GA 133 | How to Create a Visual Workplace with Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth

You're listening to episode 133 with Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth.

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 in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembaacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, I have a quick apology to make here as we get started today. On today's show, I was supposed to announce the winners of the survey contest that we did last month. In fact, I think I was supposed to announce it on September 22, and I totally blew it. And so I deeply apologize for that. And I do want to say, goodness gracious, thank you so much to everybody that sent us feedback. We've got so much feedback, so many things that we can. That we can improve on, so many things that you like, so many things that you had ideas for how we could make the show better. And it's really going to help us as we kind of reshape the show slowly over time. We're not going to make radical changes, but we are going to be making some improvements over the coming weeks and months.

Thank you.

So the two winners, we decided to pick two people just because we're late. I'm just gonna. We have the first name, first and last name of one of the winners. It's Bill Krolicki. Hopefully I said your last name correct, Bill. And then the second winner is just have the first initial, I think last name Dkoch is the first part of that email address. So, Bill and D. Koch, we're going to be reaching out to you, if we haven't already by the time you're listening to this, to let you know how to get set up with your free subscription to Gemba Academy. But for everybody else that took part in that survey, again, thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth. I keep saying it wrong. Galsworth to the show. Now, Gwendolyn, as she asked me to call her early in the show, is the author of six different books and her specialty is the visual workplace or visuality. As she likes to call it. And we are actually working on a new course where we're going to be kind of really be focused on what we're going to refer to as the visual enterprise. Visual management is what some people refer to it. We had a great conversation on the term visual management that you'll hear Gwendolyn's opinions on. It was really good insight, but she's written this book, Visual Workplace Visual Thinking. I have highly recommend everyone have this in their library, if you don't already. I do think it's probably the best Visual Workplace book ever written. You can get it. We're going to have links to how to buy it in our show Notes page, which you can find over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 133. But definitely encourage you to pick this book up. Visual Workplace Visual Thinking. It's been. We've really referenced this book heavily as we've been creating this course along with, you know, there's also a lot of other material that we're referencing. But. But Dr. Goswith has just done amazing work in this field and it was a true pleasure to talk to her. Now, as you'll hear, we had a real conversation. I would say there were some things that we agreed on, but there's actually a few things where we sort of disagreed on a few points. And I think it's fantastic when we can have those open conversations on the podcast. So I would encourage you to listen all the way through. It wasn't anything bad or anything. And in the end, I think we were basically saying the same things, just slightly different terminology. But it was a great pleasure to interview Dr. Galsworth on the show. So again, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 133. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Dr. Galsworth, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

I am calling in from Portland, Oregon. Beautiful. And even today in October, sunny Portland, Oregon, Wow. Has a bad reputation about rain, but it has been glorious here.

Nice, nice. Now, are you. Are you long time from that part of the country?

Yes, about 15 years. I'm normally, I should say, I originated, I was born out east. I spent a lot of time in New York, lived in New York City and made my way through Ohio. And now I'm here and it's pretty close to paradise.

Nice, nice, nice.

And I wanted to ask you, please call me Gwendolyn.

Okay.

If I may Call you Rohan?

Oh, yes, you may. All right. All right. Well, perfect. Gwendolyn. All right, well, thanks for coming onto the show. I mentioned in the intro you haven't heard that yet, but I'm a huge fan of your work. In fact, we're working on a visual management course. And your book, Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking has been very influential. And I've. I've had it. I've read it several years ago, and then I just. I picked it back up and really went through it closely and carefully. And so thank you for all the work that you've done for our movement. And I think. I think it's. I don't know, I don't want to make your head big. I think safe to say, within respect to Visual Workplace, Visual Management, I don't think anybody's done more work than you. So well done. And thank you.

Well, you know, it's very interesting. Thank you for saying those nice things about my work. But it has been like a pot of honey that I've fallen into and I'm a big brown bear because it's been such a great fit. I don't know why, but somehow my eyesight has. Was sensitized to information that comes in through other channels. I didn't have any words for it, but it has been for me, a life's work where at the beginning I was just, you know, checking things out, but I've really found it to be so vast and so rich that it has satisfied me now for. It's been almost four decades.

Wow, that's fantastic. All right, well, let's. Let's back up several decades ago, and I'm just really curious to learn about your background and, you know, maybe how you first came to learn about just kind of continuous improvement in general.

