GA 164 | The Lean Pilot with Todd Abshire

You're listening to episode 164 with Major Todd Abshire. 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 and your week to listen to this show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com, we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today, I'm excited to welcome Major Todd Abshire to the show. Now, Major Abshire is a KC135 instructor pilot for the US Air Force. Now, he's also a chief of inspections for his operations group, and he's been in the air Force for 24 years. And he started as an. And is now a major, so definitely extremely accomplished. Now, last week, we had another kind of tie into the US Air Force with Damian Hochard, who is with the Canadian Air Force, actually, but is stationed at a US Air Force base. But today, Major Abshire is actually in the US Air Force, and he's gonna tell us about really his journey and with, with process improvement, kind of how he got started and really how that's working really, for, for a US Pilot in the, in the Air Force. I just kind of, we really got into, like, what are you guys doing and how do you do it and what went well and where have you struggled? And I also, I couldn't let the episode get away without asking him just some, some questions about what it was like the first time he, that he, he lifted off in that airplane without anybody else assisting him. And really it was interesting how he tied that back into the Lean Journey. So really good stuff. I really enjoyed talking with Major Abshire, and I hope you liked his show. Show notes for this particular episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 164164 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 1 64. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. All right, Todd, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from?

Actually calling in from wichita, Kansas, at McConnell Air Force Base.

Nice. Nice. We were talking before we hit recording that year. You're not too far from Tinker where our previous guest was just on from. So, yeah, it's a small world.

Yeah, Very small world.

Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, well, thanks for coming on, Todd. Let's go ahead. And as you know, I know you listen to the show. We like to get things rolling with our gu A quote or two of something that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

Well, a quote that I've actually come across not too long ago was one by Warren Bennis. It said, the manager accepts the status quo. The leader changes it. And that's kind of resonated really well with me lately on some things I'm working on, and because we just kind of get into a funk sometimes. And that one just kind of stuck to me. Like, you know what? They're right. I am kind of managing stuff versus kind of leading and changing things. So that's what I've been getting into a lot.

I love that. Say it again one more time.

The manager accepts the status quo. The leader challenges it.

I love that. I love that. That's a good one. Good one. All right, well, Todd, let's kind of kick things off with you telling us a little bit about your background and maybe what you're up to these days.

Well, my background, I've been In the air, U.S. air Force, for about, well, 24 years now. I started. I started out, enlisted, actually, at Tinker Air Force Base, working on aircraft. And then I got tired of turning wrenches on airplanes. I wanted to fly them. So I got my college degree and then I went off to pilot training for the air Force. And that's what I've been doing for the last, well, almost 18 years now. It's been flying airplanes for the air Force.

What's the coolest airplanes you've ever flown?

Well, I've flown quite a few. I'm a tanker pilot by trade, but I flown lots of little airplanes, Cessna 208s with the Afghan Air Force. I've flown T1 trainers at Vance Air Force Base, teaching upt. So I've done a lot of different little things depending on what I want to like that at that time. Do I want to fly low level or do I want to fly high altitude giving gas to some fighter or bomber?

That's so awesome. That's so awesome. Yeah. Actually, my colleague Steve Kane was just out visiting with the Cessna folks earlier this week. They're a customer of ours, and yeah, they're doing some great work out there. So it's funny how sometimes different people interact with other folks and just that Little network weaves itself in many ways. Cool.

Yeah, it's been a good time.

So let's talk a little bit about your journey into the process improvement. How did it. I guess, how did it start?

Well, thinking back on that kind of stuff, I think it really started back in my childhood. It's kind of interesting that I think on that question now, growing up in Boy Scouts, I didn't realize it at the time, but we were always 5 sing. I didn't know what the term was. We just were told, you know, clean up your after yourselves. Yeah, we need to standardize things. We get training, we get everything kind of laid out. How do you set up a campsite with a bunch of teenage boys and make sure they don't trash it and who's going to cook and how they cook and, you know, getting. Teaching people how to do things. So I think the journey really started back in childhood and then growing up the Air Force. Back in the day, we did tqm, totally total quality management. That's kind of learned about widgets and all that stuff. I kind of applied that for a while. I worked at Sherwin Williams, and I kind of applied that because we had a small store, but we had a lot of volumes. We had to kind of, how do we adjust our space? We can't have too much stuff because then we have overstock. And so I applied it there. And now I've gotten lucky enough to get back into the lean world as a process improvement facilitator for my operations group. And so I went back through greenbelt training last year, but got kind of tied up doing other things. But this year I'm really trying to focus on doing process improvement stuff.

