GA 157 | Using Brain Science to Understand TWI with Roger Bilas

You're listening to episode 157 with Roger Bayless.

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 OR day in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. You know, when I just got done saying you're listening to episode 157 with Roger Bylas, it kind of struck me that 157 episodes, that's quite a lot. And it's been a pretty amazing run. I don't think we've missed a single week since we started this show. And, boy, that's a testament to all the amazing guests that we've had. To Greg, who edits every one of these episodes, really, to everybody that's just involved in the process. So thank you again for listening to the show. I know we say that and it sounds like kind of rote in nature, but we really do appreciate all the feedback that we get from this podcast and it's such, such a. Been a, such a good part of what we do here at Gamba Academy, and really one of the favorite, one of my favorite aspects of the work that I do each and every day. So today I am excited to welcome Roger Bylas to the show. Now, Roger, we've had him on, and Roger is actually, if you've seen any of our job instruction videos, our Gemba Academy job instruction videos that we, we actually just released that course a couple weeks ago. Roger is, is deeply involved in that. And in fact, you're listen, as you're listening to this episode, we are just finishing our job relations and job methods training up in Virginia. I'm obviously recording this ahead of time, but, but we have that, that class scheduled to come here pretty soon. And so we're going to be releasing our job relations and job methods courses to the, to the Gemba Academy community here in the coming months. So pretty exciting times around here with all the TWI action that we got going on. But with that said, today, the episode is going to be a live talk that Roger presented at the TWI Summit that was just held in San Diego. Roger had, well, he did several things at the, at the summit, but in particular he gave a, around a 20 minute talk where he kind of ties in the reason the JI classes, JR classes and JM classes are done the way they are. And he kind of ties in all the neuroscience behind it. And in fact, I don't, I don't know if the folks back in 1944 understood all the things that they were doing correctly. But neuroscience has kind of proven that this approach, this five day, two hours a day approach to training is really powerful and it's very, very effective. And so Roger kind of walks us through the brain science of learning. So even if you're not interested in TWI or JI or anything like that, it's just learning in general talks about, you know, why that 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell writes about in the Tipping Point may not be exactly the way Malcolm Gladwell put it. So there's a lot of, a lot of talk about deliberate practice and different things like that. So really interesting show. And I listened to it just a while ago and because I wasn't actually at that live talk, I was listening to another talk. Cause I knew we were recording it. And as always, Roger delivers a great message. He's super funny, he's got awesome energy and it's just a blast to be around. And I think you're going to enjoy listening to him on this show. Show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 157. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 157. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

Well, let's start out though. I want to start out with a test. How many people have had JI training? How many people are JI trainers? So you should know the answer to this. I'm going to start a sentence and I want you to finish it. If the person hasn't learned. There you go. I thought I was going to have to pull my card out and drag it out of you. I love that. One more time. If the person hasn't learned, the instructor hasn't taught. Right. So in the brain science, what they say is if you retrieve that information, that's going to make it stronger in your memory and it will stay in your memory longer. So we're going to use that to help you, those of you that have retrieved it because you've been in the training, we're going to continue on to practice the retrieval Those of you that are learning it, they also say in the brain science, if you do a pretest on something somebody even know anything about, they will remember it longer because of that pretest than if you didn't. So you've had your first pretest in that statement, which is really the foundation of ji. So we're going to talk about the brain science in ji or really, after 70 years, is this stuff still useful? And so how I came about ji, I was doing some leadership training. It's called zenger Miller at QI Global. It was basic leadership training, 14 modules, off site, readings, homework. And I said to the guy, how's this going? He just looked at me and said, roger, all I want is to know what to tell that person when they've got a childcare issue. I'm telling them they're working over and they're screaming at me, how do I handle that? So my 14 modules didn't get him his answer, I guess. So I went online and I looked around and I found this program called twi. And I pulled it up and there's Brian Lund and Mark Warren had posted the manuals. They dug out of the archives of this program, but it was dated 1944. 