Yeah. Thank you. Well, my background has nothing to do with manufacturing or the world I find myself in now. I was the. I am the daughter of a gentleman who's from Europe, very stern, very strict. And when I was in high school, I led a very closeted life. When I was a child, I would do my homework. I was Ms. Goody Two Shoes. And I loved to read, I loved to think, I loved to study. And when I was about 16, 17, I went to my father, who had had a heart attack about 10 years before and was confined to home. He wasn't ill, but he couldn't do any strenuous work. So my mother took over the making money for the family. And so my father really was closely involved in bringing me up. And I didn't Know anything. And I went to my father. He was sitting in the backyard, I remember. And I said, hey, Pop. Because that's what I called him. Pop. People in my class are talking about something called college. They're going to a place called college. This is how completely untutored I was. I said, should I go to college, too? He said, yes. And. And I said, well, they're talking about studying things. What should I study? And he said, latin. And I said, well, what should I be? He said, you should be a Latin teacher. And that was it. That was the end of the discussion. And that's exactly what I did. I had some facility for language, and I had been studying Latin. And I became a Latin teacher. Wow. Of course, by the time I became a Latin teacher, the world was ready to turn its back on Latin America, and I couldn't find a job. And on and on and on and on. And then I was a hospice director, and I was a token Caucasian waitress in a Chinese restaurant. And the other waitresses would steal my egg rolls. So I could never get my. I could never get dinner started because the egg rolls come first. One adventure after another. And I was, you know, in the Midwest at the time. And these are just the kind of undesigned sequence of events that brought me to this conversation with you. The next thing that happened was I was living in a small community in Indiana with nothing to do in my evenings. I decided to go back to school. And I went back for so long that I got my PhD just because, you know, I didn't have anything to do in the evenings. And it was a sleepy little community, a college town, and I had to do a PhD and I had to write a thesis. I wanted a PhD so I did my work in statistics. I wanted something that was really authentic and hefty. And I was writing my dissertation, but I'm a terrible typist. And I said to somebody, I can't type. You know, I keep making holes in the paper because I keep going over and over again. And they said, you should try a computer. And I said, what's a computer? And they said, well, this. I was in a meditation community at the time. It was during a time when people were learning to calm down through meditation. And they said, you know, Norman Bodak has a company, and he has some computers. This was in the early 1980s. And I went to see Norman. He was a fellow meditator. I said, norman, can I borrow one of your computers? And when I finished my dissertation, he gave me a job and There I was at the absolute beginning of the continuous improvement revolution of jit, of everything, of Ishikawa, of Nakajima, Fukuda. Shingo was my mentor in the 1980s. I just fell into this thing.

Because you needed a computer. That's amazing.

Because I needed a computer because I was bored in this Midwest town. So, you know, it just. I went to my first factory, and the moment that I. I know the exact moment when I connected with visuality. And it was a moment. And I tell this story often. It was a moment that I was taking my first study mission to Japan. 1984, maybe. Maybe 85. And we were at a Toyota final assembly plant. I had never been in Japan before, never took a study mission. I was just thrown over the wall. Norman said, you must go. And I objected, but I went and I saw this man on final assembly who was putting on the lug nuts with his impact wrench. Lug nuts to secure the tires on his side of the car. Someone on the other side of the car was putting on two tires, right? And I just stood and watched it because, you know, I was supposed to watch and observe. So there I am watching and observing, and he does the lug nuts. Five lug nuts on one tire, five lug nuts on the other. And when both of the gentlemen were through the line, did this thing that I later was able to name called index. The line moved, and it was explained to me later on that it was electronically connected, etc. But I stood there for a moment longer because he put his impact wrench not down, nor was it hanging. He put it in a bucket of pink powder. It didn't make any sense. It made so much nonsense to me that I watched again and I said, why would he be doing this? He's getting pink powder all over his lug nuts, all over the tire, the wrench, it's on his shoes. And then I saw. Oh, my goodness. The powder tells him. Tells him that he has tightened each lug nut so that if the line doesn't index, he can see if he skipped one.

Wow.

And this was the exact moment that I was caught and visuality became mine forever. Because it was such an interesting way. It was language, but it was language that was decided upon and peculiar. Weird, even. So that was the moment to answer your question.

Wow, what a great story. I remember the first time that I was ever in a Toyota factory in Japan. I also stood on the catwalk, so to speak, you know, and you're just watching, and I have to say, it, like, moved Me, like, I was almost in tears watching these people work, because it's like magic. But it's just beautiful, right, to see the sequencing and just how organized they are, how unchaotic it is. Right. And it's just something to see. So what a story.

You know, it's so interesting with Toyota, with these very mature companies, Mature in their improvement thinking, in their infrastructure and in the precision of the work. I find it. I also find it very moving. It's like a dance. It's flow and it's tightly choreographed. And in fact, that, I believe, is a subtle part of what your work is about and what my work is about, which is to remove the barriers, to remove the struggle so people can simply go to work and flow.

Yeah.

The standardization of the work is part of the flow, but there's a lot of minutiae that needs to be moved out of the way that only the intervention of the kinds of methods that you teach and I teach can address. It's quite beautiful. We go there. It's like, watch. It's like a ballerina going to, you know, to watch some master dance. We know exactly what it takes to get to that point of flow. It's not easy.

