GA 194 | How to Teach the Art of Continuous Improvement with Attila Dobai

You're listening to episode 194 with Attila Dubai. Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same.

Continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such.

As Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira. Hey there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. As always, thank you so much for taking time out of your day in your week to listen to the show and for watching our Lean and Six Sigma training videos over at Gembacademy.com we definitely appreciate each and every one of you. Now, today is December 21st, so we are four days away from Christmas for. So for those that celebrate the holiday, we'd like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and definitely wish everyone a happy New Year. We'll talk to you again before the New Year, but we'll get ready for that as well. So today I'm excited to welcome Attila Dubai to the show. Now, I corresponded with Attila over email from, I think we discovered each other on LinkedIn or something like that, and come to find out that he's been practicing Lean and Six Sigma in the kind of the services industry for quite some time. And so he came onto the show and we had a really nice chat just about how he's applying the tools and methodology and more importantly, how he's really focused on the people side of continuous improvement, which, as we all know is the most important aspect of continuous improvement is that in the end, it's all about people. And so he shares some nice stories, get into interesting conversation about five why? And he gave a shout out to John Miller's episode that we did a few weeks ago on 5 why? And kind of talked about some of the, some of the mistakes that he made and, and maybe some aha moments that he uncovered that that helped him better deal with people when doing things like five why? Like why are people getting defensive and scared and whatnot? And so he made some tweaks to his approach and everything worked out well. So hopefully that adds some value. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com youm'll just look for episode 194 and again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 194. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Attila, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in From.

Sure. I'm calling in from lovely Denver, Colorado.

All right, all right. Well, before we got going, you were telling us about it's a no snow. So you were complaining about that, but I don't know how long that will last for you.

Well, we could certainly use it here. We need it for the tourism.

Yeah, I got you. I gotcha. Well, good stuff. Well, hey, thanks for coming onto the show. I'm really excited to talk about LEED and Six Sigma in the services industry. But as you know, Attila, we like to begin all of our shows with our guest sharing a quote of something that possibly inspires him. So do you have one?

I do, I do. It's actually one that's been guiding my life for a very long time. It's an oldie, but it's Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And I believe this to be true. No matter if it's good luck or bad luck. Poor preparation will lead to bad luck. Great preparation will lead to good luck. I feel that that's something that continuous improvement folks and leaders, they always have to be learning so that they're prepared before the opportunities present themselves.

Yeah, got it. Love it. All right, well, Attila, let's go ahead and get going with you telling us a little bit about your background, maybe how you first came into Continuous Improvement and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so I think I started a little bit differently than a lot of folks. I started in the services industry. I've never actually even worked in manufacturing. So maybe a little bit different perspective than a lot of folks start out with in Lean and Six Sigma. Yeah, but about 10 years ago, there was a great visionary leader that I worked with who had this idea of bringing, you know, Lean and Six Sigma into our services, completely services oriented company. And it got to work with them over that 10 year period. When I started, I'd never even heard of Lean and I'd heard of Six Sigma, but I'd never even heard of Lean before. But let me tell you, it was life changing for me. Learning these skills have been absolutely life changing for me. I've taken the continuous improvement mantra to every aspect of my life.

All right, well, let's kind of dig into that a little bit. So talk about, I mean, talk about. I mean, obviously, you know, we've preached on the show and again, the Academy, Lean and Six Sigma know no boundaries. So whether your services manufacturing, you work in a hospital, you work in a factory, it doesn't matter. You know, it's people, it's processes. But let's dig into the services side of things because there is a, you know, kind of a misunderstanding many times that, hey, this doesn't apply to us. You know, we don't make cars or something like that. Right, right. So. So talk a little bit about your experience and actually what I actually, let's take it in steps. Let's talk about the moment that you were first introduced to it. I don't know if you remember, like the day, like when someone told you about this thing. Like, what did you think? Did you think, oh, you're crazy, you're nuts, this will never work, or maybe we'll just, if we persevere, it'll pass and we can move on. Or. What was going through your mind?

Well, you know, it's odd. I got it, I got a call from my boss and he said, you know, hey, we're gonna try this new thing. You're gonna head it up for the division, so you're gonna have to figure out how to make this thing work. And I said, well, I have no idea how that would even apply. So, you know, I started looking at it and, you know, I look at Toyota production system and I'm trying to understand how can I fit that into something that isn't about machines. So it was a little rattling.

When was this? Like about what year?

That was about 07.