1944. I was like, wow, okay, this looks like a good program. I see these cards. It's something I could use. But somebody's got to be doing the updated version of this 1944. Come on. Can't be really up to date. And so I got online and I searched around and there was the TWI Institute. They hooked me up with a guy named Pat Graup. And he came out to do our training. He was going to train us in JI and jr. He, you know what? He says the first thing we used the 1944 manual. I'm like, what? 1944? He's using the manual. I thought I was getting the updated stuff. So what happens? He does the course. It works pretty well. I got nothing else. They said, well, it's working. I go back, he trains me to be a trainer. So now I'm running a workshop using the 1944 manual. What happens then? I become a master trainer. He brings me to that level and what do I admonish my students with? You better use that 1944 manual. Follow it. Just read it out of the book there. We don't want you to change anything. And here we are, 1944. And I'm saying to myself, I feel guilty. I'm in continuous improvement. After 60 years, I should be able to do something to help this program. So it got me to start to research. And what I found was I brought us 40 years into the future. 1984. Now Kolb wrote something about experiential learning, his experiential learning theory. If you look there, you're reflecting on experience, then assimilating and conceptualizing those experiences, building those models in your head. And then what do you do? You practice and experiment with it. And then the last thing is you plan the application. And so I'm sitting there saying, does this apply to ji? So I looked at the course layout. What do you do in that first session? What do we do? We go around, we do introductions and what do we ask? What leadership or training experience do you have? We're getting people to reflect on their experience right from the get go. And then we link that to leadership and then we talk about their problems, reflecting. And then what do we do? We do the telling method, then we do the showing method. Doesn't work too well. And now they are reflecting on their own experiences with telling and showing. So it looks like we're following this model. We get down to assimilating and conceptualizing. That's when we do the four step method. We give them the perfect demonstration. We give them the perfect demonstration of breaking down the knot. In day two, they have these concepts and what do we do with them then? We have them practice and practice and practice. And then on day three, what do we do on day three? The training timetable. That's when we have them start planning application of the tool. So I said, oh my gosh. This actually 40 years later is supported by what they now call experiential learning. How does this though? I still have this thing, we've got to make it better. So I said to myself, if it's supporting, it's a good program, we know that. How do we make it better? Well, there's a woman out there, her name is Mary Broad and she did training transfers. She's got a book training transfer. And this is what she found. There are three times and two people that make the most impact. The number one is the manager before training. Number two is the trainer before training, and number three is the manager after training. I said, how do I fold that into JI to make it stronger? And so what did we do? Get that manager or if you're the trainer, how many times, how many trainers do we have? How many times have you said to the people, so when did you find out about this course? 10 minutes ago. They said I was the least busy person and they sent Me in all the time. How about we have them before they go to the workshop, start to discuss what tasks really need training, have them think about what needs to improve in their operation. So by the time they get there, they're going to have a very strong foundation of what they need to do. And then afterward, that manager or the trainer, somebody go up to them and say, how are you applying it? Where's your training timetable that's going to apply what you learned? What's your plan going forward? The reason we want to strengthen the JI is because we want them to be learning. If you remember what was our statement, if the person hasn't learned, great retrieval. I love it. Folks, you're doing well this time. A little bit louder, let's get into it a little bit more. But so we want to continue to do that. So here's the other thing, the five days thing. Trainers out there, five days, isn't that it? Oh my, come on now. So I always ask me, they say, so how long is it? I said it's five days. They go, it's 40 hours. I said, no, it's five two hour sessions, that's all it is. But we split it out over five days. Five days, wait a second now. Five days, you could put those five sessions, just squeeze them up a little bit. How about one 10 hour day? How many people have sat through one 10 hour day? Did anyone learn that way? Maybe they broke into two five hour sessions. Yeah, that's a lot easier. Intuitively. We kind of know that 10 hours is probably not going to be good intuitively. But I wanted to know, what does the science tell us? How can I respond to somebody with more than my anecdote? Like, hey, my butt gets sore after 10 hours. Nobody's paying attention after five. You can't really mean that, can you? They tell me we have tough people though. So what did we do? This is just the set of books that I bought, the ones I got out of the library. You know, I had to send them back and didn't get their picture. But there's a ton of