Yes, yes. Well, I do have to back up a little bit, and just to make you maybe feel a little bit better about your original career choice of Latin, my daughters are studying in Latin right now in school, so. Oh, yes, it's come back. We're a big Catholic family, so, you know, Latin is the language of the church. Right. So, yeah, good.

Okay.

Yeah. So my girls are studying a Latin. I actually sat in her class recently. I don't know any Latin, you know, aside from just some rote prayers or whatever.

But.

But it's such a beautiful language, and, gosh, they're learning so much, and I just. I'm so excited for them because, you know, Latin's the root, right? And. And of so many languages. And so I think when they go to learn other languages, it's going to be so much easier for them with their.

You know, it's so interesting, I want to say, about Latin, because I was going to be a linguist at one point, and it's funny, in a way, I am, but of. Of a visual language. But the thing that's. That is so comforting about the Latin language for the mind, because I could feel my mind go through it, is that it is so predictable. You just add things on, like a potato head. You just add certain things and it changes the tense or it changes the person, and it's very satisfying because it is completely knowable and because it's dead as a doornail, it doesn't change.

Yeah, exactly.

Right. Idioms. Yeah, it's very interesting.

Beautiful. All right, well, Gwendolyn, you know how the show flows and we do like to kind of, towards the beginning, we've had some great conversation already, but we like to start with a quote. So I'm curious, do you have a quote that possibly inspires you?

Well, it's funny, I have quotes all around my computer. I'm sitting in my office now, I have three monitors and I have a bunch of quotes around my computer. I'm going to read them just because share freely, practice when the stakes are low. Teaching with no answers. Here's one. I am an athlete that's supposed to inspire me to go out. Oh, here's one from Sherlock. Only lies have details. But one of my favorite quotes that is in our field is from Taiichi Ono. And I had the pleasure and honor of meeting him on one of my trips to Japan. But he said this thing that has been an explanation for me that I have shared with a lot of companies. So they understand the power of what he is commending here. He says people don't come to Toyota to work, they come to think. That is for me, not just the essence of the importance of thinking, that it is actually a natural state for us that we have to find at work, but it also, because of Ono's stature, because he was a co architect along with Shingo of the Toyota production system. A great emblem of what was valuable to Ono after all those years. He put this together so that you would understand in this beautiful. It's a translation, of course, but beautifully translated. People don't come here to work. This is a factory. But what you see here is not work. What you see is the result of thinking. And what you see here is the result of our putting a premium on thinking. And rolled up in that, Ron, is the whole investment in people, the whole expectation that they have something extraordinary to deliver if I, as a company owner, stakeholder or executive can support and promote that. So that's one of my favorite.

Very good, very good. All right, well, let's jump into the topic of the day, which, just generally speaking, visual management, we'll call it the visual workplace, if you will. And let's just kind of begin at the beginning, if you will, and just give us a level, set, explanation, definition, whatever you want to call it, of what is visual management.

Well, first of all, we have a departure right there I do not call the big picture of visuality visual management. It's a term that this visual management term entered about three years ago. I almost remember the moment that I saw it, in my estimation, misused because I thought, why are they talking about management when we're really talking about performance? Why aren't we talking about visual performance? Although I don't use that term as the big term. Why are we talking about management? So I have some things to say about this if you really want me to.

Yeah, no, for sure.

So the word management comes, you know, I told you I was. I'm a linguist by preference, but I'm not a trained linguist. But the word management is derived from the French manager and menager in the French means literally to train horses. It means to maneuver around this heavy footed, somewhat dangerous creature and get it to do my will. I'm going to manage it. I'm going to manage it. I'm going to train this horse. The term has come in. I'm not sure why this isn't talked about more, because we're always taking apart words like empowerment, all the words that we use so commonly. But management for me has always been the art and the science of getting people to do what you think is right because they think it's right and to develop skills to do so. So when we think about visual management, for me that's a particular category in the continuum of visual function. And all, you know, these are kind of terms of art that I've developed in order to make clear what the field of what I call the visual workplace is. The visual workplace is the umbrella. Visual management is the subset in my model. And what visual management is about is about managers, executives, supervisors being able to see in order to lead, to control, to monitor, to make good decisions, to change their minds, to calibrate. It's totally vital. And what I find so interesting about the term visual management is that what has happened is that managers and executives and supervisors have realized how much easier it is for them to do their job if they can get the information they need at their fingertips at a glance. Instantly this 10 second rule, the 30 second rule for status. And in doing so, they got so excited about it, they were so relieved that they named the whole field and now the field.

So in your opinion, what should the field be called? Visual Workplace. I mean, this is the name of your book?

