GA 087 | Practical Problem Solving: Part Six with Jon Miller

You're listening to episode 87 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 Lean and Six Sigma videos over@gembacademy.com now then, today I'm excited to bring John Miller back onto the show for our final installment of our Practical problem solving series of podcasts we've been doing. And in the last episode that we. The last PPS episode, I rattled off about four different URLs, which was kind of confusing. Um, but what we've done to kind of counter that that problem was we've created a dedicated landing page for all of John's PPS podcasts that we've done. And to access that page, Simply go to gembapodcast.compps like for practical problem solving. So again, that's gembapodcast.compps so we'll have all of John's episodes linked to that, as well as any other PPS related articles and whatnot that we've covered. We'll put it all on that one page to make it easy for you to follow. But anyhow, in this final installment of this series, we talk about step eight of the PPS step, and John will cover what that is. But it's basically the final step of the pdca. So it's the act step, really is what we're going to cover in here. And as normal, John brings up some things that I had never thought of before. And I'm just so grateful to have John as my business partner and friend. He's just one of the brightest Lean thinkers that I've ever met. So if you want to go to GembaPodcast.com you can find the show notes for this particular episode. But again, we'll have all that linked@gembapodcast.com pps so that's the best place to go. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, John, well, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

It's going well, Ron, thanks.

All right, well, we have had quite the journey here in this PPS series of Podcasts, it's been pretty popular and I mentioned in the, in the intro that we've actually created a landing page, that we're just going to have all these episodes on one page for easy access. And I'll give that URL out again one more time, which is gembapodcast.com just the letters PPS for practical problem solving. So that'll be a one, one stop shopping, if you will, for all these episodes. And I know Mark Grabin actually linked to them this morning, so I don't know if you saw that, John, but he's writing some blog articles on PPS and he linked to these podcasts, so that was pretty cool.

Yeah, that was nice of Mark.

Yeah. Yeah. So, all right, well, step eight, John. Let's just jump right into it. Do you have a quote that possibly relates.

Yeah, I do, actually, directly. It's a quote from Deming, from Dr. Deming. And it, the quote is, what do we mean by act? Adopt a change or abandon it, or run it through the cycle again under different environmental conditions, different materials, different people, See if we get anything like the same result. Hmm.

Okay.

He's talking here directly about the act part of the PDCA cycle. This is from one of his lectures, I think, if I recall correctly. I think this. I got this quote out of the Essential Deming, which is a book written by a fellow named Orsini. Is it a fellow or is it a lady? I don't remember, but it may be a lady. I think it was a female professor. But any case, he talks about a lot of different things. It's a good collection of his reflections. And I found this, and I'd written it down some time ago, so I dug it up. But yeah. So what does it mean? It means to act is either to adopt a change. So if it's a successful change, you adopt it, you make it a standard, or you abandon it if it doesn't work, or run it through the cycle again, PDCA cycle again, under different conditions to say, okay, that worked, but will this work in a different condition in a different country, in a different time of year, with a different team, a different product, with a different mix, different materials, all those kind of things, and see if we get the same result. So he's basically saying it's the place where we decide what do we do? Do we run the experiment more, or do we say this is a. This is a good reliable outcome that we need to. We need to take further, or is it a failure? This is not a fruitful avenue of Exploration. So I think that summarizes what, you know, the whole spirit of pdca, but also the critical. The importance of the ACT step, which is. Which is essentially what we do in step eight, which is the. Which is the final step in the PDCA cycle. If you want to call it the final step, it's the. It's the step before the first step. So it's. Because it's a cycle. Yeah. So where we. And what we call the step eight, it's. I don't know, it's been called a number of different things from standardize or sustain or share, all these kind of different things. I just sort of think of it as the ACT step.