Okay.

It was about 10 years ago.

Okay. Okay. So what were the first steps? Did you get some. Read some books, get some training? You know, Gemba Academy didn't exist back then, so couldn't watch any videos.

Yeah, yeah. So we had, we had some folks come in, basically hired some outside, outside help to teach us the tool set.

Okay.

We started out by learning lean and then trying to apply lean. We would then raise talent up from the lean practitioners. We would put them into a green belt program, start teaching them some of the lean, some of the six Sigma aspects, and then bring people up from there into black belt roles and then into master black belt roles. Ultimately, we had three or four master black belts altogether.

Okay, so like in those early days, what kind of problems were you trying to solve?

Well, I think typical of any lean six Sigma deployment in a company, you're going to have a lot of low hanging fruit for us. Things like obvious forms of waste. Once you learn like waste tools, you start seeing very obvious forms of waste that you can go after. We would start working on those and ultimately we were able to make large financial gains off of using those tools.

Can you give me an example?

Yeah. So One would be like how we applied how we did the service on a vehicle, on a truck, and specifically when we were replacing tires. We found that there were three different cost metrics and the easiest one was the most expensive one. Of course, we were able to adjust our processes by really digging into the root causes of what drove a person to use that method and come up with easy ways for them to use ones that were more cost effective for us.

Okay, well, good stuff. Talk some more about how you guys use Lean and Six Sigma on the services side of the world.

Sure. So it's really about understanding people more than it is about understanding a machine. So when you're working with machines, when you learn these tools, you learn about how to impact the machine, make it more predictable, make it put out widgets that are uniform in size, less variance. But when you're working with people, you find that there is more variation, especially on the Six Sigma side. I think it has more of an impact than on Lean because when you introduce humans to a process, you have a great chance of ending up with special cause variation in an understanding that in the services industry, it really forced me to take a look at the different tools and how to apply them, how to give them a human feel, rather than digging into how they work as a, you know, how they would work against a machine.

Right, right. Yeah. I think that's the power of leaning Six Sigma. In the end, it's a people based system, right?

Yeah, really is.

No matter, really. I mean, even like a manufacturing guy is probably listening, saying, yeah, for them it's still about people. Right. I mean, the machines are part of it, but in the end it's people who are making decisions. It's people who are, you know, operating things and whatnot. So yeah, so in that sense, the manufacturing world, very similar to services, really, in that that people are always involved. So maybe give us an example of, of how you've approached that kind of the human side of things.

Well, sure, Let me go through a tool that I love to use. It's one that's easily understood but really hard to master. And that's five whys. You had a podcast the other day with John Miller, I think it was episode 182. Folks who aren't familiar with Five Whys should really listen to that. But you know, Five Lies is just one of those great tools, really helps us get from when we have a symptom or understanding of the symptom to get down into the root cause. One of the things I really like that John emphasized Was that the number, the 5 is really arbitrary? Yeah, we can't, we can't get hung up on. You have to ask why five specific times? Sometimes you'll get to the root cause of three, sometimes it'll take 12. One thing that could actually boost that number or one potential pitfall of five, why is you can end up going down rabbit holes. And John again talks about that in 182. So you can go down this rabbit hole, go down a wrong path, and end up at 15 wise. It's one of those tools that really, you only get really, really good at when you develop the intuition needed to understand when you're at a root cause. And that's really only going to come from experience. You just have to do it over and over and over again. But ultimately you'll get good at it. But I did notice that there were some other issues that existed, especially when I was trying to work with this in the services. And I imagine, like you said, you know, folks in the manufacturing side have probably noticed the same thing. When you're asking an individual about why something happens, sometimes they can get defensive. Mm. See, I noticed that. I noticed that fairly early folks would end up in either a flight fight or freeze type of response. You know, they would, they would either get angry, they would fidget like they wanted to leave, or they would just completely freeze up. In my typical response when I, when I see something like that in a project, my typical response is to just sit there silently. Usually discomfort will take over and they'll start talking again and we'll get past these emotional type of responses and into something founded in logic and reason. You know, that didn't work for me in five why, and I really wanted to understand why that wasn't working. You know, why. Why would people freeze up on me? I'm, I'm just trying to understand why something's happening so that we can get to the root cause, so we could fix the problem. And it frees up on me.

So what'd you do?

