GA 137 | How to Approach TWI with Roger Bilas

You're listening to episode 137 with Roger Bielis.

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 Lean and Six Sigma training videos over@gembacademy.com now, today, I'm excited to welcome Roger Bilas to the show. Now, Roger is a longtime practitioner of Lean, and in particular, he has spent a lot of time learning and teaching others about TWI or training within industries. Roger's also going to be taking part in the upcoming TWI Summit, which is going to be held in San Diego. And, uh, let's see, what's the exact date for the TWI summit? February 21st through the 22nd in San Diego. Now, if you're thinking about going to the conference, Definitely go to gembaacademy.com TWI and we can save you 10% on admission. So today, Roger and I really explore TWI. I had lots of questions on my mind that I wanted to get his opinion on, including things like there's the three J programs, job instruction, job relations, job methods. So I wanted to get his opinion on which order he thought folks should learn new Zen. So he gave us some really nice insight, and we just really explored many other aspects of twi. And I just had a great time chatting with with Roger. He's got a lot of experience and a lot of wisdom to share. So show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 137 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 137. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Roger, well, thanks so much for taking time to come onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Calling in from Avon Lake, Ohio. It's just on the west side of Cleveland. O. Hi.

Oh, that's it. Well, I'm. I don't know if you know, I'm from Ohio originally. I grew up in Greenville, Ohio, close to Dayton, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome, awesome. Well, the Buckeyes are having an interesting year, so we'll see how they. I'm a Little nervous about Michigan. I mean, Michigan looks pretty salty this year, so I don't know. That's going to be a tough one.

All right, fingers crossed that's all you can do.

Exactly, exactly. All right. Well, Roger, I really do appreciate you coming on, and we're going to spend some time talking about twi. Why twi? Why not? Kind of is the. The topic of the day. But before we get to that, let's just begin with you telling us a little bit about your background, how you first came to learn about just continuous improvement in general, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Okay, so my background is I've been in leadership and management positions probably for the last 30 years. I started off in the military with a small unit there and grew in size and responsibilities. I did leave the military and then went into manufacturing. And from there, I've led groups from two to three people, development teams all the way back up to six plants as the director of manufacturing. So I've seen a lot of things. And what I've really, really use that background for is to help those in those positions now as a trainer and consultant, to help them solve their problems, to help them achieve what they want as results. And so that's what we created in the BILAS Group. It's a consulting and training firm, and it initially started off with Lean Consulting, and we'd done a lot of work in that. And then I took an internal role at one point, and the people there, everywhere, it was a multinational firm, and there were nine plants, and every plant I went to where they were trying to implement Lean, they said, you know, Lean's good, but what we really need is to train our people. And at that point, the Internet had just had. They just posted up the TWI manuals, Mark Warren and his group, and I looked at that, I said, boy, that's something. It's about training. Let's bring it in. And we brought it in. We started doing that training. It was very successful in the organization I was with. It helped promote the Lean process, but at the same time, it gave those folks the ability to train their people what they had been asking for. And so for the last 10 years, though, we do Lean consulting, we also do quality management, performance improvement, organizational development. There's been a strong focus as well on twi, the job instruction, job relations, and job methods training organizations in that, not only in the US but all over the world.

Got it. Got it. All right. Yeah. Like I said, we're going to jump right into the TWI here in a bit. But before then, Roger, we like to start all of our shows with our guests sharing a quote or two that possibly inspires them. So do you have one?

You know, I do, I do. When I got out of the military, it was a very people focused organization. And so when I went into the manufacturing, you know, it's about machines, it's about making product. There's processes, there's systems, and there's a lot of emphasis on the technical systems of an organization. And so I had been put in charge of a department that was struggling heavily, is struggling with their maintenance, with their quality, and with morale in general. And at that point they brought in a guy named Garland Flippen. He had been the VP of manufacturing of the organization. They brought him back as a consultant and he came into my department and the first thing he said to me, he said is, fix your people problems and all your other problems will solve themselves. And I was not getting that kind of advice from anybody else. And then he immediately said, let's go look at safety. And we went out and we started to work on the safety problems with people. And the next thing you know, we started to solve quality problems. They were bringing solutions, they were doing the improvements on the machine. They had ideas. And it really taught me that if you do focus on the people in your organization, they can help you with all the other issues Now.