But, yeah, now and the last episode, I hinted at a question that I wanted to ask you, and I don't know if this is the appropriate time to ask it or not, but, you know, sometimes in PDCA we hear the A being referred to as adjust instead of act. What's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, as long as the content of what you do is correct, then it doesn't really matter what you call it. I've heard it called act. I've heard it called Adjust. I've heard it called Even Adapt, or seen it right sitting written that way. It was originally act. I think the way Deming taught it, or the way at least it came out of his teachings in Japan was act. And I think my preference is act. I think Adjust is good. But if you summarize in three words, and these are Deming's words in three words, what this step eight and what the act phase of the PDC cycle is all about, it's take appropriate action. Those are the three words. He says that, and I think that's really concise. You know, we could end the podcast here because, you know, it's. What do you do once you've done steps one through seven? You've checked your process and results, you've learned some things, you've gotten some results, good or bad. So what do you do now? Well, you take appropriate action. You do what needs to be done, you know, and that's. You shouldn't have to be walked through. What is that appropriate action? If you're at that point? It's a question of, you know, competency and common sense and human psychology is, are these. Are the people, the. The teams, the leaders, whatever, are they going to take appropriate action based on the findings or are they going to put their head in the sand or whatever, you know, so, yeah, so those are. That's really, I think, to Answer your question. Act is, is what I, what I lean to. But it's interesting. We kind of maybe, maybe go on a little side sidetrack here. But there's. Deming didn't like the C of the pdca. He didn't like the check. He liked it. He made it. I think around 1993 when he was summarizing his thoughts and writings and so forth, he was saying, you know, I'm not comfortable with check. I'd rather have it be study, plan, do, study, act, plan, do, study, act. So you'll see that a lot or you'll see plan, do, study, adjust. And that I think mostly was because he was uncomfortable with the idea of checking being too much like policing. You know, how he was very much about management should be removing fear and not setting quotas so that checking probably in the English language felt too much like somebody looking over your shoulder. But in fact, when he learned it from Shewhart, when you learned the PDCA cycle, it was just called the scientific learning and improvement cycle. And Deming first taught that to the Japanese as not a, a specific production oriented improvement cycle, but for product development. For his first cycle was design, produce, sell and redesign based on market feedback. So that was his. It's more kind of like a lean startup, build, measure, learn kind of thing instead of. For him it was design, produce, sell and then redesign. But the Japanese people, the Juice Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers, people that really applied this in production heavily. They made it the PDCA cycle, plan, do, check, act specific to production. So I think that's interesting is that Deming didn't like the check. The reasoning for why he didn't like the check, I don't think is. I think if you would have studied what they were actually doing during the check phase, like we talked about in step seven, he would have probably been more comfortable with it. But yeah, it's. I think people are free to call it whatever they will. The only thing I would say is, you know, plan and do. If you change plan to something else, maybe prepare, but you know, messing around too much with the words and do. I don't know what could you replace do with and do is do. Yeah, yeah. So that's. Yeah, I think actually the learning and improvement cycle going all the way back to Shewhart. What's interesting about that is nowadays people are, let's say the lean communities sort of coming back to the idea heavily and strongly that it's not just about improvement, it's about learning. And I think after decades of focusing Lean and Kaizen, continuous improvement on improvement and recognizing just how important it is to pair it with learning so that people can get better at improving, but can sustain and sustain the gains, change their behaviors and so forth. And where does that come from? Where does that gap come from? And how is that message lost? I don't think it was lost in Japan largely because, well, culturally or historically, but it could be that, at least in the United States, Wall street rewards mainly financial performance, improved results. There's no measure of organizational learning. There's no value placed on that. Right. If you do pdca. And PDCA is a learning and improvement cycle. We only measure the improvement part, at least in financial terms. Executives are only motivated to improve, not to learn. Now, they may personally be motivated, but there's nothing in their bonus that says how much did you learn? Or how much did you help your organization learn? So I think that's maybe the incentives part is at the source of lean becoming more about improvement, less about learning. I think it has to be a balance. You can't have just one or the other. But yeah, that's kind of a long sidetrack on pdca, where it came from and why we got to where we are. So I'm sorry if. That's awesome.