But I made a deliberate effort to understand why that was happening to me. And I beat my head against the wall for a long time. But I ended up stumbling across the Simon Sinek video, his TedX video, where he's talking about, you know, how leaders are using a why basis to motivate. In that talk, Ron, he talks about people's responses to why questions. He talks about how a why question can elicit a, a emotional response rather than a logical. He talks about it being attached to the reptilian brain. And I don't. I don't want to pretend at all to be a psychoanalyst or biologist or anything else, because that's really not my expertise. But it made sense to me. So I thought to myself, is there. Is it a language problem? Is it. Is it something that's lost in the translation? Was the original Japanese different? I don't speak any Japanese, but we could ask John. Right, right. But everybody I reached out to. So I reached out to a bunch of people who speak Japanese and English, and I wish I knew John at that point.

Yeah.

Because he would have been a great one to talk to. But I reached out to folks who speak both Japanese and English, and every one of them, Every single one of them. Ron, tell me that why was the same in Japanese as it was in English? I mean, I beat them up on. Well, is there an emotional difference? Is there some slight variation, something going on in the way that people receive that question? All of them told me no. Now, it was a limited sample size, and maybe one of your listeners or John, give me some more feedback to help me understand it. But every one of them that I talked to, Ron, every single one of them told me no. Yeah, you're on the wrong path. Yeah. But one of them did give me a great tip, and it ended up having a completely aha moment for me. What he told me was that when you're talking to people, you got to talk to them different than you talk to a machine. And it kind of gelled for me, like, all at once. It was this great eureka moment. It just came together for me. I went back and I watched the Sinek video, and it was just absolutely solidified in my head that what we were doing wrong or what I was doing wrong was asking people why, when I should be asking them in the form of what or how. Getting out of that emotional realm so that they're thinking logically rather than feeling attacked or feeling like, I'm trying to say that they did something wrong.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's reminding me of, you know, as you've probably heard in the last few episodes, we're all in this Toyota Kata movement right now. We were working, finishing up this course. And, you know, the fifth question of this, you know, that the coach asked the learner, is how quickly can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step? Right. So it's all about. First of all, it's we. It's both of us, right? The coach and the learner. Because neither one of them know. Right?

Right.

And Yet I'm going to see what we have learned, you know, how quickly. So I think you're onto something there. I mean, why is obviously part of that. It's kind of hidden in that, but maybe it's a little bit less jarring. Right. Than why. Right. Yeah. So it's interesting.

I do think that, you know, if a culture is, you know, a continuous improvement culture within a corporation or within a business is still poorly formed or young and still new the idea of continuous improvement. I think that subject matter experts can be a little more defensive or a little more on edge about what exactly it is that we're trying to accomplish.

Yeah, yeah. You know, sometimes I also wonder is, you know, even before we get to the five why, when we're approaching that person, I almost wonder if it's. And this is very kind of Simon Sinek Y in that we explain why are we even doing this? Right. I think sometimes we forget to do that. Right. Like, why are we practicing continuous improvement? Whether it's lean, six sigma, project management, doesn't matter, theory constraints, why are we doing this right? And when people have that found that foundation of why, then things like 5 why are a little bit easier. They're like, oh yeah, I get it. Versus walking up. And if their first introduction to this whole concept of continuous supreme is why did a machine break over there? Or why did the customer get upset or whatever it is, then it's fight or flight kind of thing.

It really is about everything that we can do to change an entire culture. It's not necessarily just about any individual project that we're working on. And I think you're spot on, you know, approaching the project right at the start from a why perspective, then breaking it down into the how are we going to accomplish that? Why? And what tools are we going to use can be especially effective. And frankly, that is how I approach the projects that I work on here. Yeah, I try to always approach them from why are we doing this?

Yeah, yeah.

Try to try to dispel some of that, some of that fear right off the bat. Right.

Good stuff, good stuff. So any other final thoughts on the services side before we jump into the reflection section? Any things that wisdom or you want to share for folks who are practicing in the services industry?

You know, I think it's going to be very similar for folks in manufacturing. One of the things that I would like to always say is make sure that you prepare for the opportunities before they even happen. It's one where we have to learn constantly, almost with a child's curiosity. We have to be constantly seeking new opportunities to learn. In the last that I would like to say is the field, like you've said on this podcast, Ron, it's really about people. Our entire approach has to be about people. And maybe I felt that more on the services side than I was feeling from, you know, feeling from the tools that I was learning. But I really feel that it's very important on the services side to approach it from a people aspect. Yeah, we're not. We rarely have opportunities to work with just random variation. Yeah. Especially services side.