research out there and it's from the last 10 to 15 years, not 60 years ago or 70 when they created this. I took this research and I said, how do we apply it? And so one of the things is the new technologies we're getting. You can see CAT scan, mri, a lot of people know about those. Those tell us the structure of the brain, the function of the brain, EEG, Meg, PET, FMRI, FMRs. I didn't even bother to Learn the names. They're too complicated. Complicated, but these tests tell what the brain's doing while you're performing. Like the functional mri, the fmri. It tells you what's firing in your brain when you're doing the task. And the funny thing about it, a sidelight, is when I'm doing the task, I have a certain brainwave pattern that can be identified in an fmri, when I'm watching somebody else do it, that same pattern shows up seeing almost as good as doing. Maybe that's why we have 10 repetitions. So what we found was spacing out. The repetition is how we get to retain it. Now, Ebbinghaus, back in the 1800s, figured that out in memory, but we've built on that and we've perfected it to a point where we can actually use it to improve. So one of the things is, there's a storage strengths, Vincent. Agreement versus a retrieval strength in storage. If I repeat a phone number 50 times, I could probably retrieve it. It's strong storage strength. I need to retrieve it. One time I dial that number, I make the call. Whoa, I need to call them back. I forgot the number. Low retrieval strength. What you want to have is a strong storage strength. But if you want to ever retain it and retrieve it, you'll have to increase that. And that's where the spacing out helps. Think of massed repetition. That's the phone number. How many people memorized the knot? How many people did it by masked repetition? Mine was a five hour flight to San Diego, where Pat was going to do it. He said, you need to have this memorized before you get there. The guy next to me hated me. Take an ordinary piece of twisted lamb cord, hold it vertically in your left hand. He looked at me. I'm tying this knot. What is this guy? Is he crazy? Four hours later, I got that, I get in there. I had a problem with retrieval because maybe I didn't retrieve it enough. The spaced repetition, you memorize some today, some tomorrow, some the next day. And then that's how you actually do it. Much better and much easier. If you look at that spaced retrieval. There's another thing called forgetting to remember. This is where the brain is really, really useful. We forget things. We get, what, a thousand, ten thousand? A million stimuli a day. When we go to bed at night, what does our brain do? Dump it all, except what it thinks is important. If we remembered it all, we'd never be able to retrieve those pieces. So our brain is shedding at night. We need to forget to remember. The next day though, when you come back into that next session, what happens? You retrieve it again, it tells your brain, hey, this is important, important, remember it. Pretty cool. I thought, okay, so now I'm knowing why we're spacing this stuff out. And then they've actually developed an optimum spacing and we'll talk about that. They went out and said, if I want to remember this for a year, how long do I have to space it? If I want to remember it for that test in two weeks, how long do I need to space it? And so this is block scheduling. This is a critical thing too. In the two hours you'll notice this is 40 minutes you have prime time training where new information could be provided for the first 20 and really for the last 10, you have the second in the middle there. People aren't paying nearly as much attention. So if you think about block scheduling and we look at this one over here, if you go off task, every time you go off task, you increase the ability of people to stay on task. So every time we go out of the room and maybe come in the next day and they're coming back in at a higher level than if they did 10 hours. So if you look at that, this block scheduling, if we look at, if we look at the 18 minutes here of 20, you're almost 90% of prime time. When you drop down to 80 minutes, you're at 62%. What do you think you're going to get after four or five or 10 hours? Half that time is going to be downtime and you're not going to be getting the value out of it. So using that, you'd want to space it out. Now these are just six rules to improve learning. I want to hit on them real lightly. These rules were summarized from all the brain research in a book by Cummings and Purcell and Blythe Daniels. It's called Helping Learners learn. And in that book they said, you want to have desirable difficulties. People say to me, why don't you let them have the breakdown on day two? Why do they go in there and struggle with the card? Because that's a desirable difficulty that increases their long term retention. If you make it easy for them, they won't remember it as well. The next one, spacing. We talked about that emotion and relevance during deepens learning. How many people were the guinea pig that had to do it by telling or showing? Right? What emotion did you have? Were you all happy when you say I can't do it and you hand it back or pat snatches it out of your hand and says, you are not good at that. I always wondered about that one. He said it was so much glee. Usually that emotion there. How about when you get up, how many people, when they did their first demonstration thought, oh, you know what? I