No, that's great. That's great. That's great. All right, well, let's just go back into Step eight now, John, and focus in on it. So you mentioned briefly kind of some of the names, but let's dig a little bit more. What is it? What is Step eight?

Yeah, well, in terms of the practical problem solving cycle, it's the last thing you do before you either wrap up the project or call the problem solved for now or go to the next step of the problem solving. So it may be that you've broken down the problem from a big, vague, complex one into several component problems. You've taken it through the bps practical problem solving steps for one of the broken down problems and then you say, okay, we've learned, now let's take the next chunk of the problem and turn the cycle again. So that could be where you're going with it.

Yeah, and I think, I think the level said, I think in GEMBA Academy's PPS course, we refer to Step eight just for people who are curious about what we call it. We call it standardized success and learn from failures. That's kind of the generic term that we gave it. But like you said, it could be called different things.

Yeah, yeah. Standardizing. There's a. If you look at the if you look at step eight, if you look at the whole ACT phase of, of the PDCA cycle, what goes into it, I think there's four major parts to it and they're overlapping. But if you can break it down into four, I suppose, and fortunately or unfortunately they all start with the letter S, So it's the 4s of the act phase. You can hopefully somebody will email and find a better words for these or maybe a different kind of acronym if they change the letters around so it doesn't get confusing with 5s or whatever. But standardized is the first one. Obviously you document the new process, the new improved process as a standard and set that, put that in place, or you update existing standards based on the new process or whatever new method that you've developed. Second is to put sustainment in place. And what that means is to make sure that checking the standards, auditing the standards is part of the new. You can call it leader standard work or daily management, or your go see GEMBA routine on the part of team leaders, supervisors, managers, all the way up to as far up as your leader standard work goes. So that's the key part of sustaining is first you have to check it, you have to keep auditing it, you have to have your kamishibai and you have to have your random audits and accountability boards. And then you have to also be feeding any gaps versus reality versus that new standard into the new improvement cycle. You can't sustain without actually, without actually addressing your erosion of that standard because standards will erode. So that's part of it is you're setting it up so that you can be checking standards. So that's part of the act phase. But that also, it's something you sort of kick off in this act phase, but it goes on. Obviously it becomes part of normal management. It isn't done or finished. In step eight, you just establish the. You link it to daily management and your daily checks. 3rds is sharing. Now you could just call this yokoten in Japanese if you want that. And yokoten is just. It just means horizontal deployment or deploying it sideways. And what that means in terms of problem solving is you have a good result and you adopt it in other places, other environments. So it could be internal sharing sessions. Best practices could be putting it up on a, on a countermeasure or solution database within the organization. It could be doing information sessions, bag lunches, workshops, however formal or informal, whatever your organization does with it. A lot of times at the end of a Kaizen event or a project Review, you'll have people from other locations, other departments coming to listen and learn and see what they can pick up, see what they can take and ask questions and then go back and say, all right, let's try that in our location. So that's something that should be part of the step 8 or part of the act phase. It's sort of beyond the scope of any particular focused problem solving team. But they have to. So they have to be supported by some kind of a. Let's say traditionally, what might be called a Kaizen promotion office or a lean organization within or continuous improvement organization or some sort of central or corporate quasi central body that has the interest of the whole in mind. Right? Because each group, each division, each plant might say, well, you can come and see, you can come and take whatever I have, but I'm not going to push it out to you. And so there has to be some. Well, not has to be, but often it's helpful if there's some central body that's collecting this information and disseminating it.

So one question I have for you is when we talk about Yokoten, we talk about it being horrible. Horizontal sharing versus I guess vertical sharing, for lack of a better word. What's the difference there? Is it, in other words?

