GA 150 | How to Respect Diversity with Mike Brett

You're listening to episode 150 with Mike Brett.

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 to listen to the show and watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and one of you. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Mike Brett to the show. Now, Mike is a Lean thinker from the UK and we connected over LinkedIn. Mike's listened to the show for a while and he hit me up on LinkedIn and kind of introduced himself, and we had a nice chat that way. And I asked him if you want to come on the show. And about a week later, here he is. And we had a great chat. We talked about several different topics. We started by kind of learning a little bit about the diversity that they have at their company there in the uk. They have nine different languages spoken, and so we spent some time talking about how they deal with that. In particular, they're doing a lot with. And I didn't even realize this before we started the show, but they're doing a lot with job instruction, which obviously we've spent a lot of time talking about over the last month or so. But I was really curious on how they dealt with doing things like job breakdowns and whatnot, when you have nine different languages to deal with. So Mike kind of walked us through that a little bit. Then we started talking about a game that Mike actually created. It's called the Lean Card Game, and it's really basically just a Lean game. It takes a couple decks of cards and sounds like a really fantastic way to kind of engage folks. I've never personally tried it, but I'm going to order up a set and give it a go. Maybe we'll make a Gemba Academy video on it or something. So we talked about that, and then we kind of finished up with their journey with Hoshin Kanri. Um, so they've got quite a diverse organization across multiple locations and multiple business segments. And so they've created 38 separate X matrices, kind of covering the executive level down basically down three tiers across the organization. So who spent some time talking about that? And they got A lot of good stuff going on over there and Mike's a very well spoken guy and I really enjoyed chatting with them. So show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 150150 again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 150. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Mike, thanks so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Hey, Ron. Yeah, I'm over the water in the uk. Okay. I'm about. About five miles from Cambridge.

Okay, very good, very good. Before we came on, you were talking about it's sunny and nice today in the uk, so that's great.

Yeah, we don't get much snow around here, so we had a little tiny bit of the weekend, but now it is bright. The sun's coming through the woods in the back and it's around 10 degrees, so it's quite a nice day.

Good, good, good, good. All right, well, thanks for coming on. So, Mike, as you know, we kind of like to get our show started with our guest sharing of something that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Yeah, I was. I've listened to a lot of the podcasts. It's something I've been doing recently when I've been driving around the country with work. And I hear a lot of people doing this or the lean ones. But actually I was watching a film not so long ago called the Imitation Game. Have you heard of it?

No.

Okay. It's about when they tried to break the Enigma code at World War II. And anyway, there's this character called Alan Turing, and his phrase is sometimes it's the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine. And for me, relating that into the lean world and the CI world, we're really focused on behaviors and culture. And it's bringing people out who maybe haven't had a chance to say things before or felt the ability to come forward with anything. And they may be perceived as quite quiet individuals, especially if. If we talk later on about the multicultural elements. Sometimes they're hidden behind a language barrier and actually they come out and then they have these awesome outcomes from just having the opportunity maybe to try something or be taught in a different, slight different way or something like that.

Yeah. Awesome. I love it. I love it. All right, well, Mike, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about your background, maybe how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then what you're up to these days?