love this. This is as good as Thanksgiving dinner or maybe Christmas morning. Probably not. It was probably struggles. Multi sensory instruction. What do you have? You have people telling, showing. And then in step three, you actually get to perform in those demonstrations. You're doing the hands on small groups. And what do we do in those small groups? It's not the instructor that's critiquing. He's drawing out of everyone watching. I always think that the people that are giving the critique are actually getting more out of it than the person that's trying to pack up all his stuff and get back to the chair that I'm sitting in. Formative assessment. What did we do? I tested you in the beginning. If you do testing whether it's a pretest or afterward, which aren't demonstrations, a low stakes evaluation that strengthens the retention as well. So the brain science supports these six. Now the question then becomes, how do we strengthen it? Arthur Cohn in 2013 said, we're almost up to the future. I mean, to present day, we're 2013. I was pretty excited. I'm like, okay, the brain science is bringing this up. He said, two plus two plus two. Two days after the training, you want to ask him a question on a critical piece of information. That asking of that question not only strengthens the retrieval of that bit of information, it also strengthens the retrieval of all the information. That's how the brain works. Two weeks later, ask him a question. It says, elaborate recall. Rote recall is A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Two plus two is four. Elaborate recall is, well, I think I can do a breakdown on this task and I think I'm gonna have to break it into two. Because you told me the long task, I can break it up into that. Elaborate recall is going to get them to remember and then two months later, ask them for examples on how they applied it. Two things happen there. One, they better have an example because you know that you're coming back in two months to ask them. So they are going to apply it, but it will strengthen as well. And then the other one I wanted to show you is block scheduling in less than five days because we have that. How can we use the brain science to strengthen it? You can see up here we have the yellow are group one and the green are group two. I tried it. This was in a hospital. They said, hey, we're on three and then we're off to. And all these different crazy schedules. The best they could do is three days together. How can we do it with breaks and not have a huge amount of people covering? So what we did is we brought in this second group that would cover the first group. They only had double coverage in certain areas and in the morning it was busy anyways, so they had not really a big problem. Session one, session one, groups one, group two. You have a break, there's your lunches, then group one, group two again. And you get that spacing. Is it as good as going back overnight and allowing your brain, what the brain does while you're asleep, assimilate into long term memory what you did that day? Probably not. But if that's the best you can do, it's better than a five or ten hour session. The other way you can do it as well. This one here, a little less on the participants, but just do it for four days in that break in there, that's actually going to help them on retrieval by spacing it out and doing it that next day. If you wait two weeks, it may not be as effective, but that break there could actually make it more effective. And so the last one I wanted to Talk about is 10 repetitions. People say to me, so how many times are we going to go through this? Well, we have 10 people, we're going to go through 10 repetitions. Okay, so about Wednesday, they say, you know, I'm pretty good with this now, you know, I understand it, but 10 repetitions, really? And then usually by Friday, and sometimes on the feedback surveys, we give 10 repetitions. That's way too many times. But why do we have 10 repetitions? 10 repetitions? To learn a skill. What do we say in ji? To learn a skill. It's only done through practice. And so if you don't practice it, many people, and this is where the brain fools us, we think we're good at something because we understand it. We go in and take the test. How many people thought they knew it and then bombed the test? An honest man. Somebody give him a doggone drink. So if you bomb the test, it's because your brain usually tricks you and makes you think you know it better than you normally do. And so in this case here, the 10 repetitions are required. And as what we said from the brain science, if I'm watching somebody, my brain's firing just as like I was doing it. So I'm getting the same practice out of it. So this one here, it's a little bit different. Why so many repetitions? Has anyone ever heard of Anders Ericsson? Okay, a couple of people he studied. What expertise? For 30 years he's been doing it. Have you ever heard the 10,000 hour rule? One of the studies he did, it took 10,000 hours. And of course, in the Tipping Point. Who's the author of that? Gladwell. Gladwell. He says, oh, my gosh, it's 10,000 hours. You're an expert. Well, that's not what he said. He said 7,500 hours for cello players. He was using that as an example. It's not necessarily 10,000 hours, but what it does take. And he covered this in his book called peak, written in 2016. Yeah, I hear the whoo, whoo out in the back there. He wrote a book and it's about it. He talks about the