Yes. Well, I call it the visual workplace or I call it workplace Visuality. And I'll just kind of peel the onion there. Visuality already exists in human endeavors. We see that in the community, we see it everywhere. Because we are sense based beings, because of our brain function, we understand information much more quickly. Visually, we're able to react much more quickly. It has to do with our safety. 50% of our brain function. 50% of our brain function is dedicated to finding and interpreting visual data. And this has been isolated. Even though we have four other senses, that single sense vision is dominant in us. So that the huge resources of the brain. 50%. I mean, just think of it, how enormously powerful our brains are. We are continually scanning the perimeter. We're looking for threat. Our peripheral vision is something like 100, or is it 1000? Let me get to my notes. More acute than our frontal vision, because threat comes from the side. I see what's in front of me. And so we have this capacity. And a workplace that doesn't have visual information sharing is a workplace that is literally not fit for humans. Humans cannot navigate. They have to constantly check for threat. They have to constantly check for everything. So did I answer your question?

Yeah, no, you did. The more we've been talking, and that's what I love about these podcasts, is I'm always thinking and learning as we go. You know, like even workplace is limited in a sense of when you're driving down, you know, i70, right. There's no workplace for you, you're on a road, but you rely on visuality to stay alive. Right. Stay between the yellow lines and so forth. I almost wonder if, like a better term, maybe we'll call the course Visual Thinking or something like that is. It's like your visuals help you think, they help you stay alive, they help you function. Right?

Visual survival. Yes.

Yeah.

The name of my company is Visual Thinking. That's the name of my company because of that. And it ties right back to what Ono said. People. But that's a different part of our discussion. Let me stay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me not move to the thinking part. Let me just go back to the visual management part and say that it is a field that has many layers. It has been my entire pleasure to codify this field over the last 35 years. A field that didn't exist before, but yet Toyota in its wisdom has put visuality in place. Although they didn't call it that. They called it Kanban, or they called it color coding, or they called it Jadoka, or they called it any kind of physical device that would help us do the work. And Ono and Shingo were masters at relieving the human of the worry and the stress of not knowing how, or not knowing how exactly by creating this fixturing. Toyota is a world of fixturing. And when we look at pokyoke, pokyoke is simply deeply embedded fixturing. It's fixturing at the point of use. So I want to back up a little bit and go to visual management. Visual management represents, in my estimation, 10 to 12, at the most, 15% of the spectrum of visual function that is included in the umbrella, which you could call, I probably wouldn't call it visual thinking because that's process, but more an outcome. Visual workplace. There might be, might be visual enterprise. I would love people to play with that and to come up with a term that was large enough. Because what we're talking about is something as, as its partner, lean in the original meaning of lean, close to what Jim Wolbach wrote about, but also leaning towards jit, a predetermined engineering change. And it's very formulaic standard work. As soon as you start cutting into, you do your 5s to clear out the clutter, you do your standard work. As soon as you break your work into elements, you've introduced time and then you put in a little bit of pull and then you have this flow, you have the value stream, etc. So my introduction got me off of my main. Okay, but I do want to make this point, which is visual management gives us feedback or points in our direction. Some things that are. I have like four categories that work for visual management. One is what's the destination? What is our roadmap? What is the house? Second is what are the metrics? Let's monitor those metrics and maybe they are site wide. And then you step them down to the departmental level and you step them down again to the machine level. And all of these dashboards and all of these 10 or 30 second status reports that we have pinned on a wall or pinned on a bulletin board or pinned on an LCD monitor is visual information that is summative. It's not formative, it isn't changing the performance, it's reflecting on the performance. And that's the big slide. And the reason why I believe these words are important is because if we use the terminology visual management to describe what is in fact visual performance, which is what you're seeing on the roadways, you are seeing us seamlessly respond to visual devices that are there to trigger behavior. And we say yes. So the other part that is, in my mind, non visual management is the behavioral piece where people are actually performing and getting stuck and doing the wrong thing. And trying to self correct it has to do with the word content. And visual management has to do with the results of that performance. And I make that distinction and I think it's important. And I really appreciate the platform of this show to get the message out. Because if you call the whole thing visual management, everybody knows on an intuitive level that management is a passive experience. It is not a direct experience. Do you see what I mean?

Yeah. No, I got you. I got you. Now, one thing that as I reread Visual Workplace, I had forgotten about what you referred to as the eye driven approach to visuality. And I just really love that you said it's a short aspect of the overall book, but it's so powerful because it's an overarching concept. So I was wondering if you could maybe go into a little bit just for folks that maybe haven't read the book, what is an I driven approach?