Okay, well I think my background's been sort of fairly, I use the word organic. It's kind of gone from one thing to another. But I left college and I was studying architecture and for one reason or another I ended up getting in engineering a little bit of a change and I kind of came back to that in my early 20s and I started teaching a local college in the engineering department and part of the programs we were delivering was this Kaizen continuous improvement flow stuff. And as I had to prepare the material it kind of got interesting and I found that, you know, being a bit of engineering background, quite, quite nice to have sort of bits and pieces and didn't really know too much about it. And that kind of evolved over a few years and then there was a team of people running what was called the business improvement programs over in the UK as a side of NVQ qualification. That was the chance of working with different businesses and applying some of these tools and anyway I got asked to sort of that side of it as the lecturing and I was end up going out into sort of the eastern part of the UK and working on those things and it kind of just evolved and evolved through master classes and various courses and. And eventually I've been doing that for probably five years and I had a bit of time off because I was a bit unwell start to have an operation and when I came back I was looking for something and I came across where I am now, which is Dalehead Foods and there's a lady called Suzanne Nuttall who was heading up the sort of lean transformation here. And when I came to interview with her I remember going down into the factory and had to do some observation exercise and she really, she knew everyone, she knew everyone on the shop floor and all about them and you know, all the operators and what they were doing with their families and kids and I just thought wow, this is a place that really talks to people. And as we kind of went through that, I think actually this is quite a nice company to work for because we're a sole supplier for Waitrose who are a fairly well known supermarket over here and produce a lot of high welfare products, sort of the top end of the market. And there was a bit of kudos that came with that thinking it was a nice business to be in but also this opportunity to get rid of some of the frustrations we'd had in the education sector. There was a lot of inefficiency if you like and people were challenging back saying you're saying one thing and another, and there's a little bit of confusion. So when I came to Dernhead, it was like, wow, these people really love people. And I remember being told, look, you're not going to be really using any of these fancy lean tools for a good couple of years. You're going to be working, you know, working with the people. And that's how I got involved with Don De Niro on the TWI JI side. And he was coming over and doing some standard work in our butchery, which was really, really effective. But because of my teaching background, Susie turned around and said, well, to. Why don't you train this guy to train JI for us? So he then came back across a couple of times and trained me in the train, the trainer element. And then we started to roll it out as our sort of method of teaching people, which, again, really engaged and worked with some of the people who found maybe traditional methods of learning quite difficult.

Yeah, well, that's great. I want to definitely dig into your journey with ji. I'm really interested. As you know, we're getting ready to launch our JI course and just ran a class last week with Roger Bilas and. But I want to come circle right back to something that you said earlier. You talked about the. And I forgot her name, but you're the leader of your company.

Suzanne.

Suzanne, yeah. I'm making notes here. You said she knew them. She's talking to the people. It's like a family. You mentioned how big is the organization? How many people?

Well, Dalehead works across four or five sites. Really got four main sites, but we're an integrated supply chain. So we manufacture pork and lamb products for Waitroses as a sole supplier. So we have all the farms and each site has around maybe 300, 350 people on.

Okay.

And that comprises of different sort of functions and different sites do different things.

So we'll talk a little bit about the cultural side of your workforce. So I understand it's pretty diverse.

Yeah. I mean, we have probably. When I was teaching ji, we had nine different languages in a room at one, possibly nine different languages.

Okay.

And how many different variations you know?

And how many languages do you speak?

Oh, I speak English and what we call Pidgin English and Pidgin English, pigeon, German and French. But no, unfortunately, we have to find other ways.

Yeah. So how does that work with. I don't know, ji. You're going to bring someone and run them through a breakdown. Are you going to have the breakdown done in nine different languages or how does that work?

Well, no, what we actually did is. Well, to start with, obviously you kind of. You do your best. And then I think we use the example when we're talking about repairing a puncture and you know, we're trying to work out all the important steps and key points and doing things like that. And I'm looking at the group and I just looked at me vacant and I just think, what's wrong? And then it turns out that hardly any of them drove, drove a car, so they wouldn't know how to handle a puncture or. So first it was like, actually, have I got the context right? Do I really know my people and the people I'm working with? And what we actually ended up doing, we also had a quite a number of people sort of drop out from fear. So there's a massive fear element with some of these barriers at language. And so what we did is we kind of thought actually we need like a pre meeting. So I used to start a JI week on a Monday and then the preceding Tuesday we'd get all the group together in the room because we had a dedicated room which we put on like a porter cabin and made it into a really nice. Had the mantra on the wall, you know, if the student hasn't learned, the instructor hasn't taught on the wall. And anyway, we get them all in and we'd sit them down. And of course that would be the first time the group got assembled and they'd get to meet me and I'd get to meet them and we'd talk about it like half an hour. Their manager. So we had the manager there as well who would be advocating and actually introduce it. And we kind of went through what it was going to be about and the reason we're doing some basic QCDs, type bits and pieces. So what actually happened in that moment, it was we were able to get rid of some of that fear that would come in on a Monday morning. So they knew where they'd be learning, there'd be no who they'd be with. They. They knew me as a face. And also it was a short enough period so they didn't get too worried about it and, you know, disappear off. It was, you know, only a few days before they'd be in there. And that really starts to help break down some of those, some of those maybe initial fears. And in order to deal with some of the real difficult languages, we actually, actually had the manual, the J manual, translated with into these different languages. So we had the English on one side and Then their equivalent language in the other, so they could sort of map back on Pro and sort of a follow up from that, from that perspective. And then if it was too difficult. So we have a whole bunch of languages, but it's predominantly, you know, maybe Portuguese or Polish. And for the real tough ones, we actually had a young lad called Elder who came in and worked with us, and he was actually able to translate and he actually got to the point where he could actually run a job breakdown sheet, produce it with somebody in Portuguese so they could really get it.

