GA 088 | How To Grow and Develop People with Robert Ilbrink

You're listening to episode 88 with Robert Ilbring. 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 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 Gembacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Robert Ilbrink to the show. Now, Robert is from the Netherlands, so he has a super cool Dutch accent that I think you're going to like to listen to. Robert is in the learning and development kind of arena. He's a. He's a consultant with an IT background. And so what we talk about today is kind of contrasting the traditional learning and development role, if you will, versus what one might call a more of a lean learning and development. So no matter if you work in that area, I think we're all interested in how we can improve those around us and improve ourselves. So I think the topic is going to be interesting. So show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 88. Again, so gembapodcast.com and look for episode 88. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Robert, well, thank you for taking time to join us today. Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling in from the Netherlands, Arnim, to be specific.

Beautiful. Beautiful. How's the weather in the Netherlands these days?

Currently it's good. Last few days we had quite a storm, but currently the sun is shining again, so life's good.

Yeah. You know, there's a podcast that I listen to. It's actually a. A priest from the Netherlands, but he has a podcast called the Break Father Rodrik, and he always does it from his talks about movies and whatnot. It's a really great podcast. But I always catch up with the weather from his podcast because he tells us if it's. If it's beautiful or nice. It seems like it's really, really pleasant there in the. In the summer.

So, yeah, summer. I think this year summer fell on a Tuesday.

Oh, yeah, I gotcha. I gotcha. They're relatively short all right, Very good. All right, well, Robert, and tell us a little bit about your background and how you first came to learn about continuous improvement.

Wow. Yeah, my background, I've got a background in it, worked in it, but also in learning and development, knowledge management, and continuous improvement, both in large organizations and smaller companies. And at the moment, I'm an independent performance consultant.

Okay, great, great. Well, Robert, as you know, we like to kind of start our shows with our. Our guests sharing a quotation or two that possibly inspires them. So do you have one or two?

I have at least one. Okay. And that's a Dutch quote, which translated sounds like this. When you focus on cost, the quality goes down, and when you focus on quality, the cost goes down.

Hmm, I like that. So what's that really mean to you?

Well, as we all know, cost is an abstract lagging indicator. And when you try to reduce costs, you're not immediately improving the way of working. And if you ask managers how they can reduce cost, they never know. But as soon as you ask managers what problems they have, you seem to get a never ending list. And it's exactly there where you need to start working.

Well, and it's also that cost of poor quality. Right. If you're making bad parts and you have to repair them and whatnot, that's.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know those stories.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So how did you get into Lean?

Actually, that was early in my career. I had two examples. I would even call them mentors. At least one of them was for me. At that time, I was an account manager in the financial information industries, working primarily in Eastern Europe, where I sold complex IT systems, the ones that you see on Wall Street.

Okay.

And many of the projects that I had had problems. The engineers were struggling with complex software installations where all the modules were separate and they had to configure them so that they would work together. And due to that, we had lots of project overruns, unhappy clients. So I informed the country manager and he decided to put some more training for the engineers in. But that actually didn't address the root cause. And on one day, the CEO from London walked into my office. Now, I was five management layers and 800 miles removed from. From him.

Okay?

But he did his Gemba walk. I didn't even know what the Gemba walk was at that time, but he did his Gamba walk.

Okay?

So he walked up to my desk and just sat down and said, hi, Robert, how are you? He actually knew quite a lot of people, even though it was a company of about 10,000 people.

Was this the first time you ever talked to him?

No, no, it wasn't the first time I talked to him.

Okay, okay.

Because he did this regularly. Every time he was in a different location, he would just walk up to the floor and talk to people. That's great. So he said to me, what are you running into? What are your problems? So I started to talk about the software problems and especially that I thought that the development department, due to their deadlines and lack of resources, had some problems by not combining the software as an integrated package, which resulted in shifted costs, of course, because now all of a sudden all the engineers out had to correct or actually redo the work that should have been done once at the software development department. Now, he was a systems thinker, you could really tell, because he immediately saw that. And a few months later, the software development department delivered a completely integrated package where all the separate modules were completely integrated and there was no separate configuration anymore. So that was a great way because we not only solved our own problems, but we solved the problems for all the other countries that ran into the same issues. Now, I spoke about two mentors and the other one was a team leader. He later became a personal friend of mine. He was super smart and an inspiration for me. He led a multidisciplinary team with people from technical people, admin people, salespeople, etc. But he never ever told people what to do or how to do something. The only thing he did was ask questions. Even though he was super smart, he knew exactly what he wanted, but he only coached his team so that they would find the answers. And then once that was done, he didn't have to do anything because the team was so inspired to implement their own ideas that there was nothing he needed to do. So those were the two people that really opened up my eyes. And then only later I found out about Lean and all the other programs, because before that I didn't even know about that.