So do you think it was because, you know, if you try to find a correlation there is it maybe it wasn't safety per se, but it was the fact that people felt like they care about my safety. Is that what it was, you think, or what's the correlation there, you think?

I think it's if one, you're exactly correct. It's about caring about people. They said, okay, the other thing is it's you want to improve it. And if you focus on the folks first and they get involved in that, they just naturally carry that to the next point. I mean, I had operators coming up and saying, you know, 10 years ago we used to do it this way. Do you want us to go back to that? That's a great idea. Okay, let's do that. And those improvements, they weren't top down generated. They were folks coming forward saying, what did we used to do? What ideas would work? So I think we eliminated a lot of the issues that caused morale problems and that turned around not only our human system, but I think it had a huge impact positively on our technical systems, our machines and our equipment and our parts.

I love it. I love it. All right, well, very good. So let's kind of jump into the topic of the day. Twi. So we've had some other folks on in the past where, you know, we've kind of given an overview of what TWI is, the, you know, a little bit of its history and so forth. And we'll link to all those in the show, notes of the episode. But just at a, at a high level. You know, it's been, gosh, what is it, 70 some years now since we've started thinking about these things in this, in this country in particular. But is it really, is it still relevant?

You know, that. That's a great question, and I think it's highly relevant. You know, this is one of the things people, when we're out there doing consulting or training, and they say, we have these apps. Can we make an app for this? Can we do something? We have procedures. What about an email? And it all goes back to what we started with the people. And those people that you have are the ones that are going to execute your processes, that are going to operate your machines, that are going to fulfill your procedures to make a quality product or service. So if you look at twi, what does it focus on? It focuses on the five needs of a leader, knowledge of the work and knowledge of responsibilities. You know, that's on the organization. But how to train people, how to lead people, how to improve the methods that they're employing. Those are skills that we can train. So if we can develop those people in those three areas, they will tremendously impact the performance of an organization. So I think it's highly relevant.

All right, so TWI, in particular, what makes it so effective and why is it so critical for just really, most of the audience here are, you know, lean thinkers of some, some, you know, some way or manner, they're practicing lean. Why is it so critical that we think about TWI and use twi?

I see the three programs, the three J programs, as sort of meta tools. And what I mean by that is these are tools that allow you to do other things. So if I know how to train people and lead people and improve the methods, how will that help in a lean program, aren't those critical skills we'd want of our people? And when I say our people, you know, TWI is a leadership program. It's for leaders. But the way they define leadership is anybody in charge of people or who directs the work of others. In our flattened organizations today, just about everyone at one time or another is a leader. So if we can empower them with these types of skills, it would be tremendously easy to solve your quality problems, to solve, or at least help solve your maintenance problems or your productivity problems. And so that's why I think it becomes the foundation of that any organization that's on any continuous improvement path can use to help support it. You know, when I was in that one organization with the nine plants, you know, we would go out and they said, you know, we're doing lean and we like it, but what we really need is training. One of the things that was always a problem is they would do an event with the consultants that we had in, and it would tremendously improve performance for a week, for two weeks, for three. But by six weeks, eight weeks, people had started putting things back because we didn't have a way to train them on the new improvements. We started doing twi, we started to do ji, training people, jr, solving problems as they came up with the new processes or procedures. And all of a sudden the lean improvements started to sustain themselves because we trained all four shifts. Because when there was a problem, instead of just making a workaround, not telling anyone, leaders started solving those types of problems and continuing to improve the process and the people that were working in them.

Now, you've mentioned the three primary J programs, ji, jr, jm. Do you have a suggestion or a recommendation for the order in which someone learns the J programs? Most people seem to start with ji.

Right, right.

What about what after? What do you. What do you suggest after that?