Yeah, I guess horizontal sharing. It's with peers, it's with other. So if you have an improvement in a factory and you have other factories in your company, then instead of taking an innovative process that you developed to handle materials or schedule production or whatever and saying, okay, let's see if we can apply that to upstream, to upstream, downstream to sales and product development, when they might say, why are you giving me warehousing tips when I'm in sales? Right. That would be a vertical example. Or you're trying to apply production scheduling methods to how your general manager does annual planning. I mean, that doesn't really make sense. There can always be things that are broad and general improvements that anybody can learn from, in which case you are peers. If there's a better way to do a quick and easy Kaiser and Kaiser suggestion type of a thing, if you come up with that, then the horizontal version of that would be in every person in the company, regardless of vertical status. Because every person can and should be contributing to improvement. Right? That's something. That's a very flat, non process specific thing. So it can easily go sideways and there's no vertical for it to go. Whereas something that's focused on a certain step in the process chain horizontally, it means it's going across equivalent Processes, organizations, people, peers, in other words, where it makes sense to translate it. But it's not meant to say, well, salespeople can't come to a factory presentation and try to learn. Absolutely, everybody should learn from the process. But it's more about learning what specific countermeasures that are being put in place technically, physically, visibly, what can we take home? What can we do if not copy and paste? Copy, adapt and paste. That's one and two is what lessons do we have regarding how we do problem solving?

Yeah, and I don't know. I don't know if this is correct or not, but something. Back when I worked in the industry, when I used to think about this concept, it would be that I shouldn't have to. Let's say I made an improvement and I wanted to share it with my friends over in our Utah facility, for example, because I thought that they could benefit from it. Sometimes what happened was I would tell my boss and then my boss would communicate with the big boss over there in Utah, and then the big boss would go tell the folks. Whereas I would be like, you know what? I don't care if my boss communicates with his boss or colleague, that's fine. But I want to also communicate with my direct colleagues and associates over at the Utah plant. So I almost took it to be also that, you know, it's okay for me to talk directly with the people who are doing the work and doesn't have to be the big bosses, if you will. Always orchestrating the show.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's. That depends on the. That really depends on the culture of the company and the country. It's a little bit utopian. If you tried to do that in some places you have a lot of lean guys getting fired because it just isn't culturally appropriate. And that's something that you won't change right away. Maybe in the Middle east or Southeast Asia, some places where organizations are very hierarchical and you don't go around your boss, go to your boss's peer in another location and say, hey, try this. It's just not done. And right or wrong, it's just the culture. So I think if that's lean and kaizen and continuous improvement problem solving, that may shift the culture towards that becoming okay. But if it's not okay, I certainly wouldn't say, well, Yoko 10 says it's very, very peer to peer and everybody should skip levels and just talk to anybody. I think it's still. You still have to work within the realities and whatever are the. Or good practices within your organization. If, and I think in your case, you know, you had, you probably had a culture that was very open and vibrant and willing to share. And it was like, you don't have to take it through me, just go ahead and blast it out. You're the lean director, so tell everybody the good news. So I think that's, that's ideal. I think that's ideal and it's, it's certainly meant to be. It's not meant to. The horizontal is not meant to imply, you know, only, you know, stick to your, stick to your level of people. It's more meant to be if we've changed the process. What is an equivalent or peer process? What rests alongside this? In other words, it is an upstream or downstream to it. Because upstream or downstream, it's assumed that you're communicating with them already. Right. If you make a change to a process, number three, you have to have involved process two and four in the problem solving process or at least communicated with them so they know what's coming and what they're feeding into versus saying, well, there's a different value stream, different location, different segment of our business. But I think you could learn from this or I think this is something. You've got similar machines. We've got similar, we've got machines that this type of technology or methodology for changeover, for example, could benefit. You got it? I think that's, yeah, that's more the intent there.

Okay, so that's the third S. Yeah.