He spoke sports Portuguese or someone else.

Is helping you Portuguese. Okay, now he was Portuguese. He also spoke very good English. So his family worked in the business as well. And he was, he was heading off to university, wanted to come and work with Lean for a little while and. And we kind of got him up to speed. And he was really nice and polite and engaged with them really well and sort of didn't make him feel like they were stupid for asking questions and things like that. So if it was really tough because we actually sat back and had to think, actually, what is the key objective here? Is it to make these people understand technical elements of it, or is it to be able to create a more standardized, more controlled work in the work workplace and have people more engaged and, you know, ready for change, ready for these things? And so sometimes we did a slightly light version when we dropped some of the technical language, which was confusing for them. So we kind of, by having that pre meeting on the Tuesday, we got a few days to think, right? Who's in the room do we need to do? Who are the individuals that are going to need more attention? Who's going to be the loud one? You know, and it worked a whole lot better.

Like that one question I have. So I have my blue how to instruct card here right in front of me right now. And step one of JI is to prepare the learner, and we talk about putting the learner at ease. I'm curious to hear, when you speak about nine different languages, which means it's nine different cultures, right? And everyone has very different ways of thinking, behaving and so forth. Talk a little bit about how you guys teach people to put them at ease. Is it just, hey, how's your morning? Or do you really work to, I don't know, respect that person's culture and really kind of come at it from a different angle depending on who you're dealing with?

Okay, that's a good question. So when we were originally teaching the JI program, obviously they Had a week long with us and. But actually, as we started to embed the standard work, we got a TWI champion actually in the department we were working with, and his name's Steve and he's been doing that for a couple of years. And so the good thing about our site is kind of everybody knows everybody and they kind of have a. Is a bit like a family. They have a lot of respect for each other. And I think when it came to preparing the worker, having somebody who worked in the department who. He was actually on the JI program and we were looking for somebody to. Who had the butchery skill to help sort of lead the job breakdown sheet sessions and getting the groups of experienced people together. And Steve put his head up and he applied for the role and we took him on and worked with him for a year. And having him in place meant that he was almost one of their own and he understood what it was like to maybe work in production on a base and some of the challenges and where possible. Because the beauty of a job breakdown, she is very few words.

Yeah.

You know, and it's just the right words and they're real motivator reasons. They're not, you know, because. Because we have to. Because the management say so. You know, it's, you know, the things that make a difference. So, you know, if we've got a particular job in there and it's really hard on the wrists and this makes it safer for the worker and easier to do. It's. It's something that we can convey and we also can use, you know, either somebody who, if I really struggle with the language, who are of their native tongue and they can kind of interpret. But to be fair, most of them with signs of a demonstration and, you know, the ones who may be more challenged on the English level, we also had that dedicated person who kind of had a much better understanding. And also I have another guy working with me now. His name's Helder. He's a lean facilitator for the Barry St. Edmunds site and he's Portuguese. And he actually also was on the job introduction program and he came through and he's now a lean facilitator looking after a site. You know, he's progressed for the last three years. Really beautiful. Every time we've opened the door, we kind of smashed it through. And again, great, because he can translate perfectly for us into English and Portuguese. So we can really get past some of those. Some of those hurdles and people just got to wait, get it. You know, you look at Them and think, ah, get in contact now.

So talk about this Lean Card game that you guys are using, right?