Well, I suggest starting with JI because there's two reasons. One, if you make any other improvements, it's hard to train people if you don't have that. That skill of instructing. So JI gives you that. But the other thing JI does too, when you go out and you make a breakdown, I tell. I tell my clients, if we make breakdowns in areas that you're having problems, you're going to get a 20% improvement. Not even if you. If. Even if you don't train people, but just by doing a break bound, by looking at that procedure, that task that closely, you're going to get that benefit. So JI is a great place to start. Now, I either start concurrently with jr, you know, maybe a workshop in the morning with JI and a JR workshop, because what's going to happen pretty quickly after that is you're going to start to see issues. People are just going to say, hey, I don't want to do it that way, or, you know, I think my way's better. Nobody talked to me. What happens is problems Come up. If the leader doesn't have a good system, which is the four step JR problem solving method, if they don't have that, then they struggle with that and then we struggle with implementing ji, we give them JR either concurrently or fairly soon after as it's being pulled into the organization to start to handle those problems. Now I think you need to probably get to the point people say, well, how long do I do that? You need to get to the point where it's a habit, it's a kata. The way you train procedural tasks is ji. It's not something we have to think about. It's become automatic.

It's like breathing.

Yeah. And it's the same way with jr. How do we handle problems? Now, HR will teach you many different tools and techniques, but the JR four step problem solving method, that's the way to pull those in to solve those problems when you weigh and decide. So once you get those two habits actually sustainable in an organization that are self sustaining, I should say, then I think you can bring JM in because then you're going to have the improvements once you make those improvements. How do I implement? Well, let me train them on this. Let me do this, let me train that. Oh, people are not seeing why it's beneficial. Let me use JR to help with that problem. And so what's the timeframe? I think a good six months of ji, maybe minimum, probably up to a year. You'll see a huge performance improvement anyways just by closely looking at your processes and then training your people on the one best way. But when you get to that point after a year or so, then I think you can really make some effort or some improvement with jm. Now that's just a generic suggestion. There may be organizations that are much more fluid that can handle it much more quickly and there may be more others that may take longer. But you know, that's just a kind of a rule of thumb that I go with.

Yeah, I got it. So let's talk shop a little bit on within ji. We talk a lot about job breakdowns. Right. And, and I would. It seems to me that the, the, the hardest part of JI in particular JI is the breakdown. I mean it's not a complicated concept, but understanding how to under, let's say identify an important step. Right. Versus, you know, getting into like the confusion of like say job or standard work. Right. Really detailed standard work. You got 20 steps. Well, that's not an, not necessarily an important step. How do you differentiate between all of the minutia and an Important step.

Well, you know, I'm going to have to disagree just a little bit right up front here before I answer that question. One, I think making breakdowns is one of the easier parts of ji okay. And the reason I say that is I have seen organizations make 10, 15, 20 breakdowns. We want to get all the breakdowns done before we start to implement. You know, we want to have it all set. And what happens is they get all these breakdowns, but they get no feedback on how good they are. So my, my philosophy is make one train one. That first breakdown you make, even if it's putting hearing protection in, go train somebody.

Yeah.

Because what you'll find is, well, I missed this key point. Or I guess that wasn't an important step. It probably was a key point. Maybe there's only four steps for that simple task. And you'll learn in the first breakdown by training it whether it's any good. You know, people hand me and say, what do you think of these? I don't know. Did you train somebody on them?

Right.

Well, not yet. Well, we're not going to know if they're good or not. And I can look at them and know if they're pretty good, but we're not going to know if they're effective or not until you train somebody. And you're going to find out immediately if they don't get it. You missed something.

Yeah, no, I think that's great. Maybe, maybe I should have restated it and like, maybe hard wasn't the word, but it takes the most practice, right? I mean, you've got to practice these breakdowns, right? And you've got to experiment. And like you said, try, you know? You know, and that's, I guess that's, that's where I see the folks that get the most confused. Especially a traditional lean thinker, right. Who is so used to, you know, the idea of, of detailed standard work or maybe a standard operating procedure. And they just want to naturally a 40 step, you know, breakdown. I'm like, yeah, you know, maybe no, that's not gonna work. Right, Right.