And then the fourth is just start again. So again, you could be. Begin again if you wanted to get away with S's. But so that's just meaning that reminding you that it's a cycle. It isn't that you're done with problem solving and you pack up your A3 and you, you move on to other things. But you have to sort of pay it forward and say, okay, here's everything we learned. Here's what is left to be done. Here's a chunk of the previous problem breakdown that still needs to be addressed. Here's some new issues that came up that we can feed into the, to the problem solving hopper or the, or the funnel to prioritize and work on. It could be, you know, it could be okoten that you're going to go do, you're going to go to another location, help them do the same thing and that becomes part of it. But it's just keep like in the Deming quote, you know, it's to take it through the cycle again, take it through the Cycle again. And it could be on the same topic, it could be on a slightly different topic. But to take what lessons are learned, take what knowledge has been gained and keep, keep, keep it going, keep it continuously moving.

So, so you. Let's meet. Let me cover the four again to make sure everybody has them. So the first S was standardize. Second one you had was sustain.

Yeah. Really it's setting up the process for sustaining. Right. Because sustain isn't the, isn't the task. It's. It's a ongoing daily effort.

Third one was sharing.

Yep.

And then, and then the fourth one is start again.

Yeah, that's kind of how I think of it. There may be other things that people like to do. Celebrate. You can certainly put that in there. A lot of people put that as part of a problem solving cycle is that there's a celebration recognition at the end, but it isn't technically part of the PDCA cycle. Looking at it from a problem solving point of view, but from a organizational point of view, from a motivation point of view, human resource development point of view, it makes a lot of sense to add other things like celebrate or recognize in there. It's just that's something you can do separate from or in parallel to. It's not necessarily. The problem solving itself doesn't necessarily fail if you don't recognize and celebrate that sort of more organization wide. It's like saying why don't we have train and educate up in the plan phase of a PDCA cycle? Well, it actually really, it really exists there just we don't talk about it because there's sort of an assumption that if you're bringing people together to problem solve, you've already done enough upfront education and training or you recognize that people don't even know what you're talking about and you'll stop and pause and train. So putting it in there as a thing is not. But that might be an interesting, might be an interesting look just to kind of do a parallel study through the, the steps of problem solving, the eight steps. Look at the PDC cycle and say what are the assumptions in parallel regarding human resource development and training and all the kind of things we talked about, recognition and so forth that are somewhat baked into the process. But maybe somebody like me, maybe I'm assuming that it's being done and if it isn't done, what are the potential gaps? What are the potential risks? So maybe that's a future podcast. Just.

There you go.

Anyhow, that's okay. Yes. So there, those are the four you could Put other things in it. But those are the sort of the four core things that I think are needed in the, in step eight in the act phase.

Okay, well, what about. I know something that we talk about in the, in our PPS course as it relates more to the learn from failures side of things. We talk about, about Hansai or reflection. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I think reflection, you can certainly do reflection anytime, anywhere. It's daily. It should be a daily, a daily thing. You know, after every, every sporting event where you lose, you look at the tape and you say, oh, that was my bad. After a good day at work, bad day at work, you say an unkind word to somebody because you hadn't had lunch yet and you go, that was my bad. I should make sure I have a granola bar at my desk or whatever. So that's. There's, there's constantly opportunities to be self reflective and do hansei. In terms of the problem solving cycle or the eight steps, I think it mostly resides within step seven as sort of your big, big moment to check and reflect and do Hansei. And then step eight really is take appropriate action. Right. Hansei is good, but you got to do something about it. So there isn't a lot of hansei built into step eight. You could do a mini check cycle within ACT and say, okay, how did that go? How did our act, how did our step eight go? You could always do an after action when you're ready to hand off from step A back to step one. So that's there. But there isn't a huge element of Hansei or let's say a formal element of it, any more than there is on a day to day basis. Okay.

All right. Well, John, what else do you want to say about this step or do we want to kind of get into what can go wrong and where do you see people going wrong with this step?