Yeah. So before I got to Dalehead, I worked with a guy called Byron Panton and we were going around and we'd have these icebreakers, you know, just to get people in the mood and stuff like that, before we'd start. And one of these things. Where was this card sorting game, which we kind of made up? And I was. I kind of forgot about it. And then I was really trying to find a way to get people engaged. We'd had a couple of projects that maybe hadn't gone as well as they could have done, and I felt it was because of the engagement was wrong. And again, we had this sort of language element and I wanted to find something that was relatively straightforward but could actually do a lot. So the Lean Card game is something which I've been working on for just over a year now. It's something which is more formal now. There's a whole website and stuff for it. But what it is, basically is you get a bunch of four people together and four decks of cards and you mix them all up in the middle, face down, and all they've got to do is get them back into perfect packs as they started. And it's basically how they do that and how they sort them out, because there's basically numbers 1 to 10 on the cards. Most people know cards and they know how to sort them out. And then you start to see the dynamics between the people and you see leadership roles. And as you go through, you, you time them. So you use a short interval control board, really, to sort of capture how long it took them where there was any mistakes, any quality issues. And then you start bringing in the concept of improvement. You say, what? You got three minutes, what are you going to do differently? And you start to get the interaction going. And what you can actually do is build an understanding of quality, cost, delivery and service by taking them through this journey over sort of a couple of hours. And the outcome is. So, first of all, they start and they just do it. And quite often they just want to get going because they think they know the rules. And of course then they make a mistake or someone drops a card or they're not really quite sure. So we start bringing, what's the standard? Where's the spec? What does the customer want? What was the objective? And then people do it in different ways. So you've got different techniques coming out and you're like, well, some people are faster, some people are slower. And then they try and change things and maybe they try and change too much and actually, whoa, whoa, you need to back off and try one thing at a time. And then you bring in some visual, you know, because there's red and there's black cards. How do you know who's getting which one? And of course, then you can bring in the idea of the customer and say, okay, well, okay, you've got a balance between making right first time quality and actually delivering to a standard. And so actually we get them to generate the standard of what they think they can do, which can deliver perfect quality every time at a competitive speed, and then how they share it out. So by the end of it, the best one we did here was, I think the lines finished early one day. So we got six groups of people at once and I had the other two lead facilitators, so Tunaji and Helda here. And we ran six at once. And what was great was we had a whole bunch of people, so that's 24 people in the room over different tables. And there was this new crowd of Romanian guys and ladies. And they always used to get a bit of a hard time because their language wasn't great. And so we ran this thing and it was awesome, you know, just such an electric atmosphere. And at the end, it was actually this team of four who. Who got it right first time in the quickest time, you know, who no one was expecting anything of. Yeah, it was just for them. But you could just see this because they'd work together, they'd focused, you know, and at the end of it, you could stand back and say, right, everybody, you know, how'd you get on? And what did we actually give you in order to help you achieve this? They pretty much half the time, zero errors, and it was nothing apart from a couple of hours and a bit of guided thinking.

Wow.

And it's just, it was, it was. It's the power of being able to bring that out of people that's already there, just with a little bit of direction. And of course they discover it for themselves. And by the end of it, they can't imagine not having a board which tells them whether they've, you know, they've done it to the standard or how many errors they've got or, you know, what they're looking for. So actually it was a precursor to putting these things in because I then wanted the system.

Now, did you come up with this game or is it just another company that you found?

No, no, it's something I'm not going to say I take the whole grid. I'm sure Brian and I probably thrashed it out in the past, but no, it's something which we've taken on this. Mats and boards and games and rules and all this kind of stuff now. And it's just we've used and built it up because there's some great lean games that they like, the plug game and all that kind of stuff. I found it was really manufacturing biased and a LEGO game that. That's quite good. We did that recently with a guy called Ed Clements. But the card game was something which could be done in either in a couple of hours or you could, you know, you could go crazy and get your GoPros out and video it and look for how many times you touch the cards and yeah, you know, where's. Where's the wasted motion and all this kind of stuff. And I just wanted to find something that was fun because it's an absolute giggle and also pretty simple for anybody to use. You do not have to be a lean expert to be able to run this thing. Or if you are, of course you start to see the finer observation points of behaviors and leaders.

Oh yeah. So I found your website. So it's the Lean card game dot com, right? Theleancard game dot com. Yeah. So we'll link to it in the show notes. I want to order one up and I play with it myself. It looks pretty. Do you ship kind of worldwide or.

Yeah, we can ship anywhere. It's not a big deal. It's only really small thing at the moment. It was just wanted to get it. Get it working really and get it. You know, I think we always look for these things and having the whole engagement piece now and the behaviors piece, it's a. It's really useful for. For that.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, that looks really fun. I mean play. Playing different kind of games, you know, whether it's just like you said, Legos or folding airplanes or anything, just getting people kind of working with their hands and problem solving as a team is a fantastic way to. To get people, I don't know, thinking lean and understanding this stuff works no matter the application.