Well. And you know, I think too, some people need to have it all set up first. You know, we were working with one group and I said, you know, go ahead and train it. And the guy said, no, I'm gonna rework it. I think he reworked his first breakdown like eight times. And I finally said, that's it, stop. Go train somebody on it. He went and trained him and he said, wow. It was. Once I trained him, I could see what I really needed to tell him.

Yeah, exactly.

And so his second one, I said, how many times you rewrite it? He goes, two. And I said, okay, the third one maybe once or twice. And he got good at it because he got that feedback. So I think, you know, when you said the hardest thing, I'm going to say the hardest thing is not the breakdown. It takes a practice to get there. The hardest thing is when you actually do the training. Because what are you doing when you're doing that? People don't know the one best way. And that's why you're training them.

Yeah.

If they don't, you're actually asking them to change their behavior.

Yeah.

So I've been in places, we've done hard breakdowns. Have you trained them? No. Go train one all of a sudden.

Yeah.

We need junior because we have a lot of problems.

Yeah.

Because if guy's been doing something for 30 years and you come out and say, this is a better way, you better have the key points and reasons for those key points that will help him understand that you better have the tools for handling problems when he refuses to do that. And so I think the harder thing is to go out there and actually change the behaviors. Do the four step method. Got it. It seems simple as well. You know, four steps, they're all on a card.

Yeah.

But if you don't do step one well with somebody that has a lot of experience in that task, they may not be receptive to steps two, and then it'll be difficult in three and four.

So I got so many other questions are popping up on my mind here. I'm making notes to myself here. My own. My own breakdown. Right. Notes to yourself. Right. It's what a breakdown is. So you mentioned reasons. Now when you look at the original literature, the TWI literature from, you know, wartime, I've always found that interesting where they don't seem to put a lot of emphasis on reasons. It's mentioned what a time or two, but it's important steps and key points. And then they kind of just lightly talk about reasons. And I've always found that interesting because to me, just my own bias is that the reasons are extremely important. You know, the why that you do things. So what are your thoughts on that?

Well, you know, it's interesting you should say that because when we developed our own materials to train people in ji, JR and jm we went back to the original manuals. And in the original manuals, interestingly enough, it only mentions that you have to do the important steps the first Time through and the key points and reasons. The second time through, you may do it a third and a fourth time, but it was only two times. And actually in step three, it's the same thing. Make sure that they give you the important steps and then the second time, the key points and reasons. But they actually stressed in the original manuals the key points and reasons even more than the important steps. And I think that's because, you know, intuitively the important steps are usually what people know. I mean, if you look at a breakdown versus, say, sop, a work instruction, you know, a procedure or something like that, people get the important steps. You know, it kind of works out that way. What they don't get are those key points. And if they do, I could probably bet a Diet Coke they didn't put down the reason why they're doing those.

Yeah.

And that reason does two things. One, it helps that person understand what they're trying to achieve by doing that. The other thing is it helps to reduce the. The denial of people from doing it. You know, if I don't tell you why you're doing it, what's the reason for that key point, three days from now, you may stop doing it. But if you know the reason, you know the job will fail, you could get hurt, or it makes it easier, you're probably more apt to include all that. So I think the stress is there. I think that we need to focus on that even more so because that's the thing that's going to help that learner when you not there after you've trained them.

So on your breakdowns, when you're teaching folks, you do encourage kind of the three column format and pull your step, key points and reasons, having all three.

Right, right.

Good.

And it's almost too like, you know, like, we tried it, you know, when we initially learned it, there was a separation from key point and reason. And I almost encourage people. I mean, it's very difficult to say, you know, you need to untwist and straighten. And then the key point is, you know, six inches and then stop. Yeah, six inches, because it won't work downstream. Oh. And so we almost have it almost as a sentence, you know, just continue on out.

Yeah, yeah.

