GA 106 | How to Understand the Nature of Transformation

You're listening to episode 106 with Dr. Darlene Dumont.

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 Perera.

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, I'm thank you so much for taking time out of your day in 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 Dr. Darlene Dumont to the show. Now, Dr. Dumont, or Darlene, as she asked me to refer to her as at the beginning of the show, is the public service program director for the Lean Enterprise Institute. Now, I recently got to work with Darlene up in the state of Connecticut when we were visiting our good friend Allison Fisher and the whole team of Connecticut government employees who are practicing lean. So Darlene helped set that all up. And we have many other projects planned with Darlene and Lei coming down the road, which includes a trip to the Washington, D.C. to visit our federal government to see how certain areas within the federal government are practicing lean. So that's very exciting. Now, in today's episode, Darlene kind of shares a little bit about her background, including some of her time at Pratt and Whitney. She worked on some pretty incredible projects there, so she walks us through those before spending quite a bit of time on what Lei calls the Lean Transformation framework, which consists of five dimensions. And so we're going to link to a video in the show notes for this episode of a really nice video that they put together that kind of explains this framework. But Darlene gives us an elevator pitch, if you will, of those five dimensions. The show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 106. Again. That's Gembapod. And look for episode 106. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Dr. Dumont, thank you so much for taking time to come onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Hi, Ron. I am calling in from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Beautiful. So are you getting blasted with snow right now here in April?

Hopefully not. It's a much better winter than it was last year. But it is kind of that April spring, spring gloomy rainy kind of cold. Well, cold to me, but I'm not a good fan of that.

Well, we were. I understand. We were obviously, as you know, a few weeks ago in Connecticut together, visiting there with their whole. Allison and the whole crew at the government there. And I guess when we left, the snow came in or something like that. Is that right?

It was crazy. Yes, it did. And we got several storms right. In a row. There are cancellations in school and delays, and it's just. It's crazy.

Oh, yeah, yeah. All right. I won't mention what it is here in Texas.

So what is. All right, now you have to tell me.

Well, you know, it was a little chilly yesterday. We were, like, 65. But, you know, it's crazy here, though. We have wicked storms and tornadoes and all that, so it's not all great. Trust me. Oh, my goodness. All right.

I guess you just need to come back in the area so you can bring some of that sunshine.

Exactly. Exactly. All right, well, Dr. Dumont, why don't you talk?

Call me Darlene, please.

Okay, Darlene. All right. So, Darlene, tell us about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about Lean and Continuous improvement.

Sure. So I wasn't always in this career field. I started off as a public accountant, working. This is going to date myself, but working in one of the big eight accounting firms. I proceeded with the accounting career field for about 13 years and then ended up working at Pratt Whitney. And it was during my tenure at Pratt where I just immediately fell in love with Lean. And we didn't call it Six Sigma, we called it process certification, but just the whole ability to look at processes and try to streamline things.

Were you one of those evil cost accountants?

I was not a cost accountant per se. Primarily, I worked in the. The reporting area.

Okay. Okay.

And then, of course, I was an auditor, which. That's a bad word, I guess, but we were good auditors. We helped people.

There you go. There you go. Yeah, I want to. I want to explore your Pratt and Whitney experience a little bit later on in the show because I. I understand you did some pretty cool projects there, and. And we're on some pretty awesome teams, so. But as you know, darling, we like to start all of our shows with our guest sharing a quote or two. Do you have one or two? Maybe even.

Oh, boy, I definitely have one or two. I have a lot because I love Nightingale Conant. I'm a big fan of theirs. And they always have these motivational quotes of the day. So every day I get a pretty Good quote from them. But one that I particularly like is from John Paul o'. Connor. And it's very simple. It's just heightened observation leads to heightened experience. And I think that that just resonates with me from a lean perspective just because it really reinforces, you know, going out and seeing and going to the Gemba really helps to bring home what's actually happening as opposed to sitting behind a desk in an office somewhere. And then in addition to that, just being able to do experiments, you know, go try things. And through that observation, you'll also have greater experience through that as well.

Very nice, very nice. So tell us about your role there at the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Sure. I'm currently the Public Service Program Director. When I first started at lei, I was the Director of learning. And what we found was about two years ago, one of my colleagues, John o' Donnell here, kind of set off to find out what was happening in government and in a public service arena. And we started to get a lot of pull from that area. And so I'm retired military and with my military background and such, and John himself is retired government, we just started to get a lot more pull in terms of people wanting to know more. I think in the government and especially in the federal government, there's been a lot of history with TQM and Six Sigma, which can be very project based. And I think there's really a great opportunity and desire for people to explore the people side of lean and really that cultural component of how do we. How do we change our behaviors not only for leaders, but also for people doing the work so that they're able to become more engaged in problem solving.