Yes, yes. Yeah. It starts with people. Right. And that's what sounds like these two individuals imparted on you, that it really is a people based system, right?

Oh, absolutely. I couldn't agree more.

Yeah, very good. All right, Robert. Well, today, as you know, we're going to talk about really kind of, I guess, two themes, learning and development. And then, and then we're going to get into knowledge management. So I want to start with learning, development, and I'm curious if you could just tell me, what does that mean to you, learning and development?

Well, like for many people, I think it's about developing people, growing people, inspiring people, providing knowledge building skills and giving people insight. And of course, you have several tools or several ways you can do this through traditional training, classroom based training or E learning. Podcasts really are important in my opinion. Knowledge management. Yeah, knowledge management is part of that. But also job tools like checklists or reference cards, coaching, reflection, these are all part of learning and development, in my opinion.

So like, from an organizational perspective, do you see learning and development as like their own, I don't know, department, for lack of a better word? Or is it every leader's job?

Well, that's the same as with a continuous improvement department. I think, I think you should have some central department. But these departments should always work as part of supporting the rest of the organization.

Yes.

So it's much more telling people what they know and how they can improve their own work instead of doing all the work for them. And that's one of the problems that I have with the traditional learning and development is that a lot of work is actually taken out of the hands of people. And that means that a lot of the employees become passive, independent. Yes, because all the knowledge comes from above. Somebody else has thought of it and developed a training program. And that. Yeah, makes people passive. And yet. Yeah. The other problem I think is that many of the department managers have an expectation that training can solve everything. Yeah.

So. So you, you kind of, I think you've begun this. I want to dive deeper though. What, in your opinion is the difference between what we say? I don't know, traditional learning, development, and perhaps what could be called lean learning and development. What's the difference?

Yeah, it all starts with how things are initiated. For instance, with traditional learning and development, you very often walk into a department and the manager walks up to you and says, I need three days of training on X, Y and Z. And there has been no analysis. Nothing. Has it already been decided? It has to be three days. The platform has to be training and the topic has to be X, Y and Z. And then people go through the whole rigmarole of doing the learning and development analysis, the training needs analysis. And then in the end comes out a program where we tell people how to do it and we even try to influence the behavior of the system. But what we don't do or what we actually do is we ignore the system. I call that coloring within the lines. Because you're trying to change the system, but you stay within. Or you're trying to improve the performance of people, but you're staying within the system, you ignore the KPIs with individual objectives, you ignore the workflow, the procedures, the poorly matched IT systems, and you formalize the workarounds. And that's exactly what I don't want to do. And then in the end, the training manual often becomes the de facto standard work description.

So what about a lean learning development? How does that contrast to the traditional.

Approach in a lean learning and development environment? First of all, I focus on critical thinking and problem solving and trying to provide people tools to learn from their own mistakes. And again, you start with an analysis, but the analysis is much more about the system where you first try to remove any performance inhibitors and you try to remove waste. Not that you can do this for 100%, everybody knows, but at least you try to start with that. Once you've done that together, you develop a training where you can then help people to understand, okay, this is what we've done so far. This is what we think is the best way of working at the moment. But again, it's up to you to use your problem solving skills and your cooperation together to improve whatever we have set here in the training course.

You know, I can't help but see parallels between what we try to do here again, the Academy, you know, today as I, as we're standing here in 2015, November, you know, we have close to 800 videos on our website. And so a new customer will come to us, they'll join our program and they'll say, oh my goodness, you have 800 videos. Where do I start? What do I do? And what we, Steve Cain and his customer success team, what they're really focused on now is really trying to help people identify the problems that they're facing. It sounds so basic, but until you really, truly understand what problems you have, you know, there's no way, you know which direction to go, Right. You could say, well, start with 5s. Well, you know, maybe it's a clean room environment and it's like the most organized, meticulous place. You know, they don't need to start with 5s, right? Absolutely. But yeah, so I really like what you're saying there because it is about critical thinking and it is about solving problems ultimately, right?

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

Yeah. Well, so do you have an example perhaps of.

Oh yeah, actually I've got two examples. Both are in the administration field. One was a large team of about 120, 120 administrators. And two years before they had merged five teams into this one group of 120 and they had quite a Lot of performance problems and quality problems. So what they started to do two years before was to provide training every week in small groups, eight to 10 people. So every person roughly had about two training courses a year. But the problem was that the quality and the performance didn't improve. So in the end, they came to me and asked me to, as an independent advisor, to double the amount of training. And I was like, okay, this sounds like Einstein's quote. You remember doing the same thing over and over. Insanity. Expecting. Yeah. Expecting different results.