We did some calling back of clients and we said, you know, how's it going? And a lot of them said they struggled a little bit. One, because it was too complicated. We had to do it three times, they had to do it four times, and it was just too much for the tasks. And so when we went back to the original material, it says, you know, two and two. We found that people were much more comfortable doing that. Now if they had to do it a third and a fourth time on steps two or three, they could. But it made it easier because people found it difficult to separate those key points from the reasons. And then they got frustrated in the four step method versus, you know, letting it flow and letting the learner absorb it and be able to perform it.

Good stuff, good stuff. Now what about program development? Maybe tell folks what that is and then why doesn't it, it doesn't seem to get much love these days.

Well, it's funny you should say that because program development is the hard part. This is, you know, when I look at it and I know TWI has the, the whole program development piece in there and that's an excellent program, but I'm just going to even make it more basic than that. We like to do things that are separate. You know, we can call it ji, we can go and ji an area, you know, let's go out there and make breakdowns and train everyone on it. And it becomes a training program. And program development, it really focuses on a performance program. And if you look at the literature about performance management, you need to start with something greater than we need to do training because at the end of the week, at the end of the day, we don't ask, or many people don't ask their leaders how many people you trained, they ask how many parts you made or how many services did you provide. And so we need to go back to that. And that's what program development helps you do. And it helps you go back to that and say, where do I need to focus my efforts? And then, you know, I like to just call it performance management because then we can go to what are your strategic goals? What do you want to achieve? Is it about cost? Is it about quality? Is it about delivery?

Yeah.

And then, okay, that's your goal or your goal in it. What are your business objectives to achieve that goal? What do you need to do in business? Well, we need to run at 98% efficiency. Okay, now we have a business objective. What performance objectives do we need to deliver that? Well, you know, we need to be able to Change over in 15 minutes or less or we need to be running the line at this rate. And then you ask yourself to be able to do that. What individual and team tasks do I need to do? And once you hit those individual and team capabilities, well, now you're starting to talk about where do I need to Focus JI where do I need to focus, jr? Where do I need to focus? JI yeah.

Yeah.

And so that rolls back up. So when people ask, how do we do today? I know why I train three people on that changeover task because it's going to deliver me that business objective of we made 120 today.

Yeah.

Oh, it's great. And I know that it was the training and not necessarily just going out there and a little louder, a little meaner and a little longer. That doesn't get it, you know, that's not going to get you more.

Well, it comes back to just the concept of, you know, Hoshin con repolicy deployments, having a strategy, having a plan. Right. Like, why are we doing these things? Right?

Right line of sight, you know. You know, I've been in many places where they want me to achieve this and, and I'm doing that. I have no idea how I impact that organizational objective, but I'm working real hard. How do I make that lineup for everyone? Yeah, everyone all the way down to the folks out there that are maybe emptying trash cans or doing something that we don't see helps make it maybe that could be lined up for them. And so they can see it because I think everyone has a critical component. Otherwise in lean, we'd call that waste and we wouldn't.

So, Roger, who should attend just TWI training in general? Is it like frontline staff, C level, something in between?