So I'm fascinated. Talk about how an Air Force pilot applies lean to the air to your world. I'm fascinated to know.

Well, it's interesting because one of the projects I worked on recently with the team was how do we. Because we have a lot of things we have to check before we go fly. And we were seeing as guys are spending a lot of time trying to log into computers, they're trying to access all this data and they're trying to compile it and review it and make decisions. And what we're seeing, it was taking a long time for that to happen. And if you take a long time for that, you have a lot of other things you're not focusing on. So what we were trying to do is how would we get that data quicker and more efficiently to the crews and so they could go focus on flying and going out the door and really focus on their missions. So that's what we've done recently.

So is that like, do you like approach it like a problem, like an A3 or is it like a, like a project, a charter it up or how does that work?

This one we actually chartered up. We did the eight step. We're not quite there yet. We're kind of. We're still in the implementation phase. We sat down with the team, we walked through the entire process. We had to teach the team some basic waste identification.

Are you talking other pilots or who's involved here?

We actually had a couple pilots, a couple navigators, a couple boom operators, and some other. Just some, we call them SMEs, the subject matter experts. When we had a question. So we brought them together for about three days and we went through the entire process, mapped it out, and started identifying waste and how do we tear this thing apart and put it back together to function? And out of that, of course, you come up with a whole bunch of other projects that you can work on. So from that I think we have three more projects from the initial project. So I'll keep myself busy for the next year.

So I know we've got some other questions we had kind of scripted up here, but I've got this other one's rambling around in my mind, so bear with me. So are you guys more of a. I don't know, is it kind of lean and six sigma or lean or what's your methodology?

Well, of course, the Air Force uses cpi, Continuous Process Improvement, which does use lean tools. Not so much six Sigma. I think that's. That may be a little outside of my scope right now. I'm not that skilled yet. But we use an eight step process, so you have to kind of, you know, come up with a problem statement, then you've got to break it down, Then you got to look for root causes, and then we do countermeasures or corrective action plans and then get approvals. And then you have to go forward from there to implement and then standardize and sustain. So that's what we're doing right now.

So how's that going? I mean, kind of, I guess when you got started, maybe. Let's go back there. Like, what kind of problems or obstacles did you face?

Who? Well, I think. I think we've been practicing lean and process improvement for a while in the Air Force, but we move around so much that sometimes we just kind of lose focus on trying to keep things going. And that's been My toughest challenge is trying to, you know, get people on board to understand what Lean can do for them. And actually, I've been watching some of your videos and using some of your videos and some briefings I've done to say, look, it's. Lean is not about. It's not about the tools. It's not really. It's great to save time and cost, but it's really about, you know, about people, for them to understand that we're trying to make their lives better.

Yeah.

And that's. I know people complain about their jobs and they are disengaged and they're not happy, but now I'm trying to convince them that you don't have to be disengaged. Yeah, you have. You have to get involved, and nothing will get any better if you don't get involved.

Yep.

And so I actually gave that briefing earlier this week, and people, I've got actually a few emails that I've still got to answer about, hey, what can I do? And that was a good thing to see some positive aspects of it.

Yeah, no, I'm not asking for a promotional thing or anything like that, but Gemba Academy, been fortunate to have a lot of the US Military, pretty much all the branches leveraging Gemba Academy now. And we're really honored with that. I'm curious, is there. How is that going, like, as far as are you using it for yourself or.

I use it for myself because obviously I'm in that position where I really kind of need to stay skilled with the tools and understand what's going on. But I'm trying to use it because I can't get anybody into a green belt class for the Air Force because it takes a week. And that's sometimes hard to take people out of their jobs for a week. But maybe if I can take them out for a day or maybe even an hour and to give. To give them some basic understanding, I think that's, that's, that's one of my biggest goals this year.

Yeah, I mean, that might be a great. I mean, like, if you wanted to send them through, like our School of Six Sigma, you know, you know, you chip away at it an hour at a time kind of thing. It wouldn't take you that long to get them through it, you know, and.

It'S nice about your videos is that we can actually. I can. If I like, now, what was that again? I can go back and just bring up the video and we go back through it again. So that was. It's easier that someone's already explained it, so I'm not reinventing the wheel. I'm just having.

All right, so the Gemba Academy commercial can stop now. So. Okay, so talk about. I know you talked about the one where you're kind of speeding up those processes for your pilots, but talk about maybe another project or an event that. That left you feeling like you really accomplished something.