Yes, I'll give a little background. So you know where that came from, because it came from a series of failures that I had in the 1980s. The package that I was able to bring home from my trips to Japan is a package that you know fairly well, which is 5s held together five neat steps. And I brought it home. And Norman was my boss. He was the head of Productivity Inc. I was the head of training and consulting. And I had a particular gift to think and to create learning pathways. Just a gift. And he knew it. He discovered it and he knew it. And he had me. He said, okay, I want you to take 5s and I want you to be really successful at it. I have a lot of love for him, a lot of respect, but I absolutely recognize his pivotal role in why we are talking today. And the Lord and all his angels could not have chosen a better, a better warrior for this, because this guy is tenacious, he's an entrepreneur. And so he said, go out and do it. And I did it. And there were endless clients. I did it and I failed. And I did it and I failed and I did it and I failed. And my metric or my pivot point for failure was when I left, it left. When I left. Whatever I left behind didn't roll over by itself. There was no grab. And so the clients were dependent on me. Hey, Gwendolyn, you need to come back. We're stuck. I don't mind a little stuck, but this was like no movement at all unless I was there. So I considered it. And this was intuitive. At the time, I didn't have an understanding that this actually is a data Point I said, I got to do this better. And I began to watch where the 5s methodology went wrong. Now I'm republishing a number of my books over the next six months, but one of them is a book that's been out of print for about a year and a half, which was my book on 5s. I'm going to rename it 5s on steroids, because I think that when we start with 5s, there are so many things that we can do right that are not currently a part of the popular paradigm. Company after company will do it by the book, but it's the wrong book. And what I discovered was we were asking adults who had bigger mortgages than my own, larger families than my own, who had better brains and better hearts than my own, to clean up after themselves. And we also never went into the visual aspect of 5S, because 5S itself is such a thin set of instructions. And, you know, in Japan, 5S is one of an array of probably six other processes that take care of the shop floor on a fundamental level and get people involved. It isn't the be all and end all. So I failed. And I decided, since no one was looking, Norman just said, be successful, that I would start tweaking the model. And I said, okay, I've got to present this idea. And I emphasized most importantly, the visual aspect, because that seemed to be completely undernourished. But at every inch of the way, I want this to be about individual choice, because I'm working with Americans, and man, they have such a sense of entitlement that if I tell them to do something, that's a guarantee that they won't. So I've got to somehow get this owned by people that I have no power over because I'm an outside person, plus a woman. I'm not an employee. I'm not a manager. I have no authority. And what came clear to me is that if I let people make decisions about their own will early on, that that will would slowly come over to the side of the process, the individual will. And that's where I driven came from. There's a story in the book that talks about Hank, and Hank didn't know where his pliers were. And he was laughed at because no wonder you can't get any work done, Hank, you don't know where your pliers are. And I was in the room. I said, hold on, everybody. This is Hank's. And, Hank, will you go for a ride with me? Let's just ride this pony and see where we Go, so what do you think about these pliers? He said, well, no, it really is a problem. This guy in the second shift uses it and then the guy in the third shift. And I never see the guy in the second shift or the third shift, but just a shadow passing my bench and I don't have a sense of control. And, you know, this eats my lunch every day. And you know what was amazing is that I said, what do you want to do about it? He said, I just want to put it here and I want to put a little line around it. He wanted to do a shadow board. The line in my work became a better term, became a border, because a border has functionality. A line is just a mathematical construct. It has no functionality. So we call it a border. And he said, I want to put a border around it. And I did, and he did. And we took a picture of it. And there's more, much more to the story, which you can read in the book. But I realized that if I did not have advocates for these devices, the devices would disappear. And I know there are problems in getting three shifts to agree on the placement of the pliers because everybody shares the tool. In this case, that's solvable and we can do another show on how to solve it. It's solvable and people don't think it's solvable. They don't see what happens when you enlist the I equally on all three shifts. No shift dominance. Everyone has equal say, including the say of no. So what happened is that the cultural piece became clear it was going to be I driven. And then I tried it on a supervisory level. It worked like a charm. And then I tried it on a leadership executive level to let the leader, the executive, own his function, own her work, and own it through visual devices that supported the same way that 5s and later on operator led visuality supported operators, the supervisor, manager and then the executive. The GM had tools also for installing a language, an I driven language to support their own work. So that's on a large level, the way I driven happened. And the definition of a visual workplace is the same. It's the one I came up with, I don't know, 20 or 30 years ago. It's a work environment that is self ordering, self explaining and therefore self regulating, where what is supposed to happen does happen on time, every time, day or night. Because of visual devices. It's so interesting. It's those physical devices that embed our intelligence into whatever our work landscape is. CEO or machinist. And the other thing that is Core to this. These are the secrets of the Death Star, Ron. The other thing is to stop to look beyond the devices, because otherwise we're just copying devices. And to see that visuality is about installing information. We are sharing information through those devices. Ah. And that means we're creating a language. We are creating a language of devices. So that's where it goes. Yeah. And I driven is what gives it the freshness, the ownership. And, you know, you don't. We can do yet another show on standardization. You don't standardize visual devices. It is a huge mistake. You just change your language. It'll sound almost the same thing, but importantly different. You call it. We're going to create visual best practices and then you can iterate.