It's. Well, it's easiest to see the frontline staff, those folks that will be doing the training, those that will be managing it. It's easy to see why they should train. But a lot of times I've had managers and even the C level say, you know, well, why do I need to go to it? And I'll just tell a story here that kind of exemplifies it. We were doing some JI and JR in an organization. It was a grocery organization. And the COO said, well, yeah, we need to really do jr. I think it'll work. And our department managers need those skills when they deal with their people. And he had just told me about an issue he was dealing with with his regional managers, saying it was difficult to get them to actually delegate some of their responses responsibilities they were still working to level down even though they'd been promoted. And so I said to him, well, what about you and your staff and the ones that work for you? When do you want to schedule that? And he said, well, I don't think this is really a program for us. And I Said, well, do you have any problems you could work with? And he said, no, I think this program wouldn't. I said, well, what about the delegation issue you just described? Wouldn't JR work for that? And he paused. He paused for at least 10 seconds. And he said, you know what? You're right. I should be using it right now. And so I think it needs to be at that level. I was working with another group where the owner, it was a probably 2, 300 person trailer operation, and the owner said, how am I ever going to get people to start using ji? I've been talking about it and asking them about it, but they're not using it. And I just simply said to him, where's your card? And he went at my desk. I said, well, maybe if you had your card and you pulled it out, they would. Two weeks later, I was talking to him. He said he pulled it out every meeting, he'd set it down right. First thing in the meeting, in two weeks, they were using it to analyze problems. In the meeting, everyone brought their card. So I think it's from the top all the way down to the bottom. Everyone has people problems. Why wouldn't you want jr? Everyone is or should be teaching those folks that work for them. Why not have something like JI in the back? I mean, even though you may not make a breakdown, maybe you could structure the way that you communicate. Hey, here's the five things we're gonna talk about today. Let me talk about the first one. Here's, you know, the first important point under here, I wanna talk about. I mean, if you think of a presentation in PowerPoint, here's my agenda, my first agenda point. I have three bullets. I talk about the reasons why, about those bullets. So I think it's something that everyone can use.

I totally agree. And how about just if nothing else, step one, prepare the learner, put the learner at ease. What if every CEO in the world was able to go out and put anyone they came in contact with at ease so these people would actually talk to them. Right. How powerful would that be?

Right, right. Well, you know, and the other thing, putting them at ease to even learn, because most of the time, you know, we launch a lean program and everyone says we're going to find a lot of warts, don't worry about it, we're going to work on them. But after three months when you're still working on that first word you thought you fixed, and somebody looks at I thought you fixed that, all of a sudden we don't have that ease to learn about that problem anymore, we just need to get rid of it. We need to either fix it or cover it up, one of the two. And so we lose that. But if the leaders in the organization continued, like you just said, to put people at ease, to start to understand those problems, to continue to do that, then I think you'd have a much more robust continuous improvement culture. Yes.

Hey, so someone's listening to this right now who maybe hasn't started with twi, but they want to. They're getting close, but they're just not quite sure what to do. What advice do you have for that person? Let's assume that it's someone with leadership, you know, qualities. They're a supervisor or manager or something like that.

You know, I would ask them, what need are they trying to fill? You know, if it's train your people and that's what you're thinking you're going to fulfill, then I'd ask you to go back and say, what's your business need? What are you struggling with? Because you want to align this effort with what you're trying to achieve as a business. I mean, they did that way back in 1944 that they even said that this isn't about training. This is about, you know, achieving results. So I would say, you know, figure that business need out, and then when you bring somebody in, I mean, you know, my goal initially was to take those 1944 manuals, work on them a little bit, and then deliver it on my own. And I was lucky enough to. To bring somebody in. I had Pat Grop come in and he trained our organization for a week. And then I went out and did some train the trainer with him, and. And then it's all after that. We've been doing that, but I thought you get some idea of what it is. There's some great references out there. There's some great websites that people can look on. We've even got some stuff that can give you some basic understanding. But then see how these programs are going to fulfill those business needs. And if you can see that, if training is going to fulfill that business need, then give somebody a call and ask them to help work through it. Convince people. I mean, you have to get that. I don't want to say roi, because sometimes that's a little difficult to develop. But you have to be able to articulate how you're going to fulfill that business need by doing this. Otherwise it'll be flavor of the month.

Yeah. Now, you haven't heard it, but in the intro, I mentioned the TWI summit that will be coming up here in the new year. What's your role going to be be at the, at the summit? Roger?

Well, I've talked at a few of them now and the last three years I've talked about a progression of what do you need to do to get training to stick and then what do we need to do to get people self motivated to use training. And then the last one is how do we tie this to get a return on investment? This year my role is going to be, I'm going to speak on what's the link between we have a program here that's 70 some years old. What's the link between this program and the brain science and what we've learned in the last 10 to 15, maybe 20 years about how people learn and how did something created in 1944 hit most of the things necessary for learning and then applying skills that we've only learned in the last 10 to 15 years. So that'd be a short part of it. Then the next part is how do we take what we've learned in the last 10 to 15 years to strengthen the JI program, I mean the TWI programs, the J programs and take them forward. I mean, we have learned things that make them more robust, that get people to apply them better. So that's what I'm going to be doing at the summit.