Yes. Yes. What's your proudest military moment?

Oh, boy. Oh, gosh.

Until. Well, what branch were you in?

I guess so I was in a branch of the Air Force. It was the Air National Guard. And most of my time there I was in training as a trainer, that is. And then I would. And then I went into a few other areas. But I would say in terms of what I was most proud of towards the end, we had a lot going on with regards to bases closing and our overall mission changing from the type of aircraft that we had. And so it had a lot of negative impact on morale. And so one of the things that I was heading up was basically what we would consider in the civilian world to be an employee survey. And while that can be an evil word to some people, because I think from our own experiences, perhaps sometimes we take these surveys and nothing is ever done with the data I think in this particular case, we took. You know, we submitted it to everybody. We got a very good response rate of over 80%, which is really good. And then we really engaged people at different levels across the organization, across the unit, to help decipher through all the data and the comments and synthesize that information. And then ultimately we formed into 10 different teams, and the base commander supported these efforts. And we were able to really listen to what was being said, to continue to reach out to people to try to better understand what the problems were and what they were feeling, and then come up with some solutions based on what they wanted to do to help make things better. And those were all implemented, and they were very creative ideas. And I did that right before retiring. So I think that was probably one of the things that at least I was personally more most proud of.

That's nice. That's nice now. And I kind of cut you off in your background introduction there, but where did you really kind of grab onto lean thinking?

Lean thinking. Personally, I really believe that even as an accountant, I think as an auditor going out to different organizations, one thing that you need to do right away is understand what their processes are and where there could be some breaks in the continuity and then being able to come up with opportunities for making things better, not only through the process piece, but also in terms of the financial aspects of that. And so I didn't really know about lean back then, but I think from a thinking standpoint, there was already a problem solving type thought process in there. And then when I got to Pratt, I was part of a $30 million cost reduction team. And that's where I really started to see what continuous improvement could do to an organization. At Pratt Whitney, they had. Their operating system was called the ACE operating system, which stood for or stands for Achieving Competitive Excellence. And so I worked in that area as an internal consultant for about seven years. And so the. I don't know if you want to know more about the cost reduction.

Well, yeah, I definitely do, but before we even get into that, I want to kind of comment on. Even when you're military experience, you talked about the survey, and that sounded like a really strong link to respect for people. So I think that you obviously grasped that concept of lean, which is arguably the most important part. Right. A long time. So it's probably why you're so good at your job now, Darlene.

Thank you, Ron.

All right, that's enough. Nice stuff. Come on. So, yeah, let's dig into this $30 million cost reduction team. What was it all about.

So it was actually, it was a really neat experiment. Really what they did is each of the senior leaders put in a portion of money from their budget and it all amounted to about $5 million. And then we had a small team of about, say there were about eight people on this team, this cost reduction team, and we had $5 million to basically use at our discretion. And the only caveat was we had to turn that $5 million into $30 million within a short amount of time, three to five years. And so what we ended up doing was going around basically doing a roadshow to a lot of different areas across Pratt Whitney to ask if there are people who wanted to implement things or if they had a problem and they thought that they might be able to have a solution to that. We would fund them as long as they had a compelling story. So we created basically a PDCA type template that identified what the problem was, what was their idea, their solution, and how did they come up with that idea, that solution. So what was the business case behind it? And then at a minimum, they had to show that whatever they were going to do was going to reap at least a 10% return on investment of hard savings.

So when you say hard savings, just like operating income, like on the financial statement, you had to be able to see it. Correct?

Okay, correct. So, you know, there's one of the things that I talk about is qualitative and quantitative benefits of lean. And these were very, very purely the. The quantitative benefits. So from a financial standpoint, we really needed to see those hard dollars. So, for example, if we had, if we had been using 20 different suppliers for a particular item and all with a very wide range of prices, somebody might come up with the idea of only using two or three of them and being able to leverage those dollars, and that would result in a significant savings. And then I think in addition to that, it wasn't just talking about what they were going to do. We would meet with them every month. We would go and do this roadshow every month to all of these different mod centers and hear people's stories. They would come in and present to the team and then they would leave. And it was almost like a reality show, now that I think about it. Yeah, probably what got started now, did

you guys help them? Like, did they know how to problem solve or was there training involved or how did that work?