Oh, boy. I'd have to go back to a time when we. I was in an office that wasn't doing very well. We had a lot of people gone. We still had a lot of responsibilities. And a friend of mine, we sat down and we had to look at each other and say, do we keep doing what we're doing or do we wipe the slate clean and start fresh and really put this office together the way that it really should be? And after some soul searching, we finally came to the conclusion that, yeah, we need to do that. We need to start fresh and make this office really run efficiently. So we spent. I know we sat down and mapped it out. How do we want this to work and what. What we're supposed to do? And after about six, seven months of really, you know, hard work and building new systems that the office became manageable. One to two people can run it versus before. We had six or seven. And we got several accolades for it. Some systems I put together, I obviously left there and went to another base and came back to visit. And everybody's like, hey, you know, we got this. We got this great award for all the stuff that you. You did here. So it's like, oh, well, that's nice to know that you guys continued on. They were able to continue on the process because it was easy and it made sense. That was something I was. I'm really kind of proud of. But.

Yeah, so, I mean, obviously the rewards are nice and all that, but, like, I mean, I'm curious, like, how did that make you feel when you heard those things?

It made me feel good. I kind of wish I was there to get some of the awards, too. But that's not. That wasn't the goal. The goal was like, how do I make my job and other people around me how to make their jobs easier?

Yeah.

And. And still make the. We're doing a high quality product, and of course we're talking. We're talking information. We're not talking, you know, making something right. But how do we. How do we have a quality product, but we're not spending hours and hours and hours on stuff that really doesn't produce anything that's really that great. And so to see that come to fruition was really kind of a, kind of a highlight.

Yeah. That's awesome. Who's influenced you the most as it relates to your lean and journey with process improvement?

Well, it kind of gets, it kind of changes because, you know, I've got my, I had my, my parents growing up, I had scoutmasters, I had, you know, other officers, NCOs, non commissioned officers. Sorry about that. I throw those acronyms out there every once in a while. It's kind of interesting. I've had a lot of mentors over the years about how I do things. Recently I had a wing commander when I was deployed that I knew he did a lot of leadership stuff and I knew he kind of did some of his own, like some radio shows and things, but I never really kind of got. Didn't read about him too much until I actually got back. And lately it's been a. John Michelle who's been doing. He's been. Kind of influenced me quite a bit on some. This Lean Journey, his book that I've actually been reading, no More Mediocre Me has been, it's been a, it's funny how you, you go through process improvement training, kind of refresh yourself, then you start reading this book, you're like, wow, that's exactly what he's saying. But he's not saying saying process improvement.

Right. Yeah.

So I would say he's probably one person that's really influenced me lately for process improvement.

Yeah. Yeah. Good, good. Let's say someone's listening to this right now. Maybe they're military, but. Or maybe they're not. Maybe the civilian world and they're looking to kind of get started with their lean journey. Or perhaps their journey has stalled and they need to kind of get it going again. What advice do you have for that person?

Well, I'll say the thing that for me, what caused me to kind of stall and just kind of not continue on was I just tend to procrastinate at time. So don't procrastinate, just do it. You'd be amazed at the little things you can, you can do just by, you know, stopping, you know, hey, that doesn't work. Let's just fix this. And how do I fix. Fix it? Sometimes bigger projects involve more people, but there's little things that you can do that just will make people's lives much better. Or you just ask the question. I know, I watched one of the videos that talked about how often do you mentor your folks? Like, well, I really don't have anybody that works directly for me. But then I went, well, actually I kind of do, but they don't work for me directly, but they work for me. I can go talk to. I think getting out and talking with people and seeing what their problems are and maybe you can offer some advice to them is probably the biggest thing.

Yeah, beautiful. Beautiful. All right, well, good stuff. Let's go ahead and transition into the reflection section. Todd and I know you listen to the show, so you kind of know what these questions are already. So this first one is the good one. Respect for people. Curious, what does it mean to you to respect people?

Well, I think respect for people. I think my, my parents taught me this and actually all the adults that I grew up around really taught me that, you know, just to be grateful to other, to other folks. It's, it's interesting. Doesn't the Air Force and the military in general, we have a hierarchy, we have a command structure. But you know what, I've, you know, I've had junior folks that work around me or for me that they do really, really good work. And just to be grateful for their contribution and to get their advice, I've actually gone down to some lower level folks and said, hey, what, I don't understand this. I don't know everything. Can you explain this to me? And then they explain it and we go through it and it's like, wow, thanks for that. And they're just looking at me kind of funny for a minute going, that's not normal. But I think just being grateful and appreciative of other folks is what respect is.