Yeah, no, I love it. You know, and I remember reading. I don't. You may have mentioned it, but really the fundamental questions that you propose in your book for this eye driven approach is the first one is what do I need to know and what do I need to share? You know, and that's just such a eloquent, simple, but so, so powerful, Right. And, and I see me personally kind of one of my pet peeves with not just a visuality, but insert any concept within any sort of continuous improvement endeavor is we could sometimes get a little bit lost in why are we doing this, what problem are we solving? Right? And, you know, I'm sure you know Mark Rabin, right? And you know, he's got his famous lame acronym lean as misguidedly executed. And you see it, we know in our short course we make fun of the guy who, you know, tapes out his phone and, you know, his keyboard and everything else is like, this is not. You can get a little carried away with the label maker and the red tape, right? And so like, what problem are you solving with these visual controls? I think that's at the heart of what this is all about.

But I would, so I would ask you that question. What problem are you solving? What problem are you solving? Maybe even with the guy with the tape and his phone.

Yeah. Well, I don't think they're solving any problem in that example. I think that, I think what. Sometimes what I see is people just, you know, they'll attend AME or they'll attend an LEI conference or whatever. You might get a little. Watch a Gemba Academy video, right? And you get a little excited about some new knowledge and you're dying to use it, right? Or you're dying to deploy it. And so you just go out and start throwing paint on the wall and See how it works. And hey, but the end of the day, I'm also a proponent of, you know what, go ahead and tape your keyboard out. If it gets you thinking and gets you your mind and you're practicing this border concept, as you call it, then hey, have at it. You're not hurting anyone.

Right? Wait a minute. But that's exactly. So you and I will have somewhat differing views of this.

Yeah.

So I believe. I believe that in life or at work, as in life, we are not always solving a problem and we don't always have to. I mean, when we're in life, we look at flow, we look at enjoyment, we look at maybe we don't put it this way, the lack of struggle. And I. What I love about visuality is that it exists, its impact is macro, but its source is micro. And that is one of the leverage points of what do I need to know? It means that I don't need to justify my need to know to anyone. It is my need to know. It's one of the reasons why it says, it doesn't say, what do we need to know? If it said, what did we need to know, we'd be in a committee again and we would be negotiating for the common level, which is always less than the unique or individual level. So the what do I need to know? And this is what I learned in the 80s and parlayed into my own company in the 1990s, is that the power that is within me is within you and is within each operator. And whether or not we know and see whether or not people say I'm in charge of my own will, they are. They either get on board wholeheartedly or they hold something back of themselves from your effort. And that's usually the better part of themselves. That's usually the part that counts. So culturally speaking, it's a powerful concept. It's eye driven. But it also means that I don't need to have a problem, but I have. If you would understand my work not as a problem, Mr. Supervisor, but as a struggle, you would live more closely to what I'm dealing with. It's that I have to face the same micro struggles. And every day, day in, day out, one of the best metrics. A friend of mine who's a great, he's one of our licensed certified trainers, Stuart Bellamy, used to work at Brandt. Very low volume, very high complexity, two years on the floor. You know, for a unit to actually get delivered blueprint and all that stuff was very, very complex. It's like making arrows and making a rocket ship. And one of his operators who did, he did Visuality just superbly well, I'm talking about the way that Stuart taught it and the way he teaches it, his understanding. He's a true colleague of mine. I learned from him. And he's doing my work. And I'm saying, jeepers, let me see what this work is about. Let me look at what Stuart's doing. Because he's doing things that I haven't conceived of, but he's using my work, he's using my template. And one of his operators did the math. He said, and I have this written up somewhere. He said, you know what? I'm losing five minutes every hour looking for something, whether it's a tool or a person or material, it's something. Or trying to figure out what it means or. And he was describing his informational landscape, the information deficits that were so microscopic it became his own personal struggle. And he said, I love this stuff because, you know, finally you're doing something for me. I'm getting those five minutes and you know, when I do those multiples of five minutes every hour and then every day, for every day I work, every month and every year, I'm saving X number of thousands of minutes. And then he did a multiple. And this was the brilliant part. He said, but there's 200 of me on this floor. And he did the multiple. It was like 35,000 hours a year would be saved, but not because there was a problem.

Well, no, I would disagree. No, I'll disagree. This is great conversation. We don't normally have debates on my show, but this is great. So I would say what you decided described to me is a perfect example of what. Oh, I know, you know Paul Akers, right? Like our friend Paul, you know, two second lean, right? Like fix what bugs you. Right. And so I think this is a perfect example of this operator has things that were bugging him or her.

Right.

And so they're going about their day and perhaps it was visuality that helped them counter some of these issues. Or perhaps it was anything, right? Could be any concept, solution.

Yeah.

But at the end of the day there was something bugging them. What you call that bugging could be a problem. Could be, it could be, you know, he's, he's unhappy at home and he comes to work and he's stressed out. Right. Because his sick, sick child or something.

Right.