Yeah. So UTC in general has a huge effort that they've been doing for quite a while. And this route's probably 25 years ago where they really started to get more engaged with continuous improvement. And then they were able to be coached with some of the Shinizutsu consultants and some others that came over from Japan. And so they were really at an age, I think in the 90s, I would say, is when it really started to come to fruition. And I think over the years it's just continued to really get streamlined. I think pros and cons. I think on one hand, the processes that I was involved with at least I felt that it was very much about the process and about root cause analysis and really honing in on what's value added for the customers. And I think from myself, it was during that tenure that I really switched from these accounting roles more into what is Lean, what is Six Sigma. I went and got my black belts and then continued onward to get a master's in quality systems management. Just everything and anything I could do to learn about Lean. And I think the more I learned about it, the more I realized that there was a big people side that was missing. And so I went onwards to get involved with HR at a large insurance company where I did more change management org design and then ended up in healthcare, which for me was very meaningful and purposeful. And I think I might be speaking for a lot of people in this career field. Once you've been doing it for a while and you start to see the benefits that it can have on people and their attitudes and bringing joy to the workplace in addition to the financial benefits and of course the customer's benefits, it just becomes very purposeful and you want to try to find organizations where you can give back in some way. And so that's kind of been my journey.

Yeah. Now, one question I have as it relates to this roadshow, as you called it, who did you deal with? Like, did you engage with folks at all levels or was it just senior leaders that you were working with? Or how did that go?

So it was a combination, I would say for the people that were on the team themselves, it was middle to upper management. Certainly the people that provided the funding for us all came from the senior leaders. We did have an executive leader who was on that steering committee team and we would go to these roadshows. And then in terms of who came up with ideas, it was anybody. Anybody and everybody could come up with an idea and come before the team. I think that was the only scary part for some people perhaps is, you know, if they've never presented in front of somebody before, that first or second time could be a little Intimidating. But, you know, we tried to make it as painless as possible, but the results were fantastic.

Yeah, well, so what, what did you get? Did you get 30 million or.

Well, yeah, it did. It actually continued on for. I think we did it for about three years or so. And then the returns were. Were great. And then the person who was in charge of that team ended up being promoted into the ACE office. And so it just. It just continued, but on, but in a much different fashion.

Very good, Very good. So when we were in talking earlier, you mentioned that you were a deburring engineer at one time in your career. Is that right?

I wouldn't necessarily. Wasn't necessarily by choice. I think so. This was also at Pratt, one of the years there was a strike that happened. Not necessarily a good thing, but at the same time, it really does help to bring a certain level of appreciation for what people do on the line. And so one of the things that happened was all the salaried people, you know, we needed to keep the operations running as much as possible. And so I went down and I was in charge of deburring. And that is a very tedious and time consuming and difficult task because it's all done by hand with very little tools, or at least the tools that were left behind were not the ideal ones. But afterwards, the level of appreciation that, at least for me personally, that I had for people doing these different positions was just escalated because nobody ever gets a chance to really work the lines. And that's something obviously from a lean perspective that is, you know, preached and recommended. But not everybody takes the time to do that. In this case, we were kind of forced into that situation. But afterwards it really made me feel like, gee, I want to. I want to do some of these types of things more often because there's nothing, you know, that makes it more life like than doing it yourself.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Well, it's interesting that we're talking about kind of different projects and how leans about people and behaviors and. And so forth. So at lei, I know Mr. Shook has really put a lot of time and effort, and I'm sure the whole LEI team has, into what you're calling the Lean Transformation framework. And I recently watched a video that you'd sent over and it's all great stuff. And Mr. Shook talks about five dimensions that kind of make up this framework. So what I thought we could do is just kind of have you. We'll link to the video in the show notes for this episode, but why don't you just kind of walk us through through what the five dimensions are.

Sure, absolutely. I'd be happy to. So as you identified, so John Shook, there's been lots of houses over the years. And so the more recent one is, as we've been going on this journey, and I say we in the plural sense for everybody, not just lai, we've been starting to realize more and more that the sustainability of lean and lean initiatives is what's is really difficult. And I believe that with the lean transformation framework, with these five dimensions, as John points out, really does help to create the sustainability. And so those five dimensions stem around first purpose. So what is the purpose? And these can be, these questions can be asked at any level. So you can be asking yourself this question. If you're the CEO of an organization and you're thinking about your entire organization, what's the purpose of my organization? You can be thinking about this if you are a manager of a department, you know, what's the purpose of my department? It could be an hr, it could be anything. And so really what is the purpose? Why, why do we do what we do in our day to day jobs? Why, why are we here? What, what difference are we making?