Love it, love it. Yeah, I, People listen to the show, know I'm a huge fan of the Summit. You know, it's one, you know, there's the big giant shows like AME and whatnot, which are incredible, but then these smaller, you know, so two, 300 people shows like the Summit and you know, the lean accounting that Lean Frontiers guys put on, this TWI one to me is just special. It's just there's this energy in the air that you just don't feel at most of the other conferences that you attend.

Most of my clients, I always encourage them. We always try to get them to present at it, you know, tell their story and they tell their story, warts and all, and what it really does, I think the Summit, you're right, the two to 300 people that are going to be at it, the topics are great, but it's the conversations outside, I think the connections that people make afterward. I've had clients say, you know, I'm working with this group, we're talking to these people, they're coming in to see what we're doing. The learning that goes on past the summit is probably the biggest Benefit of going to it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right. Very good, Roger. Well, let's go ahead and jump into the reflection section. Got a few questions here I want to definitely want to touch on. The first one is, you know, we spend a lot of time in lean talking about continuous improvement and respect for people, with continuous improvement being, you know, the things we can put our hands on, the tools, but respect for people is a little harder to define and put your arms around. So I'm curious, what does respect for people mean to you?

You know, I've been thinking about this because I think respect for people is probably one of the foundational values that you have to have. And the way I look at it is it's you have to value them. How much do you value what they say, what they think, what they do? If you can't value them, you can't respect them. So I'm busy. I'm running down the hallway. I'm late for a meeting, and somebody comes up to me and says, hey, I need to talk to you now. Do I stop immediately and then give my full attention for the next 15 minutes when I'm late? No. Respect for them says, look, I value what you have to say. I'm on my way to a meeting. Can I come back to you this afternoon and set up a time we can talk? Yeah, that'll work. That's the value. Everyone wants that. They want to think what they have thought, what they've said, what they've done. Here. Look at this improvement. Hey, we don't have time for that. Put that back. Let's get back to what we're really doing here. They want to see the value. They want to be valued. And so if somebody says, you know, you need to respect them, I think you need to value them. I mean, even if you totally disagree, listening to them, I mean, I can't tell you how many times, like I said, you know, I hear what you say, but these are the reasons I'm going to do this. We're going to have to do it this way. And people say, you know what? Thanks for listening. Thanks for hearing me out. At least you listened. I understand what you got to do, but. Okay. And I think that's the respect you need to have, because if you don't have that, it's very difficult. That's why I think the J programs are so powerful. They build on that value of the individual as a trainer, as a leader, as a person that can improve their processes. Let's give them the tools to do that.

Yes, Got it. Do you have a personal productivity habit others might benefit from?

You know, I love to do a lot of reading, and what I try to do is weave the things that I find or have found effective in the reading into my practice and give it a shot. And let's see, you know, and with all full disclosure, I say, hey, this is where I've got this idea. Let's try it out. And one of the things, there's a book called the Four Disciplines of Execution. And it really speaks to this concept that of, yeah, we know what to do. We know that in ji, if you want to implement it, you get your business goal, you do this, you do that, and next thing you know, after six or seven steps, you know, you've hit the promised land and everyone's trained, but how do I do that? And the four disciplines explains that. And one of the key things they say in it, as you're picking things to work on, what's the minimum thing I can do that will impact or solve this issue? And I've been in lean where we make a 50, 70, 80 idea brainstorm, and then we start to figure out which ones. But if you go the other way, what if. What is. What is it that I have to do all of a sudden? Then everyone has a lot more energy because it's not this solve world hunger. It's like, what are we gonna get for lunch? We can fix that. And so what they do then is they focus it down. Now we make that impact because our task is not overwhelming. We can break it into smaller pieces. And then you just ask yourself, what's the next thing? And it allows you to continue. Now you start to put these. One after another continuous improvement happens rapidly.

