind in your own mind. You can rewind a video. This is an example of a time observation sheet, very similar to the one that we would have used that day with Derek and his team. This is an example of a quick changeover. So you're just breaking out the elements and putting the timing on a video. It's easy. You just hit pause and write the time and then do the math and you can figure out how long that element is. So using tools like this early on in a Kaizen event really help you understand what's going on. Again, we've already seen an example of a Kaizen newspaper, and we have templates we can share with you in Gembe Academy's solutions there. But it doesn't have to be exactly like this. But what's powerful is that this isn't a spreadsheet on someone's computer. It's not a Gantt chart on some project manager's computer. It's a big, huge sheet of paper printed out on a plotter of some sort. And it's put out on the shop floor or somewhere where everyone can see it. That's what's important about a Kaiser newspaper. Day three is normally. And again, this is flexible, right? You don't have to do it all in this exact order. But typically day three is when we go out and we make change. So this was that same machine. They're pulling this stuff out and there was some sludge and stuff down here that many of these people had never seen, ever. And they'd worked there for quite a while. And so this is just an example of just getting after it and cleaning and doing whatever it takes to improve the job. This is an example of a guy was trying to figure out how much motion was going on in a plant, how much walking, how much transportation. And so they're using a little pedometer to figure that out. A lot of times you'll do some cleaning or painting or whatever. And this backstory here was this particular group of people were looking at better ways to organize. They had stuff all over the floor. Instead of looking for some racking, they thought they were going to have to go buy some. And then one of the guys said, I remember I just saw that we're getting rid. We're throwing a bunch of this stuff out. So they went outside. I took those pictures out. I should have left them in. But they literally pulled this stuff out of the trash and brought it back in, cleaned it up, painted it, and boom, problem solved. And so instead of throwing it away, they repurposed it. So I thought that was great. Day four is test and refine. So, you know, if it's some sort of organization, you might be tweaking your shadow board. That's what these guys are doing. Got all their tools cut out, and they're making a nice shadow board there. But this is also with quick changeover, you're actually practicing the event. It's kind of like any race car fans in here. NASCAR or F. Formula one or something. Do they ever practice pit stops a lot? Right? So that's why changeovers, this is when you practice. You go out there and you run through the various elements to make sure that you can figure out how to do it. And then when you get it down, videotape it. What an amazing training tool for. Then all operators say, you want to know how to do the changeover? Watch this video. Okay, there's your standard work. Watch this video. Here's some more examples of what you could do. This was an event that I worked on. This gauge was in pretty bad shape. And so they cleaned it up, and then they couldn't remember where the needle was supposed to be. So the maintenance guy said, no, it needs to be right about here. So. So they just laid some tape down. Very simple, very simple improvement, but very, very effective because now anybody can walk up and tell whether or not you are in between the lines. And then day five is sustaining and celebration. This is a graph of OEE overall equipment effectiveness for a TPM type program. So just really monitoring. What's your goal? OEE of 85%. And so they're plotting this. So maybe on the first day of the event being over, they start the chart, okay? And then we figure out how we're going to plot this, how we're going to measure this, how we're going to sustain this. So it's very important that you're measuring and understand what your goal is and taking proactive steps. When you're not there, there's a picture of a guy just celebrating the success. Now, this is very important that you do some recognitions. And our newest course, culture of Kaizen, we talk a lot about brain science. I don't really have anything for you here today, but one of the chemicals in our brain is serotonin, and it's very, very powerful. And serotonin is released. When you say, hey, Eli, you did a fantastic job today, stand up and let your associates clap for you. If you do that because of the great work that he did or anybody, then serotonin is now flooding through Eli's body, and he feels incredible. And that's what happens when you give others recognition, especially in front of a group of peers. It's extremely, extremely powerful. And oxytocin is also released. That's the feel good. And when we feel happy, we have oxytocin. That's what happens. That's why these celebration things aren't just formalities. They really are important part of the journey, especially for the people that have been involved. So what I want to do to kind of finish up my presentation is kind of transition now into just motivation in general again in that same culture of Kaizen course. We go through this in a little bit more detail, but has anybody ever heard of an author called Dan Pink? He wrote a book called what motivates People? Highly. Highly. Suggest you guys all read that. It's a fantastic book. Dan Pink drive is the name of the book. And what he talks about in the book is that unfortunately, and this is from The, I think 2013 Gallup poll in America, at least. I don't know how it is in other countries, but I'm guessing It's probably similar. 70% of all American workers, 70% of all American workers are not engaged or actively disengaged. Let that sink in for a second. 