So this is very Simon Sinek ish, right? With the power of why. Start with why, right?

Yes, exactly, exactly. And, and in John's example of the framework, he uses several questions to kind of lead people through the thinking part of these five dimensions. So even though we're saying purpose, it could be a particular situation that's happening in your business or in your operations, it could be a problem that you're having or a customer's having or whatever it is, but it's the purpose. Why are we doing what we're doing? The second item is really around the process. So based on this particular purpose and the problem or the situation that's at hand, what's the process or the processes of where the work is being done that support that? And then the third dimension would be the people. So for the people who are working in this area or are impacted by this process, what is the capability that's needed from a developmental standpoint? How do we show, how are they showing respect to each other? What is that whole dimension around people? What does that look like and feel like from a current state standpoint and where do you want to get it to? The third area, I'm sorry, the fourth area is really the kind of the nuts and bolts of what I would say is a lot of the sustainability pieces of this, which is the leadership behaviors and the Management system, think a lean management system or a management system. That terminology is used quite a bit nowadays and it can mean different things to different people. But ultimately there is a general theme that kind of goes through that. And basically a management system is, you know, what does that leader standard work? So at different levels, we would want to have true north. We would want to have, you know, what's our mission, our vision, what are we aiming for? And it's important that people know what the reason is for what they're working on and how that links to the higher vision and mission of the organization. And then it's okay, as a leader, how should I be leading this organization to do problem solving, to feel engaged, to self identify what's working or not working, to not be punished for identifying things. And so it's really thinking about what are all those leadership behaviors, what are the standards that leaders need to be practicing to help engage staff? And then it's also creating kind of what I would consider to be the infrastructure. So, you know, how often are you going to meet how, you know what, how are you going to display this? Are you going to use visual management, for example, what's going to be on that board? Who's going to decide what's on that board, how are they going to update it, who's going to respond to it? It's all of those types of questions that go into the leadership behaviors and the management system. And that's really the fourth dimension that needs to be considered if you're trying to do a lean transformation. And then the fifth thing, which I think also gets back to the people side, is really the basic thinking and mindset that exists within an organization. And that is extremely important for especially a lot of organizations will have HR departments and usually there's a lot of people within HR that have either organized organizational design or change management type backgrounds. And they would be good ones to get involved with this to help kind of understand and get a pulse on the organization in terms of what is the basic thinking about this situation? So whatever that situation or that problem is that you're trying to solve, what is it that's, that's either causing that or how are people feeling about that? Was anything ever done to improve it before? And how did that go? What did, what did people think about it then? So it's really trying to get into the psyche of understanding what are people going to feel and think about either what the current state is or potentially what the future state is and how do you build your plan of action so that encompasses all of those different five dimensions. So where we are today, where we want to get to and what are those gaps? And it's those gaps that we want to try to create experiments around and do PDCA and close as we get towards that future goal.

So let me. I wouldn't want to repeat them because there's a lot of them. There's five of them. So the first one was purpose. What's your why? What's your purpose? What's your cause? Second was process. Third was people. Fourth was leadership behaviors and management system. And the fifth was basic thinking and mindset.

You are the best student ever.

Great. Now, one question that I have is how important is the particular order that you have them in?

That's a great question, Ron. There really is no right order or wrong order. It's really just the fact that you want to be looking at all of these five dimensions when you're trying to think about how you're going to move your organization from point A to point B or your department from point A to point B, whatever it might be. Really, the intent is to look at all five of these.

Yeah, it's kind of a holistic approach, right?

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. And I do like how processes before people. Right. As we lean thinkers, we're always saying it's about the process, not about the person. Right. It's, you know, why did it. Why did we make a defect? Well, something in the process is wrong. Right. So that's, that's, that's well done, in my opinion.

So, yeah, I go back and forth. Like, I know that, you know, a lot of lean thinkers, you know, it's like, yeah, process first and then people. But I view them equal, but in different ways.

Because you could argue, I guess the contrarian could say that it is about the people. Right. Respect for people and all the rest of it. And if you get that right, we can teach anybody how to do a process. Right?