Yeah. So, Roger, you've obviously been at this for some time and have an incredible amount of experience. And I'm curious, what are you most proud of as it relates to your journey with continuous improvement?

You know, one of the things is, like, I've done a lot, but I love it when the people that I'm working with stand up and a report out and say, this is what we did. That's it.

Yeah. Yeah. It can be pretty moving. Right. And you're sitting in the back and you're not saying anything. You just listen. Yeah. It can be pretty powerful to see them.

You know, they're the ones glowing.

Yeah.

And taking it forward. Yeah, they do it then.

Yes. Wow. Fantastic. So let's go ahead and wrap the show up, Roger, with maybe sharing some. You sharing some final words of wisdom, and then and tell people how they can connect with you.

Well, the one thing is like, it's sort of like when you have a breakdown, you make a breakdown. Go train it. This is one of the things I think it also maybe is from the four disciplines. Just go do it, try it now. When you try it, you have an idea how it should turn out. If it doesn't turn out right, what do I need to do to change it? And then you're on then the path with one step to continuous improvement.

Yes.

It only takes that. It's a decision. And so that's where I work. And the other thing I think is all change is local. I think it's tip o' Neill said way back when, I mean, dates me how old I am, but he said all politics is local. And I believe in the same thing. All change is local. You can have all the change management programs you want, but people have to decide to behave differently. And so that's what you have to focus on. How do I change their mind? Oh, I don't have time to change their minds. All their minds. Well, if you don't, then you're probably not going to get the change that you want. How do I do that? Maybe it's not one on one. Maybe there's other things, maybe there are other people that can help. But if people have to decide to be different, how do I make that happen?

Yes. And JR can help too, right?

Oh gosh. And even jm, I mean, you know, the J programs, it's a three legged tool. If you throw safety in there, it's a four legged stool, you know, but I mean, if one of them is not strong, it's hard to sit on it, it's hard to stand on it. So my thing is, you know, you may start with ji, you may start with JI and jr and then get to jm. But sooner or later you're going to be working all three of those, those legs of that stool and strengthening them to be able to have a foundation. Firm foundation.

Yes. Fantastic. All right, Roger, well, one thing. What is your website address? I want to make sure we get that in there.

Okay. So we have two websites. One of them is thebialistgroup.com.

Just spell that.

Yeah. T H E B as in boy I L A S G R O U p dot com.

Okay.

And so that's the one for our consulting practice, our training practice. I mean we have resources on there. You know, if you wanted to download breakdown sheets or training timetables or you know, a matrix for a much larger Training timetable. We have all that. And so you can do those things, and those are free. We have some of Jim Huntzinger's articles that he's written about. I think you know why standard work is not standard. You know, that's a great article to help people understand that. So those are available on that and. And people can contact us through that as well. There's other things on there as Lean and some of the other things we have. But the one site that, if you're just starting out and you really want to learn something about TWI, is we've created a site called basicleaderskills.com I mean, it's spelled just as it is basicleaderskills.com and in that one, that's just a site that explains twi, the ji, the JR and the jm. There's a page for each one. It goes into depth. There's some tabs in there where you can click on the different components. And that's to help people. Like if someone says, you know what I found doing this the last 10 years is people, why would I want you to come in for a week when I don't even know what it is? This is a way that they can help learn about it themselves, but even more importantly, they can send others to it so they can learn about it. And people like to read and things like that. It's most concise, way I could put it. I didn't want to be verbose on there, but they can get a really good foundation in what TWI is from that site. And that's just informational. We send a lot of our clients there for internally communicating to others what the program is.

Yeah. And we're going to link to everything if people didn't get all those addresses. So just go to the show notes GembaPodcast.com and just look for episode 137, 130. So we'll link to everything. So, Roger, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic episode. I learned a lot and I really enjoyed talking to you. And we'll definitely look forward to seeing you at the TWI summit where we could shake hands and trade war stories.

That sounds great. Thanks for having me on.

All right, you take care.

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