I love that you just think about if you have children or anything like that and you don't know how to do something on your iPhone, you just ask your 14 year old and they'll tell you. You take those things for granted, but it gives you a lot of hope, right, that there's, there's a lot of brains out there and a lot of good things happening at all levels.

Exactly. You know, you talk about the 14 year old helping with iPhones and my soon to be 18 year old and my 15 and 14 or 13 year old will go down and try to log into their Xbox One and I'm fumbling around with it and they'll just like move dad here. And I've never seen anybody type so fast when with a game controller, I can't even type that fast on a keyboard. And I was just amazed.

I kind of miss the old days of texting on like the blackberries or Whatever, you know, like those are much easier than.

Exactly.

So. All right, good stuff. Hey, what's the best advice you've ever received, Todd?

I read a book, it's been probably about 10 years ago called Four Hour Work Week.

Yeah.

So we actually use that applied at that office I talked about earlier. I think the biggest thing is like I can't turn off my email like he did, but I can turn it off a lot. So I try to. I got away from it, I've actually gotten back into it lately is to, you know, I come in the morning, I check my email, there's nothing really that's significant. And then I just turn it off. And what are my top three things for the day that I'm going to work on? And I'm going to get those done and then come back and check the email later on. And I think folks realize that they can't get a hold of me via email that quickly, so they have to call me and talk to me and that's. Or come to my office. And it's actually getting more interaction with folks when they do that because emails are so impersonal that you kind of, you lose. We're very email centric because it's just, we have people everywhere. Can't get away from it, but you can definitely minimize it.

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Good stuff. Can you think of an experiment or maybe a project that didn't turn out quite like you planned? And if so, what did you learn?

Let's see. Well, I worked when I was first learning to kind of work on SharePoint, I was trying to like implement some things maybe a little too quickly. And I built a tracking system for folks to use and I thought this thing was wonderful. We're going to implement it and we're just going to do it. And here it is. Then I started asking folks how it was working. They didn't understand it. SharePoint at the time was still kind of new to us. They didn't know how to click on things. They thought it was cumbersome. So what I really learned from that is like, well, I didn't actually go get the voice of the customer, so how do I. What are you looking for? And once we kind of sat down and figured out what people really were looking for, we could go back. And I tore the whole thing apart, started from scratch again and built a new system. And they're like, this is exactly what we wanted. So the first experiment didn't work so hot, but learned from it, took some advice. Some people were not pleased with how it was going and took their advice and corrected it. And after that they were pleased. So I'd say, yeah, voice of the customer kind of important. Very important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Hey, I know you mentioned one book already, but I'm curious. I don't know how much of a reader you are. Any other, any other books that you suggest folks check out?

Of course, I haven't been reading that much lately. This is about the. I pick up maybe one book every, every couple months or so and start reading it. So. But this one, I keep coming back to that one because it's just the name again. It's no more mediocre me.

No more mediocre me. Okay.

By, by John E. Michelle. He's a. Was a retired brigadier general from the u. S. Air force. So he has a lot of leadership stuff in it. It's really, it's, it's, it's fascinating. I can see that because he's a pilot too. And I can see when he's talking about things we kind of relate because the things he's saying in there or a lot, some things are kind of pilot speak. So. But it does, it does resonate for.

Hey, I got a crazy question, but just I love to ask this to pilots. So do you remember the first time where you were in total control and the wheels lifted off?

Oh, absolutely.

Like, what was that? What was going through your, your body at that moment?

It's like as soon as that instructor steps out the door, you know, the engine's running and he, they get out the plane says, take it around the pattern. And you're just, you're just nervous and you're just sweating and you're like, you rotate, you're off the ground. You're like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And it comes to realization that, you know what, you're gonna have to land this plane and there's not anyone else here can do it for you. And that kind of goes with lean too. It's like, you know, no one else is going to do this for you. You just have to do it and fall back on your training. Fall, fall back on your procedures and just do it.

Yeah. I mean, from your training as a pilot, I mean, can you simulate that feeling of liftoff like in a machine before a plane or. You know what I mean?

Well, we have some really, really high tech simulators now. But you know, mentally you're going, oh, this feels like the thing, but you know that you're on the ground.

Yeah.

You know, there's no threat.

Yeah. Yeah.

So it's really hard. That's hard. Hard to. That feeling is hard to simulate. You can try, but you still know that you're in a building on the ground and you can turn this thing off and stop.

Yeah, well, same thing with lean, right? I mean, you can watch a Gemba Academy video or go to a workshop and run a little LEGO simulation, which is cool. But until you go out there and you boots on the ground and you get after it and screw some things up and figure out and learn from them, you really haven't done anything. Right.