Yeah. I've had the luxury of working in organizations where, you know, some organizations focus on process, but not as much on people. And then I've had the opposite, too. Where. What, you know, there's a hospital that I worked at where they did an amazing job focusing on the people, but not as much on the process. And the good news is, if you do have that uneven kind of focus on either process or people, you're going to get some benefits. The bad news is it's not going to be as effective and efficient as it could be if you were trying to do it more holistically. As this framework would identify.

All right, well, very good. Well, Darlene, let's go ahead and jump into reflection section. At the end of that, I want to kind of leave people with some thoughts on some things that we're working on together. Right. Eli and. And GenBank had me some really fun stuff, but I want you to kind of maybe share that with the folks here towards the end. But in the reflection section, we kind of try to focus our first question on those two pillars that you're very familiar with. Continuous improvement, and then respect for people, with continuous improvement being the tools, the things that we can do. That's the easy stuff. Right. We can learn that. But respect for people, as we've kind of explored already throughout this episode, is a little harder to define and kind of put your arms around. So I'm curious, Darlene, what does respect for people mean to you?

That's a really great question and a very deep one. I think that certainly there's the kind of. If we use that metaphor of the iceberg like we do so many times in Lean, there's the development piece that kind of sticks out on the top. Respecting people is really helping them to develop and to help them to progress, but I think it just goes so much deeper than that. There really is a whole psychology side behind Lean that is still being kind of peeled back to learn more about it, but it's really trying to walk in people's shoes and recognizing that we all live in our own realities. And as much as I think I might know or feel that I know what somebody is going through, I really don't. And so if somebody is upset or angry or disgruntled or not doing their job, as we talked about, there's something that could be broken in the process, but in addition to that, there's some human elements that are going along with that and trying to be empathetic, to put yourself into their shoes and understand what is their life that they're living in. And it could be things that are happening at work or at home or any other things. And all of that needs to be taken into account. And, you know, sometimes when I talk about that, you know, people will ask me, well, you know, yeah, there's. But when does HR step in? And, yeah, there's that small, small, small percentage of people that maybe just don't want to. Don't want to be there at all. And. And, yeah, those need to be. Those situations need to be handled separately through hr. But generally speaking, I think that people come into work every day to do the best that they can. And if they're upset or they're not as happy as they can be, then there's something wrong in that environment and it's up to us to help them, to help us figure out what that is. I think the only other thing I would like to say there is sometimes we have roles and responsibilities and we have a job description. And over time, as processes change, as they often will, those roles and responsibilities change. Well, we all have our own likes and dislikes. Some people like to like it, other people like face to face interactions. And so I think we also owe it to the people to understand what their personal likes and dislikes are. Because I know for myself, and I know that there's science out there to justify this as well. If I don't like doing it stuff and you put me into an IT role that maybe morphed into that over time, I might be a little bit hesitant and I might not be able to really get as engaged as I want to. Not because I don't want to do my best, just maybe because it's just something that isn't innate to me and I don't like doing it. So I think there's an opportunity for us to think of not only the processes, but also, you know, how are we matching up our skill sets with the right type of work that needs to be done?

I love that. Darlene, what's the best advice you've ever received?

Oh, boy. I think for me, I tend to, or I used to, I still find myself slipping into it once in a while, but I tend to say yes. Like, I think that I can take on the world. I think that, oh, yeah, I can do that. I've always had that can do attitude. And maybe that was part of the military thing, I don't know. But I feel like, yeah, if you need something done, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. And then I think at some point, probably about seven or eight years ago, I realized that I can't do it. I can't do it all. And I was spreading myself way too thin and it was showing in the quality or the lack thereof of my work. I was working at a hospital at the time and. And one of the sisters who was in charge, she said something to me and it just really resonated with me. She said, you know, we all set off to do what we can every day, and sometimes we get everything accomplished that we want to, sometimes we don't. But at the end of the day, you know, if you can look yourself in the mirror and truly say that you did the best you could do today, then your day is done and you've done your work. And, you know, it really, really resonated with me because, you know, as I. As I got older and as I got more responsibilities and different roles, I feel like, you know, we, all of us, any one of us could go to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and there would still be something to do. Yeah, you know, it's just. It's never ending. And so I think, you know, between technology and emails and just the overproduction of information that comes to us every day, it's overwhelming. And for people that really want to do everything that they possibly can to get it all done, you can't. And that was a really hard word for me to put into my vocabulary. Can't and no are just things that I just don't normally say, but I'm learning to do better.