Yeah, yeah.

But again, okay. So I spoke to the people, I observed them, and very quickly I uncovered that they had about 100 undocumented procedures. And the training that they had received was on those five different admin systems, because there were originally five different teams, all from mergers and acquisitions. So they had to learn those five different admin systems. But the only thing they learned there was how to operate that admin system. And the other thing was that there was a separate administration quality control department, and they corrected all the errors. So we sat together, developed a plan, and what we ended up with is that the procedures were going to be documented. I wanted the procedures to be documented by the people themselves, but they wanted the procedures to be documented centrally within that department. But, okay, at least the procedures were going to be documented. We also agreed that all the errors that the quality department found were going to be discussed with the administrators so that the administrators would know how to correct their own errors instead of just silently correcting those errors in a different department. Because that way you never close the learning loop. And with regard to training, we changed the training from not just the applications, but training, the whole workflow, so that people started to understand what kind of decisions do I have to make in this particular workflow in order to put this correctly into the system. Now, in the other situation was also a small administration team. This was a small administration team, and they had performance and quality problems as well. Now, the previous manager distributed all the work, and she actually checked all the work as well. So very similar to the situation before. And the employees never learned, of course. So, again, I observed, and then I started to train those people because they didn't even understand what the options and checkboxes in the application actually did inside the system, what the information workflow changes would be depending on whether you set a flag here or a flag there. So that was the first thing I did, not just training the user interface, but actually what's happening behind the scenes. Okay. And then together we developed a SharePoint workflow system, because all the tasks that were coming in were originally coming in with that previous manager through email. The previous manager then selected all those emails and gave bunches of tasks to different administrators that didn't work. So instead of email, we used the request through a SharePoint system. And that actually allowed us to have a list of open tasks so all the administrators could see which tasks were still open and which tasks had been picked up by one of the other employees. The other thing that I did is I developed a exception report so that all errors and unexpected combinations that they made were showing up in an error report. Okay, this again to close your learning loop. Because when you're not correcting that learning loop, that learning loop by creating an error report, you quickly find out that the problem only comes back a month later as an escalation, and that's something you don't want. So anytime they found a new problem, we together added that to the exception report so that they not only knew how to correct the problem, but also would be reported on that error had they ever made it again.

Yeah, well, what's beautiful about that is, you know, problems then become opportunities to learn and grow. Right. So problems are a good thing in a way. It sounds kind of crazy, but. Yeah, exactly.

Problems are a good thing.

Yes.

Because problems always tell you where you.

Can improve as long as you learn from them, I guess. Right, I guess the caveat exactly. Got.

Now the nice thing was that within three months, you had a whole bunch of happy employees who were self confident and were solving problems together. And of course, the number of complaints and escalations dropped by something like 89%.

Yeah. Wow, that's powerful. So to kind of close up this learning and development loop, if you will, give us some takeaways, maybe some tips that people can, can take from this podcast in order to help them maybe get back on track or, you know, improve their learning and development processes.

Yeah. The first thing I would say is stop believing that training can solve everything. I mean, training can do a lot, but training can't solve everything.

Yes.

So first look at the system and address the problems in the system before you start developing any training program. Because once you start to develop a training program, you actually are putting those processes in concrete. And that's the last thing you want to have because you want to have all those processes flexible and constantly adapted. The other thing is, I think, make sure that whatever you do, try to include a feedback and learning loop in there so that people get feedback on any errors that they make in an early stage instead of Waiting until it's going through the whole system and then with regard to training as such, try to teach and empower people to optimize. So not only constantly making sure that what we're doing in training is just a starting point, you, the employee and the managers, of course, have to start working on optimizing your own system and taking credit or managing your own processes.

Yes, got it. All right, well, what about knowledge management? We mentioned that earlier in the podcast. How does that fit into the whole learning development arena?

Very often you find that knowledge management is actually separate from learning and development, which I sometimes understand. But actually I think that, and you can maybe hear that already, I think that departments like learning and development, like knowledge management, but also like continuous improvement, should be working under a single umbrella. But okay, knowledge management is normally about sharing knowledge. And of course, practical solutions is the thing that you want to share, and especially it's about reuse of knowledge. It can replace training, not all of it, but it can replace training. But it also enhances the development of people and it encourages the cooperation because people start to share information together.