It could be so many things. Right. And so then I think lean, just the overall concept of the humanity of lean, if you will, is is that it addresses the human person at wherever they're at. But ultimately, ultimately there is a. There is a root to the issue, a problem, a. A defect, a crisis, an issue. And so I guess all I'm saying is. And like, guys, like what Mark Rabin would say is, don't just go start taping out your keyboard because. And think that your. Your. Your. Your lean thinking. Right. Because you may not be right. You may be practicing the tenants of lean. Right. But you're probably not solving a problem by taping out where your keyboard goes unless someone walks away. It's a wireless keyboard, and it can walk away or something. I don't know. Right. You know, maybe it could be a real problem. So I think we're saying the same things. It's just that. But at the end of the day, it's. It's. We're lean thinkers, are problem solvers. Right. That's what we do. You know, and this is what. At least the lean that I've grown up with over the last 20 years is. We're trying to solve problems. Right.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Great.

Great.

So we're aligned. So we're aligned.

This is great, man. I don't know. Yeah, it is. It is. Well, gosh, we've Talked for almost 45 minutes. This is fantastic. So. But in the essence of time, I had some questions that I'm not going to be able to get to, but I. But the one I definitely want to get to is. And you've sort of addressed it already, but I wanted you with all of your experience to maybe share a success story or two from. And you don't need to name the names of the clients unless you want to. That's fine too, either way. But I'm particularly interested in hearing about, you know, maybe one that had no concept of visuality. They were lost, if you will. And perhaps you and your organization or folks that worked with you have helped them. Like, talk about maybe one or two journeys. And obviously we don't have too long to go into each one, but can you think of any?

Yeah, actually, as you were talking, I thought of something. I've thought of a particular journey that is perhaps will surprise you because of the level it happened on. But I'm thinking of a leader, an executive who was in charge of five sites. He was called a general manager, and he was a very tough nut to crack on the outside. He had all the. All the. He had the profile of a charismatic leader. And I'm going to now talk superficially. He was Tall, he was golden blue eyes, tan, sun streaked hair, muscles, big muscles, I don't know about that. I didn't look quite that closely. But he was extremely well dressed. And this gentleman is a European. So he was extremely well educated, well articulated and he had a command of the company, he thought. And when I began to work with this company, he had just been installed to take the place of a private owner. The owner was finally, and the owner was a fabulous leader and person. And he had chosen this gentleman to replace him. And I thought it was a good choice. I liked the gentleman a great deal. Let's just call him Edward. Edward, which is not his real name. So Edward was compelling. And we began about a three and a half year journey, longer than I like to be at a company. But they did something that's called, they opened many doors. My implementation model which is in that blue book is called the 10 Doorways. And by the way, we're releasing a second edition in January which will be greatly amplified and I think a very good move. And the model is there are 10 doorways. They each represent a different category of visual function and they are each owned by different levels of the organization. Doorway number one is operator led visuality, visual order, visual inventiveness. Operators own it, they open the door, they get the outcome. Doorway number four is the leadership doorway. And in this company they had opened four doors, but not the executive leadership one. We had fantastic rollout of operator led visuality, changed all the metrics, moved it from a craft artisan type welding and fabrication organization to one that had speed, that integrated time and supervisors were involved. And we had infrastructure training function. I'm actually doing a, an online session, a webinar on this in November. We can send you the link if you want to let people know they can join. I think we have something maximum of 500 people. So if we go beyond that, the door might be shut. But I'm doing a case study on this, but the door. And I said to myself, I'm going to leave Edward alone. Even though he has a role to play right now. All I want him to say is, is yes to the things he understands, which is get the production floor in order, get my supervisors lined up and give them a role. We did standard work with them long before the book came out because it was the obvious thing to do. They had their five questions and they walked around and they got their answers. All of it went well. And finally there was enough stabilization in the production in operations for me to turn to Edward and say Edward Would you like to learn about how visuality could help you? And he of course, said, what do you mean? And he was a difficult person because he was so golden. People were normally deferred to him and his decisions were not always right. But he said yes. And we brought him into an array of visual devices that he understood immediately. And yet he, in a way, brought the wrong personality to it. He brought that personality that got things done. And you'll do it because I said so type attitude. And I'll be darn if those devices did not change him. This is what's so incredible about having a partner in the physical workplace, where the partner is one that you design to give feedback on yourself, and that's what you do. You might call it the Hoshin Suite, although we've expanded it beyond what is normally the centerpiece of Hoshin. But these visual devices, you set them up because you have a need to know and then you have afterwards a need to share, and they give you feedback on yourself. And it's like having your own counselor or your own therapist on an executive level, where these devices are, these formats, these two dimensional formats that are part of Hoshin will start shaping you and telling you about your errors, and you can spot them before you've embarrassed yourself in front of 300 people. So that, for me, was a real resurrection and it was glorious to watch because all you need to do is set them up and the right people up in the right relationship with information. We haven't spoken about this, but there's a leverage in visuality and There's a lever in 5S that allows you to go deeper and deeper. Perhaps we'll talk again and we can talk about that lever. But there are. This is a. This is a paradigm of moving parts. You know, it's dynamic. And I would say, moving on to an operator level. I'm not. I've got so many to choose from. Oh, well. I can talk about a person who was a master machinist and he started by hating everyone because that was his just the way he was. He was really antisocial. He did great work by himself and he ended up that way as well. He did not. For me, this is a victory of a different nature. He did not decide that he was wrong. He didn't decide that he was missing out on anything by not being closer to people. But he did the most extraordinary visual devices. His inventions were. He would do 10 devices for his area and then he would do another 10. And they were. They were devices, they were inventions that were Triggered by the teaching. We showed him something that triggered him. Basically, the guy was a genius. And what he wanted to do is. The way I reduce it was go to work in order to exercise this gift that he had for inventiveness. But the machining process itself wasn't fluid enough for him to find the edges. And when he heard about. When he got in line with visuality, went through the training, you know, just the way everybody else did, all he wanted to do was use visuality as a format for. To see who he was, to express himself. To express himself. You know, there's this great poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. In fact, I may have started the book with that one. I've got the book right here and I'll find out as soon as I turn this page. Yeah, it's at the beginning of the blue book. It's called as Kingfishers Catch Fire. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's wonderful because it says at the end of this very complex kind of Irish language of as kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame. I'll just read it. As tumbled over rim and roundy wells stones ring like each tucked string tells each hung bell's bow swung Finds tongue to fling out broad its name what a mouthful. And then he says, each mortal thing does one thing and the same deals out that being indoors each one dwells, Something's inside of each of us Selves, those were my words. Selves goes itself myself. It speaks in spells. Crying what I do is me for that I came. Crying what I do is me for that I came. This is the human will and this is the need for self expression. And this is one of the things I love so much, much about this pot of honey I fell into this continuous improvement. These rambunctious conversations we have is we're talking about the human will and we're talking about the importance. Not even the importance. The core value in our lives is expressing. We express and you know, Ron, the glory of continuous improvement is that we're giving individuals who were, and I'm talking about managers and executives as well, who were locked into a company for their lives or for a decade thinking that this thing that they have to do repeatedly is going to be their life. And suddenly, suddenly they have an opportunity to express themselves at work. And I find that to be glorious. And I feel very, very privileged to be a part of it. I'm sure you do too. Just to be around the kind of happiness that happens when people can be themselves.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can't Think of a better way to kind of wrap up the show. We have a whole section that we're just not going to be able to get to just for the sake of time. But I didn't want. I didn't want to cut. Cut any of this conversation short because it's been. It's been fantastic. It's been real. That's what I loved about it. And, and, and so what I do want to again have you do is tell people how they can connect with you, perhaps over your website, social media, something like that.