I tell you, a book that changed my life and it really impacted all of us here at Gemba Academy is a book called essentialism by Greg McKeown. And it's basically on the power of saying no and, you know, and being polite about it. You don't have to be rude about it. But if one of his premises is if. If someone presents you with a request or a choice or something, if it's not hell, yes, then it must be no. And it's very powerful when you put your mind around that. But you're so right. You got to do the best that you can. I think that's the most important thing.

I'm going to have to get that book. That sounds like the right book for me.

Yeah, it's a fantastic. It's called essentialism by Greg McKeown. Yeah.

Thank you.

So. All right. Well, Darlene, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

Yeah. So I'm a real big fan of visual management. Actually. It's kind of funny because in. In Lei, we've got this wonderful open floor plan, and we've got wall space all over the place in our conference rooms that people can write on and just use freely, and it's wonderful. The problem is I don't have that kind of a drawing board at my desk anymore. And so my personal visual management is kind of no longer where I can. Can see it. So what I do like doing, though, is basically having kind of a process flow for the tasks that I have at hand. So usually if we think of An X axis going across the top of different types of items that are in progress, and the Y axis being from a priority standpoint, high, medium, low, and or stop it altogether. Going across the top would be anything that's in queue. So if I have an idea or if there's an email that somebody sends to me and it's something I want to follow up on, potentially any of those types of possible action items I would put into that in queue area and I would put it in the appropriate row of priority, high, medium, low, or not to do it.

Now, one question. So do you literally have this on a wall somewhere or is it software or just stickies? Stickies.

Okay. We use smartsheets. I love smart sheets. They just stick to anything.

Yeah. Okay.

And so just put something like that up with this and play around with it for what works for you. But for me, this is what works for me.

Okay, so in queue is the first thing in queue. Okay.

So those are kind of all your inputs.

Got it.

And then if you choose to start working on something that would be in process.

Okay, so that's to the right. Yes. Okay.

And so while it's in process, it means that I'm the one working on it. So this is something that I need to do. This is kind of my to do list for this period of time. If I do something with it and I hand it off, the next column over would be, I'm waiting for a response or it's on hold, or it's just in this next bucket where it's out of my control. I'm not the one that needs to do the action on it. I'm waiting for others to do an action on it. But it's also good because it helps me to understand if I need to follow up with somebody, that's the area that I would be looking to say, okay, hey, I've been waiting for this for quite a while. I need to call them or just see what's going on with that. The next column over to that would be completed. So, you know, as once something's been done, I feel like it's been completed. I want to. I want to show it there. I think for me, it's been easy to not put anything in there. Just know that it's completed and just rush right into the next thing. And sometimes, especially at the end of the year when you're doing your performance reviews and things like that, it's nice to look at that completed column and say, okay, what did I do this year?

Yeah.

And then I think the last column over that I like to put up visually because I don't always do it very well, is sharing and reflecting. So I think, like everybody, we're so time based about get this done, get this done, get this done. And as soon as you do it, you're just moving on to the next thing. And we don't always take time to reflect upon did that work the way we expected it to work? Why or why not? What. What can we do differently? And then documenting that, I mean, I think that's a really wonderful. The A3 is a great way to show that reflection and that documentation. But it's one of those things that from a time standpoint, I know for myself, I just don't always do it.

Love it. If you have a diagram or anything like that, send it to me and we'll put it in the show notes. Because I think this is a really powerful. I have a picture in my mind, but I think it'd be great if you have something or maybe even a picture of it on your wall. You know, something like that. That could be pretty powerful because these types of tools can be extremely beneficial. I do something similar, kind of a Kanban flow board. It's slightly different, but same concept. And. And you're right. Just having the work up in front of you is. Is. Is so important.

Absolutely. I'd be happy to.

All right, so is there anything over this past year or so that surprised you?

I would say yes. So I think that, you know, obviously in this new role, the public service program director, I wasn't sure what to expect in terms of, you know, what the interest in lean thinking and practice would be within the government. And I've really been very pleasantly surprised in terms of the amount of work that's being done out there. You know, I don't think, at least for myself, I really hadn't heard a lot about it. And then as I started to do more inquiries of different states and different federal agencies, I'm really finding a lot. And I certainly know that as we talked about earlier, TQM and Six Sigma has always had a great presence in those areas. But I just find it really exciting that they want to start learning more about the sustainability and the cultural piece of it. It's no longer being viewed as just problem solving as projects. And once you're done with the project, you go to the next project. They're really looking at how do you change the culture of an organization? So I think that was a big aha moment for me this year.