Yes, yeah. And I recently finished up our practical problem solving series of podcasts with John Miller and Step eight of pps. One of the big themes there is yokoten horizontal sharing. Right. And sharing ideas and improvements, you know, across the organization. And you're right, it's absolutely critical. And you know, if it is done correctly, it's, you know, don't reinvent the wheel here, here's, here's some good solutions or that you might be able to use exactly as they are or, you know, perhaps you massage them a little bit to make them work for your situation, but that.

Exactly.

Absolutely critical.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So if you were to kind of contrast traditional knowledge management with maybe what we could call lean learning, lean knowledge management, what would you say they are?

Well, again, here you have a situation with. I would call it semi lean versus lean, because a lot of companies that I see are actually semi lean. These are companies where they use all the tools and all the metrics, but they don't use the. How do you say that? The thinking behind lean.

Maybe the culture's not there.

The culture is not there. Exactly. So in a semi lean organization, if you see knowledge management there, it is very often a push method. So all documents are controlled centrally, they're put together centrally. And sometimes it's even used as a tool to indemnify management because everything is online, all procedures are there. So if people make a mistake, it's not management's fault, whereas in a lean environment, it's again a pull method. It's very similar to the work on the workflow at Toyota. For instance, in this situation, instead of pushing documents down the throats of people, employees are asking questions and other employees will answer those questions. Now, we've all seen those kind of systems on the wider Internet, but you can use this within your own organization. And the nice thing is that once people start to answer questions, the best answers will be upvoted and out of that become best practices or what you would call standard work procedures. But the nice thing is that for instance, an employee who you would never expect might be giving a lot of answers around Excel. So all of a sudden you start to identify skills that a person has that would otherwise never have surfaced. But it also provides you weak signals of problems in your organization. Because if you look at the clusters of data, you can actually find things like, okay, here are a cluster of questions around a topic and nobody's able to answer those. What does that mean? That means you have a knowledge gap within your organization or you have answers that are very often looked at. So that might actually mean that there's an area where you can improve.

Yes.

Because if people constantly go back not asking the questions, but constantly refer to the answers, it still means that there's something you need to improve.

Yes, yes.

And if you see a sudden spike on one particular topic in your system, you immediately, before it's even bubbled up to top management, you know that there is a problem somewhere, something has changed, and people all of a sudden are asking questions around a certain topic. The other thing is that departments like the internal IT help desk or Human Resources help desk, they very often have people who are on the phone or on IM answering questions from people. Why not answer questions centrally once and for all and just make those questions available to everyone?

Yes, yes.

Because then all of a sudden you can get, you can free up the resources that would otherwise be answering the same question all over again. You can free up those people to do other things.

Yeah, you know, it's slightly different, but I recently fixed my wife's. She has a MacBook Pro and my children dropped it and, and the screen shattered. And so I first I brought it to the Apple store and they fixed it. $800 US dollars later and it was fixed. Great, fine, painful, but let's carry on with our life. Well, a week later, my lovely children, God bless them, dropped it again. And this time it broke again. I said, you know what? I'm not spending another $800. I could go buy a new MacBook here eventually. So I reached out to my friends over at iFixit. We have great relationship with them and, and talked to Eric Doster over there and he got me hooked up with the right parts and whatnot, and I fixed it myself. And the beautiful thing about this kind of what you're describing is on the iFixit website, they had these guides for how to repair anything you can imagine just about. And in fact, they had my wife's exact MacBook Pro, late 2013, such and such model. And so I followed the steps, clear steps. But what was more powerful was all the people that had done it before were able to leave comments for each of the step. So there was one step where there was three little antenna deals that were very small and very hard to work with. And so all these people were giving their, their, their tips and their advice on how to deal with this one step. And it was so powerful, I found the comments that people left even more valuable than the step itself. And so I think that's exactly what you're saying here is organizations have to find a way to get all of their folks talking to one another and sharing ideas with one another so they can all learn together and not have to have this one central hub or one expert who knows how to repair that display. Right? Everyone can repair that display.

You had the same thing with encyclopedias. I mean, 10, 15 years ago, large publishers thought that they could win against Wikipedia. But in the end, the masses of people that provide information and especially can react very quickly because on Wikipedia, sometimes two hours after something has happened, the website is already updated.