Yeah, not a lot more to say. You know, it really is take appropriate action. If you've done everything up to this point, it's really kind of putting a bow on the whole thing and then making sure you can present the whole experience of the problem solving to the next generation, to whoever's going to take it to another cycle. What could go wrong? It's not so much about what can go wrong as what people realize or learn. Sort of let the reflection settle in. And many times step seven and step eight sort of happen, if not together, then in very rapid succession. There isn't a big check process and then you take a break and you come back a week later and you do ACT because you check and you realize and then once you have your findings, it's okay. What do we do about it? Take appropriate action. So I think one thing maybe is there's two ways. So I've just mentioned that you could take it the wrong way is to sort of treat it as its own separate phase and do a check workshop and then come back and do an ACT workshop. And I've seen problem solving teams and plans. And A three is kind of schedule step eight and the activities in the ACT phase in its own little separate time. Because that's kind of how you do things. You block it off. But you just have to do it in a way that comes naturally. I think if it comes naturally for you that way to block off a separate amount of time to go through and do the standardizing and sharing, that's fine. Certainly the yokoten can be its own discrete activity in some ways. But it's sort of making sure you've done those 4s things as you're wrapping up, that the standards should be in place. Standards should be in place. Sustaining should be a part of the discussion through the whole thing. And putting leader standard work in place, the sharing, there should be infrastructure in the organization to promote that. And it shouldn't be just a one time event or one time meeting. So that's more just making sure that the team and the people sponsoring the problem solving or doing, doing enough. So I think that's, I guess integrating it, making it natural. So step seven and eight, you could almost talk about them together. But there are two distinct types of activities. And yet they have to really be done in quite a linked fashion. But then blending them too much and sort of doing one before the other, doing ACT things before you've even done checking. That's another danger. Just as people tend to talk about sustaining before you have standards, how are we going to sustain these gains? Well, do you have good standards in place? Do you have good daily management and visualization in place? That can be something people realize. So those are the kind of things. But yeah, it's, you know, if you've gotten through step seven and you've been honest with yourself, then, and if you take appropriate action, you can't really, really go too far wrong with this step. And Maybe sometimes the A3 formats, A3 templates, I think that can constrain your thinking. I think I'm not a big fan of the A3 template because I should correct, I should be clear. I'm a big fan of a 3 thinking. I'm just not a fan of the template idea of problem solving because you tend to get boxed into, literally, a box made of ink and paper. And so you scribble a couple sentences in your step eight and you're done, which is really quite constraining. It's quite hard to do. And I've seen that where at the very end of a problem solving cycle, I've got to fight the team and fight the internal coach and fight the sponsor and say, you haven't finished it. You haven't done step A. You haven't finished with act. And they say, what do you mean? And I take them through this whole podcast speech and I point to the box and say, that's not what should go there. And that's not the point of this phase. And so that's a little bit of a struggle. I think people can. People are happy. It's a downer, right? When your coach is saying, well, you haven't quite done it yet. And when I say fight, it's just if you haven't done your homework up front. And sometimes I'm called in to look at problem solving efforts that are basically done or almost done or here's our corporate standard. So it's not really up to me to take them all the way back and say, okay, stop, rearrange, reorganize. But putting that feedback into. Into saying, let's make sure that this last step isn't just ticking the box. You know, just fill in, fill in this part of the A3, and then we're done and we can move on. I think that's something that is. You need to put something there. But it's a little bit. If you look at an A3, that's probably the smallest, smallest part of the A3 on any A3 document. Right? What happens last? And that has a big effect on how the ideas get spread and what you do next.

Because they have this little sliver left in the lower right hand corner, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think, like we try to say in our A3 course, it's. It's not about the piece of paper, right. It's the thinking that goes into it that's. That's important. So you'll hear the question, do you have a template that I can use? No, no, we don't have a template. And you can grab a piece of paper if you'd like and, you know, start that way. But yeah, I think you can get. It's kind of similar to being enamored with A tool when you don't understand why you're doing it. Right.