That's nice of you. Thank you. And I'll send you a copy of this poem.

I have it. I have it right here. Okay, great, great.

All right. Thank you.

I have your book. Thank you.

There's six others.

Yeah, well, I don't have them all, but this one, we'll send them to you. Okay.

They're all good ones. Thank you. So our website is visualworkplace.com and just any of the contacts the email will get to me. It might take a couple of days. My email is gwendolynisualworkplace.com again coming off of our website, visualworkplace.com and then I have LinkedIn. I am not a great follower of Twitter and Facebook just because I like to be personal. I like to respond to my own contacts. I don't want to hire somebody to do it, so I don't get to it. But LinkedIn and VisualWorkplace.com are good ways and I'd welcome conversation, of course, and you are all invited. I'll send you that announcement to our online webinar, which will be a visual workplace case study. But I want to tell you I love the work of Gemba Academy. I hope we do create a way for visuality to come through you, but in a way that is perhaps more fulsome than. Than currently imagined. But whatever happens, your contribution and the contribution. Your contribution, Ron, and the contribution of Gemba Academy is incalculable. It is so valuable. You are popularizing that which used to be the domain of very expensive consultants. And you know, and I know them all and they did the best job they could, but you have really made opened up continuous improvement in all of these methodologies to make it available for everyone. Well, thank you. It's just a tremendous service. Thank you. Thank you for your invitation. I've loved it.

Yeah. Hey, are you going to be at AME this year?

I am not. I'm going to be in. I think I'm going to Australia, but I'm going to be there next year.

Okay. All right. All right.

Well, love to see you.

Definitely. Definitely. So, well, goodness gracious, this has been a fantastic show.

Well, I know I'm going to be in Newfoundland. In Newfoundland. In Newfoundland. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not quite Australia, but it's also nice.

Thank you very much. It's been such a pleasure.

All right, you take care. Thank you.

Yeah. Thank you. Bye. Bye, everyone. Bye.

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