gold standard of what he says to get to expertise, which is deliberate practice. And if you look at the deliberate practice, it should be on a topic that's already been mastered and led by somebody familiar with the techniques for training. Does that sound like a 10 hour workshop trainer? How did we think about that? If you go back to the literature in 1944, it's so much more stringent. I probably wouldn't be a trainer with what you had to do back then. You had to get certified, like every month they had to see you do one. You know, here we train somebody up. A lot of times they say, go luck, but you'd want to have them to be out there with the training. Should be outside one's comfort zone. How many people felt really comfortable up there with the blue card in their hand? The breakdown, Trying to do a task, setting these things down, picking them up. How many people thought that was the most comfortable thing in the world? I always tell them, go ahead and fold your arms. Fold your arms the other way. If that's uncomfortable training a whole new way, how's that going to be? It's probably out of your comfort zone. We've had nurses that say, I can't use a breakdown. I can't. I'm like, why not? I mean, you can read. You wrote it. What's the. It makes me look incompetent. I'm out of my comfort zone. If I have this cheat sheet. It's a training aid. Use the breakdown. And then they got comfortable with it after about five times. Deliberate practice. Oh, no. It involves well defined goals. That's going back to that manager, why are we here? You know, John talked about when somebody calls up and says, two weeks from now, I want to have training, they understand what the training is. And for retention and actual retrieval of information, you have to have two things. One, it has to make sense. Anyone that intellectually looks at JI goes, yeah, that makes sense. Looks pretty good. And it has to have meaning. If it doesn't have meaning, people won't retain it. How do you develop meaning? Somebody sets you goals and says, this is how we're going to approve. This is what we need to do. And I think this tool is going to help you. And when they agree, yeah, this tool can help me. It has meaning and those goals help drive that. And then it helps drive retention. That's what the brain science says. At least deliberate practice is deliberate. I drive 15,000 miles in a year. Do you think I'm a better driver at the end of the year? Just shake your head nuts. I'm a horrible driver. I learned how to text and drive. I learned how to look. I learned, I got done with that. I said, I didn't get any better, but it wasn't deliberate. I wasn't specifically thinking about that. What I started to do, I actually pulled and parked in a grocery store parking lot across three lanes. I have a Camry. How did I, you know, I don't have a Corvette where I needed all three. I was across three lanes. I said, I need to start practicing. And I pulled in and I'd get out and I look, people, probably, what's wrong with this guy? I'm looking both sides. I'm evened up. Okay, let's see. Three inches to the yellow line. I'm good. I am now a better parker. So the other one involves feedback and modification. What do we do in our demonstrations? That's what we do. And then if you look here, produces and depends on an effective mental representation. My goal has always been to use that breakdown and use that four step method as the model. Have them practice on it. And they're usually built on existing skills. So as we go through the sessions, that first one is not nearly as good as the last one. Where they've built up to. And then how do we improve through deliberate practice, create those mental models. I've had people where they wanted to go into deeper learning on it. They didn't want to do the train the trainer. We had them deliver the four step method with the knot perfectly. When they came back in a week, they said, you know what? It was so much easier to deliver the classes out there. Because I had those habits, those routines, that kata of the blue card down. We had them also break down the job, asking the same questions that we do up in front till it's perfect. And they said the same thing when I came out there. All of a sudden I had the habit of asking that question. What did I just do? Did it advance the work? Is it an important step? If it is, let me write that down. And then with the key points, what are my three conditions to be a key point? Make or break the job, injure the person, make the work easier. Why did I do that? What if I didn't do it that way and they realized how the kata or the habit could then help them out on the floor. The other one is coach after the workshop, give them that feedback that's so critical in deliberate practice and self critiquing. You know, I'm the guy out there looking at my car. Oh, man, this is a rental. It's a little further in the front. I need to back it up. And then I back it up and I'm like, okay, what is this look like? So these are the things that you can do to improve it. Call to action. Those are the things we talked about. You can see them up here. We talked about them after each section. And why are these call to actions important? Because we want them to learn. Because if you remember, if the person hasn't learned. Awesome, students. My work is done. They told me not to drop a bike, but thank you very much, that's all I have. 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 GembaAcademy.com Sam.