Well, the other thing is you should see their faces when they walk into a room now and they've got a couple of hours of what they think is training and all that's on the table are four decks of cards mixed up. They're like, what are we doing? We're going to play cards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where's the pints?

Right? Exactly.

That's it Right, very good, very good. Well, let. I want to just one last question. We've had a great conversation here. Before we get to the reflection section, give us a high level, just elevator pitch of how you guys are using Hoshin Kanri across your enterprise.

Okay. So, yeah, that's been really exciting. So we had a relatively new MD come in and we revised the strategy. We wrote it down, produced the document and essentially it boiled down to we don't just want to write this thing down, we actually want to make this thing come alive. And it was something that Suzanne actually had used a bit before, but gone quiet and she now works elsewhere. And the leadership team approached me and said, can we have a look at this thing again? No one really knew what it was, but they knew that there was a structure which could start linking everything up. Because we have quite a disparate sites across the uk, wanted to bring it all together. And what we did is at the spring conference last year, April, they presented the new strategy and then we had a couple of leadership meetings. So the top 30, 40 in the business would meet up at sort of a venue and we started sharing the process of strategy deployment, what the X matrix looked like, how to start thinking about them, how the system worked. And then we'd go away and I would then go around the sites and work with the, with the team to try and develop these things and link it back to the values and objectives. And then so we actually ended up doing three tiers. So we had the strategic top tier, then the senior leadership team at two, and then three was the general managers. And in the end we went to Stansted, which is near an airport in the UK, and the MD then presented the 38 different matrices that had been created, basically saying, look, we are now fully aligned. Everybody knows that everything they're doing all comes back to the sort of the vision and the mission and the goals of the business. And now, right now. So that all happened last year, we got that in place and it was only last week where again we got pulled together and said, right, now we've got this ready now, how do we make it happen? And it's linked by nicely in because I've just started this Masters at Buckingham University and the first module is policy deployment. The timing. This weekend I was writing all about the Ocean Cannery process and the catch ball, you know, all the teams and tactical. And it's just been a really, it's really exciting time to be in the business with all this stuff going on.

So now you have 38x matrices across the organization, starting at the senior or executive level, then to the secondary level, and then down to the GMs. Do you now do the GMs then work with their plants and then roll out even more child matrices, for lack of a better word?

Yeah, I think we kind of left the, what we call the Tier 4 up to the individual. So some people have liked the X matrix style. Some people find it quite confusing because, you know, things moving around and little boxes linking up stuff. Yeah. So depending on where they're at. So we've either said you can either go from smart objectives, so take these and work out how you're going to deliver them, or you can create your own sort of child X matrix. But all of them have whatever level. We have an online PDR system and appraisal system, and the objectives that have come off for each individual are then copy pasted straight into the PDR system. So actually during the appraisal, with a formal appraisal, actually all links back and the questions are being asked, you know, so, yeah, it was. And also it's kind of nice because people then could, instead of having to come up with objectives, they were kind of already knew that they were aligned and they had a place and that, you know, that's what the teams were looking for.

Very good. Very good, man. It sounds like you guys got a lot of fun stuff going on, so keep up the great work. Maybe next time I'm in the uk, I would love to swing by and pay a visit.

Oh, you're welcome anytime.

Yeah. All right, well, let's go ahead and transition into the reflection section. So you already know most of the questions. I know you listen to the show, so this first one's an oldie but goodie. So what does respect for people mean to you, Mike?

I think it means a couple of things to me, really. And it's really based around. So the first point is leading with humility. I think that's a really, really important part. And the second one comes from Deming's 14 points for management, which was the eighth point, which is drive out fear. And I think for me, in this business, leading with humility means quite often taking a look at ourselves and reflecting on how maybe we work with the people, how we come across, are we consistent? Do we end up using confusing terminology and those kind of things like that? Because I think it's easy to get carried away. And then you just. Especially in this, you're working with somebody who doesn't have a great English language and they're Looking at you blankly and. Or, you know, just comes across as less than ideal. And again, the thing with the fear, not that anyone will ever admit it, you know, because there's certain elements of pride, but sometimes people hold back from saying something or stepping forward or having the confidence to do something because they're worried what they'll look like or whether they'll get laughed at or something. And so from our perspective, we're trying to use coaching across the business. That's another big piece that's going across the whole of the Dalehead is leading, using coaching and really trying to get around that and almost bringing these people out using things like the card game, using things like basic way spotting one to ones getting them involved with the job breakdown sheet stuff really can start to let them know that they've got something to give back. And yeah, once they've done something straightforward or simple, then they're more likely to come back with something else for you to work with.