Yes, yes, exactly. Very good. All right, I could talk to you all day. This is very, very interesting, but let's go ahead and Robert, transition into what we call the reflection section. So the first question I have for you is that we spend a lot of time within Lean talking about kind of the two pillars, continuous improvement, which is the tools, the things that we do. And the second being respect for people, which can be a little bit harder to define. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

Yeah, well, let's first start without respect. I mean, without respect for people, you get these semi lean organizations, you know, where the whole structure is still old fashioned and old style. And on the other hand, once you start to respect people and once people start to trust you, one of the things that I found is that if you have a problem, you get no vague or bogus stories about what actually happened, but you get the real deal, which makes it so much easier to really focus into. Okay, this is what you do. Did. This is what happened. Let's analyze this, and let's find out what kind of countermeasures we can develop.

Yeah. So kind of drive the fear out of the organization so people have the courage to kind of step forward.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. Very good. Well, Robert, what's the best advice you've ever received?

That's a good thing. I think that goes back to both my examples. In the beginning, the CEO, who, even though he was the CEO, he just walked up to a floor, to the work floor and spoke with people. And the other one was the team leader who the only thing he did was ask questions. He never, ever told people what to do. I think that was. That's still the best advice that I had in my life.

I'm actually reading a great book right now, highly recommend it, called Humble Inquiry. And it's all about the art of asking questions and inquiring and Very, very powerful. Very powerful.

Yeah, there's. There's another. It's about appreciative inquiry. I think that's. That's the same thing. Yes.

Got it. Robert, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Oh, well, I'm from it. So any. Any time. Yeah. Anytime I find myself doing something more than three or four times, always write myself a script or a little program, but that's hard to share. It's something that I very often use, by the way, in my day to day work because it's very difficult if you have an SAP system or Oracle system to actually get, for instance, user interfaces changed. And sometimes people have to go through five or six different steps to just enter one simple thing of data. So every now and then, I just write a little script that will dramatically improve the way that people can enter data into the system or retrieve data from the system just to show management. Here, this is the time you can gain. I only improve this by 20 seconds, but this person is doing it 200 times a day.

Yes.

And by just changing, making something 20 seconds faster.

Oh, yes.

You. You gain so much time.

Yeah.

And not only time. Very often the quality goes up as well.

Yeah. Mistake proof it.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right. Now, do you have a routine or ritual that you follow when things aren't going well and you need to recharge and refocus?

Yep. And that is listening to podcasts.

Really? Okay.

Yeah, absolutely. And. And just viewing videos online about other colleagues who are handling lean issues as well. Because every now and then, if you run into problems, just looking at those videos or listening to colleagues reminds me of we're on the right track. And every now and then you have a setback.

Yeah, I'm so proud. My wife, she's not a huge technology buff or anything like that, but every time she exercises or she walks, she's listening to her little podcast now. She loves them. And I think there's something magical about just listening to things in your ears and while you're perhaps exercising or something, driving in a car or something like that, I think it's fantastic. I love them myself, obviously.

I listened to podcasts since the beginning 2004 and. And prior to that, driving in traffic. I hated it. And nowadays I enjoy it.

Yes, yes. You pull up into your driveway and you have to sit there for a few minutes so it finishes. Right, Exactly. All right, last question I have for you, Robert. Do you have any knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a stronger, lean thinker?

Yeah, I'm actually doing some training courses now around nonviolent communication that's following certain steps just to improve the communication and ensure that you not only stay with your own needs and requirements, but that you also stay with the requirements of the person you're talking to.

Yes, got it. All right, Robert, well, thank you so much for taking time. I know it's later in the day there in the Netherlands for you, so I appreciate you taking time to visit with us. So let's go ahead and wrap the show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom. And then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you?

All right. Yeah, my final. Yeah, I've got one quote, which is a little bit older quote from a once famous Dutch soccer player, Johan Cruyff. And he. He said, you will see it once you get it. And that is, I think, the. The thing that really stays with me because it only people only start to see it once they get it. And with regard to contacting me, I think the best thing to do is just look at LinkedIn and search for Robert Ilbrink. I L B R I N K as far as I know, there's only one Robert Il Brink. There are a few others with the same last name, but.

Well, I appreciate the time. I know that. I know you're working on a book in Dutch and perhaps maybe one day we'll have that in English, but good luck on that book in Dutch and see how that goes.

I can give you a little bit of information. The working title at the moment is Future Focused Organizations and it actually concentrates primarily on the hidden forces in the culture that very often lead to a semi lean organization. And that is an organization with no respect where people aren't being empowered. And it's all those little things like for instance what is happening with training where people expect that training can solve everything and where people are made dependent by the way that training is actually being provided to them. All those little things add up to making an organization semi lean.

Fantastic. All right, Robert, well thanks again and I look forward to perhaps meeting you in person one day.

Thank you very much, Ron. Nice speaking to you.

Take care. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma over@Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge@GembaCademy.com it.