And there's awesome people out there, like our friend Allison in Connecticut. Right.

I'm so excited for all the work that they're doing. It's just when we were there and just listening to the people, I was just getting goosebumps. And there's just something about when you see and hear people talking the language that truly believe in it and that are making a difference, it just gets. There's nothing better.

Come clean. Did you cry at all? Because I know Allison did.

I did not cry. It's not because I don't care,

military man. You're trained man. You're hardened steel. Right. Allison is over there all flubbering up. You're not. Just kidding. Poor Allison.

She's great.

You're awesome, Allison. I know you're listening.

We love you.

All right, very good. So, Darlene, if things aren't going well on a particular day or week, do you have a routine or ritual that you follow to kind of get better?

Well, aside from my red wine that I like. Just. Just kidding.

That's okay.

I love red wine. I really do. No, I think if things aren't going well, sometimes it's easy to get caught up in just not being in the moment. And I think for me, as soon as I start to feel myself, feel anxiety or feel emotions that I don't want to feel, I'll try to step back and catch myself and just really try to be in the moment and. And again, recognizing that we all live, we all have our separate realities, and how I'm perceiving something and how somebody else is perceiving something could be extremely different. Even though we're in the same room, hearing the same topic or whatever it is, but just really having respect for seeing where other people are and recognizing for myself that I'm starting to feel these negative feelings, I need to, like, pull back from that quickly.

Got it. Got it. So you're obviously around a lot of really, really smart lean thinkers day in and day out. So I'm curious. Do you feel like there's anything that you need to personally improve on in order to become a better lean thinker?

We're going to need another 45 minutes for that. I love working here. It's exciting to just be with all these thought leaders and. And to just ask questions of, hey, what about this and what about that? And what did you mean when you said this? I think in terms of my own personal improvement, I would have to say it's saying, no. I do tend to get into this scope creep. And I think documenting My reflection. So the A3 thinking and the A3 tool and technique can be very valuable. And I think for a lot, or at least for me, it's very easy to start in A three and put down the current state, the background, the ideal state, the action plan, but then to actually use it as a living document to go through, to update it, to reflect upon it, to pull it out once in a while and share it with others that you may not have shared it with before to get their perspective and then update it again. So that type of behavior is not something that comes natural to me. And so I am always challenging myself to try to work on that.

Yeah. Love it. So let's go ahead and wrap the show up. I want to tell. You can tell people how they connect with you, but before that, talk a little bit about some of the things that are cooking right now with Lean government.

Oh, boy. So we have some really great stories to continue sharing. So I know obviously, you guys came out and did some wonderful things with the state of Connecticut. Soon we'll be going to Washington, D.C. where some of the federal agencies are doing some wonderful things there. So you'll get to hear more about that.

Can't wait.

We've got some great momentum happening here in New England with a lot of the different states coming together and starting to share more stories with each other and learn from each other. And then certainly the state of Washington continues to do some work. Wonderful. They've got a whole bunch of stuff happening out there. Singapore as a country. Their entire government is working with Lei right now to try to get Lean to be part of their country. So there's a lot of neat stuff happening.

Yeah, Very good. So how can people connect with you, Darlene?

If they want to connect with me, they can send me an email, which is D. Dumont. That's D as in David. D as in David or Delta. U M as in Marie. O N as in Nancy. T as in Tom. Lean L E A n dot org.

Okay. And are you on social media and all that kind of fun stuff?

I am not.

Me either. I mean, I. I guess I technically am, but I'm not real active.

I know, right? So it's one of those things that I just like everything time just.

You gotta pick your battles, Right? You gotta pick your battles. Yeah. Very good. All right, Darlene, well, listen, I guess we'll see you here. Really. And not that. Well, it's a few weeks. I'm looking over at our calendar when we head out to Washington, D.C. so I can't wait to see you again, and maybe we'll enjoy a glass of red wine or something like that. Hopefully you. You won't need it, right? Or anything like that? No, I won't, because everything's gonna go awesome.

But it's gonna go great. They're doing wonderful stuff down there.

All right. Very good. All right, well, thanks again, and I will talk soon.

Fantastic. Thanks.

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