Yeah. And I find the whole JI process just a tremendous way to really drive out fear because you're truly investing in what's important, why it's key and the reasons. Right. I mean you just going from A to Z and it's just a. I just can't think of a better way to instruct folks.

No. And it's one to one. Yeah, isn't it? So you get to have that, you know, you're away from, from the, the big manufacturing part. You're with somebody who's there to help you, that it's not seen as a weakness to needed to need to practice or to have a bit of coaching because it's not sold in that way. It's like, right, we know you want to do a good job, let's try it like this. And yeah, you know, we've got a really, really good guy who's, who's really good with them, you know, and he's been doing it for a couple of years now. So.

Yeah. What's the best advice you've ever received?

I had to think about this one actually came from my old friend Brian. He was a bit older than me when he, when we started working together and he said not to waste time on doing something that isn't right or that you don't love doing. I remember asking him to do a piece of work, a bit of teaching for me and he basically declined. And I was like, come on, you know, it's only this. And he said, look Mike, I'm a first responder. I mean, he goes out and he helps people who are unwell at night. And he said, you know, I'm a lot older than you. He said, you know, I wake up in the morning and I don't know whether I've got one week, one year, 10 years left. He said, I'm not going to do something that I don't want to do or don't love doing. He said, because trouble you lot. And he's youngsters, he said, you think you got time for everything, you know, sometimes that stops you from doing things. And that's really been useful in, in my life and, you know, with jobs and stuff. And I just think I always come back to that, you know.

So you mentioned how, whether or not, you know, if you do it, if you know if it's right, how do you know if it's right? Like, how do you. How do you gauge if something's right?

That's a deep question. Yeah, I don't know. I think. I think I'm a believer that everybody has to make their own way and, you know, whatever's. Whatever's right for them and their circumstance and. Yeah, and like Brian, for example, in his illustration, he just didn't want to go and drive for that place, I guess, and do that, you know, he wanted to spend his time doing something else. And I don't know, I just think we always hear a lot of wise words and we don't always apply them and think don't apply to us and. Yeah, I guess that one just really hit home with me. And I think, you know, you have to be passionate about what you're doing, and I really want to do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good. Hey, so can you think of an experiment or maybe a project or a Kaizen event or something that didn't turn out as you planned? And if so, what did you learn?

Yeah, I think that's one of the lessons you get when you're getting to continuous improvement, is that you have to continuously improve your continuous improvement. And we've got one working on right now, actually. It was one of our sites in Bury St. Edmunds and we were working in the packing department and we did some balance work in there and we put some short interval control boards up and you know, those, those boards did really good things. They, you know, we worked out the tack, the cycle times, we coached the leaders and all seemed line leaders. It all seemed good. But when we got called somewhere else, they all just stopped. And you come back and we thought, that's a really good system. It works well. It does what it's supposed to do, but they just weren't using it, so it clearly wasn't working for them. And at the same time we'd move to another site and we'd kind of learn from what we'd done. We'd been working much more closely with the team and they'd kind of helped devise what was needed. Before we even put board up, they played that card game so they understood why they were supposed to be there and what they refer. In actual fact, we have a low volume, high mix set of SKUs. And what that meant was the traditional sort of throughput methods weren't really that simple to use because up to 40% of our day was changeovers, you know, from one thing to another. And actually that was the key factor in governing whether we made the plan or not. So we kind of just did a whole piece of work on those and generated a short interval control system around changeover so that actually they could have a win every time they did it. They finished a job throughout the day 20 times and that was actually a much better way of measuring them. And I think what we learned from that was we actually pulled down the ones on the other side and said, hey, look, we appreciate these aren't working for you. We didn't engage with you enough. They may be not right. And so what we've done, what we learned from it was we're now revisiting it 18 months on and we're actually bringing the line leaders over to another site and they're getting to talk to their equivalents over here and chat and we're getting them much more involved in the process. So in actual fact, before we even start trying to think about the implementation, we're spending a big bit of time getting the people in the right place so that they actually want this thing and it's something that works for them and does something for them, rather than, you know, a nice board that the management can come and look at.