7 out of 10 folks that work for you right now are either not engaged or actively disengaged. Actively disengaged. That's bad, right? I mean, that means they are actively, maybe not disobedient, but they're just not on board at all. This is costing the US economy billions with a B of dollars. This lack of productivity. That's not a new problem, unfortunately, because Dr. W. Edwards Deming said many, many years ago that if management stopped demotivating their employees, then they wouldn't have to worry so much about motivating them. So this is a very blunt, hurtful statement, but it's very true. So the two types of motivation that Dan Pink talks about in his book are extrinsic motivation is the first one. Extrinsic motivation is what you would call the carrot. Okay, so you're dangling some prize, maybe it's a bonus, maybe it's some kind of reward. This is money of some sort. Now I don't mean to say that this is always bad because it can be effective, especially if you're doing some sorts of competition or, or something like that in a friendly, good spirited way, it can be very effective. But if it's your only way of motivating, then it's not going to be all that effective. Pink does say that if you're like a frontline worker who's like maybe assembling parts or something like that, that this quotas or whatnot, those can be somewhat effective. But anyone sitting in here, even though you probably all have bonuses of some sort and you like it when you get it, that's not what you get out of bed for every day. Okay? It's just not. So the question is, is there a better way than extrinsic motivation? And there is, and it's called intrinsic motivation. And so for intrinsic motivation you have to have three things. Mastery, autonomy, and purpose. So let's talk about autonomy. So autonomy is giving your associates the freedom to think, the freedom to perhaps problem solve, the freedom to fail from time to time without bad consequences. This is what kids want when kids are playing. They want autonomy. Leave me alone. I want to play. We learn it from a very young age, but then as we grow up, for some reason autonomy is sucked out of our life. And we're kind of told that we have to do it in certain ways and that's not good for intrinsic motivation. So we need to kind of break free of that and let people have autonomy. There's another term called autonomous teams, and this is a concept many lean thinking companies talk about. Where the teams literally, my colleague Steve Cain, when he was at his previous company, they had autonomous teams and they literally the value streams, literally managed their entire PL themselves. They had complete responsibility, they ordered their own parts, they, they took care of all the supply chain Issues. They took care of the customers, everything. They had total autonomy. Now, there was still a supervisor who was there to coach and mentor, but it was the people running the business. Okay? And it's not easy. In the beginning, there's some hiccups, but once you really get that rolling, it's a train that cannot be stopped. Mastery is the second thing that you need to have for intrinsic motivation. And mastery is. It's when you get good at your job. You know, ever heard of being in the zone when you're working and you're really into your work, and then next thing you know, it's like, golly, two hours have passed and I didn't even know it, Right? This is an example of how you were really. You were probably doing a good job. You were getting things done. You were seeing results. So this is dopamine being released in your brain. When you get stuff done, you feel good. Dopamine, you cross off a to do list item, okay? But what's really going on is you feel like you're getting better, and you feel like you went home, like you did something that day. And that's more than likely because you were achieving mastery on something versus if you ever go home with your head, like, man, I just got my butt kicked all day. I don't feel like I accomplished anything. I didn't get anything done, and I don't feel like I did anything. Well, has anybody ever felt like that? I mean, we all have, right? That's because maybe we're taking on too much or whatever it might be, but it's mastery that's really behind it, that we're not coming closer or not getting better at our work. And then the last one, arguably the most important, is purpose. We need to back to what problem we're trying to solve. But really, it's bigger than that. When I think about Derek and that story, I think about what was the real purpose of that event. The changeover was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But the purpose. My purpose of continuous improvement is. Is to change people's lives. That's why I do this. And when I ran manufacturing for a $5 billion company, sure, I had to help them be successful. You know, we had operating income to get. Okay, I don't want to kid you that. But ultimately, my job, what I felt I was empowered to do, was build people and help people improve their lives and their jobs, because I knew that if I did that, the profits would come as a result of that. So that's. You all have to figure out for yourselves. What's your purpose and what's your organization's purpose? You know, what's your leadership purpose? You know, are you really, truly invested in your people? Or is it just something that we say, let's get the numbers, let's make some money. Everybody will leave us alone. Okay, if you do that, then, you know, sure, if you have a. You have a great product, so you're making money. Right? But the question is, how much money could you be making if every one of your associates became Derek? Okay, so the closing story that I want to give is back to Derek and the plant that he worked at. It was about a month later I came back, and we were going to run another event. So I was walking through the shop to go back to that training room to start the whole thing over again, and I noticed that there were some people giving me dirty looks. I was like, oh, my gosh, I've never gotten that before. You know, I've been in this plant many, many times, and I couldn't figure it out. And it happened in a couple different areas. And so my friend Jeff, who worked in that plant, I said, jeff, what's going on? These guys are giving me dirty looks. I mean, thought we did a great job. You know, all the rest of it, things were turning around. Here he goes, yeah, people are a little bit upset. Like, why are they upset? He said, because you're not working in their area this week. And I thought, man, that's awesome. I mean, how incredible would that be that you have people upset that you're not working and improving in their area that particular week? So that plant went on to this in Springville, Utah, that particular plant, and they are still kicking butt and taking names to this day. And I attribute a lot of it, not all of it, to that one Kaizen. I don't mean to say we did that one Kaizen event, and it changed the whole world, but it's a series of things, of activities like that that went. We were relentless. We didn't stop. We just went and went and went. We broke through barriers, and we involved all the people from all levels, leadership all the way down to frontline employees. And eventually that thing tipped, and then you couldn't stop it. And you can't stop it now now that it's tipped and they're off and running. So my challenge to you all is, is to maybe we come back in a year from now. Hopefully you can tell some stories of your own derricks and your own success stories of how you've leveraged things such as kaizen and just continuous improvement in general to make your business better, more importantly, the lives of your associates better. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy Podcast. Now it's time to take a free, no strings attached, fully functional, functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma. Over at GembaCademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge at GembaAcademy.com.