So yeah, yeah, that's why I think, I think that's, that's maybe one of the weaker areas. And I haven't seen that done very well even in some of the, some of the A3 papers, let's say from examples of Toyota and I think that could be a Toyota, that Yokoten is such a part of what they do. Living and breathing standards and auditing and sustaining is such a, such a part of what they do that what we see in sort of the received wisdom of A3s from Toyota is that there isn't a lot of, let's say it's not really visible, it's not clear what the thinking is behind step eight and the act phase because it's. So much of it is implied. So much of it is already part of the culture that you're sort of trying to copy. It's like trying to copy the form of a very, very good, whatever figure skater or football player. Something that you. There's a lot of training and workout and exercise and conditioning that went into being able to make those, whatever it is, spins or flips or jumps that when you say, oh, that looks easy, I just have to turn around and then I'm done. Well, no, there's actually a lot of muscle and memory and drilling that's gone into it. So just copying the shape of that box isn't going to get it done. I think that's one thing that if we could somehow make that more visible and on that piece of paper, it's quite limiting. But many organizations do get it. When they do talk about A three thinking, they do talk about the, the last step in it. And you talk about standardizing, sustaining, sharing and starting again. They all want to do that, they all believe in that. So it's just a question of how do you make that visible from having completed one problem solving cycle 1, A3, let's say one bottom right corner of an A3 to the top left of the next one. So if you've got a good visualization, you've got mother and child A3s, you've got a good library of A3s and so forth and show how one leads to the other. And again, going back to my earlier point, it's an improvement, a learning and improvement cycle. So if you're documenting your learning, well, cycle to cycle, problem to problem, as well as tracking your actual KPIs in terms of the operation and financial performance, then you do well, then you do. Well, it just isn't always the case. So I think after you answer your question, I think organizations don't fail, let's say, but they don't do a great job of capturing and quantifying their learning explicitly. Sometimes it's learned and captured implicitly and it changes behaviors from problem solving cycle to cycle within the team. But does it really get stored in the library of that organization's knowledge about how to do these things? Is it really made into a, a standard or a manual of how to do problem solving? Not as much. Not as much, but. But at least there's a mechanism for it. All right.

Well, goodness, John, we've covered a lot of Crown in these episodes. It's been fantastic. So thank you for, for taking time to, to visit with us. And I know lots of people have gotten a lot of value from this. So again, I want to give out that URL. If you want to bookmark this and kind of make it a reference point, it's gembapodcast.com pps and we'll just keep that as a static landing page for forever and we add more PPS related material. We'll. We'll add it to that page as well.

So.

So I guess. And also when your, when your book is finally finished, John. Right. Your. Your problem solving book, I guess. Or is that still. It's still in the works or what do you think?

It's on. It's on hiatus. I haven't done much with it recently. We'll see. We'll see how it is. One of my problems is I have lots of. I'm a curious person, lots of interest. So if I don't take something to completion and it ends up being. Ends up being work in process. And currently it's. It's work in process. I haven't lost interest in it, but other things have become more interesting. So I just have to.

Okay.

Just have to return to it and.

Well, perhaps you can apply PPS to that.

Right. I'm not sure it's a problem. I don't know. I don't know what the. I mean, it was fun writing how much of it that I did write it helped me clarify my thinking. And not having it be a book isn't really a problem at the moment at least. So I have to. I have to be writing. I have to be closing a gap. Writing the book has to close a gap or has to solve a problem. If it doesn't, then it becomes just something I've assigned myself to do. And at some point that doesn't work because as you realize that there are other things that are more interesting. So. But you're right. You're right. Yeah. I could address the whip part of the as a problem to solve.

All right, well, good stuff, John. Well, thanks again. And I look forward to catching back up with you on another episode down the road on some other interesting topic.

Sounds good. Talk to you soon. All right, John, take care.

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