What are you most proud of as it relates to your journey with Lean?

I think that's probably here at Dialhead. With the recent development of the team and also Lean strategy, we started to get some real momentum in the business and you get some good results. And in October last year, we restructured to have a divisional presence, not just working from site to site, which was a bit of feedback from our customer and we just couldn't. They wanted to see an uplift and I think for that it's just all starting to get such a momentum now. It's just nice to be in the mix with that thing and I feel quite good about where we're at and what the next few years are going to bring.

Have you read any good books lately? Maybe this past year. Does it even have to be continuous improvement related?

I'm having to read a lot of books for this, this masters so I've got a huge book list. But right now I'm reading the Chimp Paradox by Steve Peters which is quite, quite interesting. But actually the one I had to pick for this was something called the Talent Code.

Yes.

By Daniel Coyle.

Yes. I haven't read it, but I've heard about that.

Yeah, I've got it right in front of me here. It's only a couple of hundred pages and it's a brilliant read for me. It kind of brought together as well why the TWI job instruction works so well. It talks about the process of chunking, you know, breaking it into manageable but mylar in the brain, how we can wrap these, you know, these pathways to become really fast. And you know, someone always likened it to me to like broadband, you know, or dial up. If you don't use the route very often it's kind of slow and messy. But you know, if you practice and embed it in the right way, it's like high speed fiber, you know, it just comes back. So I'd recommend that book to anybody. It's a really easy read and kind of change the way I viewed learning the Talent Code.

Who's it by again?

Daniel Coyle.

Daniel Coyle. All right, yeah, I'm gonna pick it up. All right, last question. You've obviously been at this for a little while and you've learned a lot of things along the way. But I'm curious, is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve in order to become a better lean thinker?

Yeah, I think we're always going to have to be learning. Everyone accepts that. But over the years I've spent a lot of time focusing on the people behaviors and how people react to change and stuff, but less so on the in depth knowledge of some of the tools. So which is why I've enrolled on this Buckingham because it's just going to give me a great opportunity to meet other lean minds and really sort of dig in and get stuck into some of the background behind it all and make sure that I've actually got the foundational knowledge for when these things are going to be asked of me later on, I think.

Awesome. Very good. All right, well, it's been a Great chat in an awesome way. It's Monday morning for me, getting ready to. To start a crazy, hectic week, but I can't think of a better way to get things going. So thank you for taking time. Let's go ahead and wrap this show up, Mike, with you sharing some final words of wisdom and then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you over social media or any other form?

Okay. Well, firstly, thank you for having me. I appreciate you got a busy week coming up and we kind of did this at relatively short notice, but I think for me, it's all about the people. It always has been. It's all about, you know, really getting engaged with these guys. And I said when. You know, I spoke about earlier when I first started working here with, with Susie and she told me that we weren't going to be using any sort of fancy tools. We're going to be focusing, getting the culture right. And everything that has not worked well so far hasn't been because of the tool, but because of the failure to communicate sufficiently and effectively. So, you know, if you nail that, I think everything else sort of falls. It will hopefully fall into place.

Yeah, very good. And how can people connect with you?

LinkedIn, probably. Probably the best way I'm on there. It's just I'm under Mike Brett and yeah, I'm keen to hear from anybody who wants to share stories or just get in touch.

Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, we'll link to your LinkedIn and also the leancard game dot com. Can't wait to try that out myself. So people can just go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 150. 150. And we'll get you over to Mike.

Perfect.

Did you ever get over to the States for any conferences or anything like that?

I nearly came over with Susie for an ame, but she carried on. I think she spoke there a couple of times, but that's certainly on my radar. It's not something I've had the privilege of doing yet, but I think I got to get this Masters sorted and then that'll be definitely something I'll be looking at doing.

Well, I can't wait to meet up with you face to face one day. Keep up the great work and thanks again for coming onto the show.

Great. Thanks, Rob.

All right, cheers.

Cheers.

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

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