Exactly. And that's, you know, we're all, we all make mistakes, even when we're trying to facilitate improvement. Events, people are people, they're dynamic. They're. Sometimes they may not necessarily want to be in the room doing this. And you have to kind of convince them, you know, with some, you know, I don't know how you. What words to use for that, but you kind of convince them that this is a good idea.

Sure.

And I've seen people change. Like, ask them at the end of an event or a thing that we worked on is, was this worthwhile? They're like, well, yeah, at first I didn't think so, but now I think, I think it will be.

Yeah.

I think it's because they feel empowered. Like, they feel like I'm making. I'm doing something now versus like, like the first lot of times, I get a lot of complaints. They're complaining about the whole thing or they're complaining about the process itself. It's like, well, you know, you have a chance right now to fix it.

Yeah.

You'Re in control right now.

So, yeah, I mean, a lot of times I think people just don't realize that they're going to be able to, you know, be heard, you know, like, for so long, people just aren't heard. And that's where that frustration grows. And then when you finally get into this adventure, like, what do you think? Let's do it. Let's try that. And then you start winning their heart, Right?

Exactly. There's a new process that we just started recently on. I gave the briefings around how much paper we're going to save and how much toner we're going to save and the potential for the time savings. But, you know, there's that growing pain. So you have to, you know, here we are, here's the new process, and let's start trying this out. People are kind of looking at, well, you know, this doesn't quite. This doesn't quite work, or. Can we move this here? And I said, absolutely. And they're like. They look at me like. But you built this checklist.

Yeah.

Yes, I built this checklist.

Yeah.

And we're building it together now. You don't like something, let's. Let's. We'll change it. As long as we're following all of our regulatory guidance, it's our process, so let's change it. Like, really? Like, yes, right now. Let's do it.

That's awesome. Hey, so is there a knowledge or skill area that you want to work on over this next. I don't know, three to six months.

I think being a facilitator is sometimes a little different than being just a, you know, leading a mission or an office, because they kind of go hand in hand a little bit, but, you know, trying to. Hey, guys, let's stop thinking about that, you know, really? Because people like to go down different paths and call rabbit holes to start looking at stuff, and sometimes that's not a bad thing. But I think my biggest skill is just to try to keep them on the path that we're trying to work on. I allow people sometimes to deviate a little too much.

Yeah. My colleague, Steve Cain, he says that we're really good here just sharing the dirty laundry of Gemba Academy. He says we're real good at. At Squirrel. You know, it's like, you know, so, like, we're in a meeting and we're, like, talking about something serious. We got everything going. All of a sudden, we'll.

We'll.

I'll say some random thing, like, totally off topic. And. And Steve was yell out Squirrel. It's like, good, good reminder, you know, stay focused.

So, yeah, I have the Squirrel thing. Someone taught the waving the hands and people's faces to get their attention. Yeah. We do a lot of PowerPoint in the air Force, obviously. And I. I put. How many minutes it's going to take for that section.

Oh, that's good.

So people are like. So they see my slides, like, one to two minutes. Absolutely. If we're not down two minutes on the slide, we're moving on.

Yeah.

Or, or. Or if I see that they're not getting, you know, they're kind of going down a path and they want to talk about something else. I may just cut out some slides.

Yeah.

As I say, we're going to be in here for 45 minutes or 30 minutes. That's it.

Yep.

I'm done. I'm done after 45 minutes. You know, they'll start, they'll continue talking. But I was like, well, you know, my porch, my portion's done.

Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Very good. All right, Toddler. Hey, it's been great chatting with you. Thank you, first of all, for your service to our country. And thank you for practicing lean, you know, in the military. That's fantastic. And gives me a lot of hope as an American, really.

We're trying. We're trying.

Yeah. Well, thank you. Keep it up. So how can people connect with you, Todd?

I'm. I am in on LinkedIn. This seems to be the. The way to get people get a hold of me, too.

Spell your last name.

Abshire. It's a B, S, H I R E. First name Todd with two Ds.

Got it? Got it. All right, well, very good, Todd. Thanks again. Perhaps we can. We can catch up later. I don't know if anybody in the Air Force ever gets out to conferences or anything like that, but if you do, man, would love to. To meet up with you.

Yeah, if I. If I can convince them, maybe I can.

Yeah. Jump on an airplane and fly over. You don't have to pay for the flight at least, right?

Well, somebody's got to pay for the flight.

That's true.

I guess that's true.

All right, well, hey, thanks again, Todd. You take care.

All right. Appreciate it. Thanks, Ron.

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