Yeah. And unfortunately, the way many people are taught, the heck the way I was taught back in the day, you know, when I went through, you know, my lean training, was more kind of, you know, on the fly and learning as we go. John and the guys and Gemba research back then did some training for us, but. But it was mostly trial by far. But I did go through formal six Sigma, you know, green belt, black belt, master black belt like you described. And unfortunately, and all those classes, all we spent time doing was shooting catapults and learning about multiple regression and design of experiments. And so, you know, unfortunately, sometimes these continuous improvement guys are so obsessed with these tools that you do forget, in the end, it's about people. It's not about your doe, man. You know, I mean, the doe can help. No, for sure. I mean, it has a place. Right. But it's very, very subordinate to understanding people and getting people to work together and to, you know, want to help each other. Right.

It really is. Yeah.

Yeah. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, let's go ahead and jump into the reflection section. Attila. You know, this first one's an oldie but goodie, and it's about respect for people, which can be a little bit harder to kind of wrap our arms around. So I'm curious, what does it mean to you to respect people?

To me, it's about really understanding people, having high empathy with them. I try to always place myself in somebody else's shoes to try to understand what's driving them to me. Unless you take that opportunity to go out and really understand people, you're in a difficult spot.

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

Yeah, the best advice I ever received was to do the job before you get the promotion. Guy gave me this piece of advice fairly early in my career, and it was huge for me. What does it mean to me? It's don't wait for permission. Go out and grab it by the horns. I love it. Take the opportunities that are presented to you and just grab a hold of them. Don't wait for, for permission. Ultimately, you know, if you just wait for permission, you're going to be waiting for permission forever.

I love, oh, I really love that. I mean, so many times you'll hear from people saying, oh, my boss doesn't support, you know, continuous improvement, so I can't do anything, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, you know what, just go off and make something better and then give your boss credit. Pretty sure he's not. Or she's not gonna be offended. Right. So just go out and do it, man. And then give them credit. Make them look good. And yeah, you'd be surprised how effective that is.

It really is. I find that I just have to accept those things that are beyond my control to change. Yeah, you know, there's so many things that are just beyond your control. It's probably beyond any of our control over whether or not our boss embraces CI, but we can control whether or not we do. We can control whether or not we bring that into our day to day lives. We can control whether or not we're willing to accept the status quo, you know, non stop, or we're going to grab ahold of what we can, what we actually have control of and change it.

Yep.

Yeah.

As the old saying goes, instead of blaming other people, just say, you know, I have found the problem and he is I. Right.

Right. Yeah.

Good stuff. Hey, can you think of an experiment or project or something that you worked on in the past that didn't quite turn out as you planned? And if so, what did you learn?

I probably shouldn't admit this out loud, Ron, but I would say the majority of projects that I work on or have worked on haven't necessarily turned out the way that I planned from the start. And what I feel the greatest learning is from that is, is that they don't have to, they don't have to turn out exactly how you planned. I almost feel that over planning can be detrimental. And what I mean by that is that we have to be open to, we have to be open to adaptation. We have to be willing to change our path based off of what we're actually experiencing, based off of what's actually in front of us. If we go in with too rigid of a plan into one of these projects, you can run into roadblocks that you could just never get over. Whereas if you go into it with a fairly loose mentality that you're willing to change your path as you go, you're more likely to actually accomplish the goal. So I would. I would be more goal focused and less focused on exactly how we're going to get to that goal.

Yeah, I love it. You know, I was actually having a kind of an email conversation with Mike Rother, you know, Toyota Kata fame. And we were talking a lot about how Toyota Kata is not necessarily a. It's not a problem solving tool. It's a learning tool. Right. So I think if you go into projects with the mindset of we're not really necessarily trying to solve a problem, sure. I mean, that might be the end result. But if we go into it with, we want to learn about how this thing is behaving and what works and what doesn't work, you go in with that mindset, you can't lose because you're always learning. Right. And if you learn enough, any problem can be solved. Right. So. But you go into it with that learning mindset versus problem solving mindset. It's a really interesting way of looking at.

Really is. I mean, like I said earlier, to me, it's almost a childish curiosity. Yep, it is. You know, to me, if I notice a break point in the process, especially when I'm physically observing it, the first thing I want to do is run over to it and start looking at what's causing that. Why is it breaking down constantly looking to learn from any process that exists so that I can hate to keep repeating it so that I can learn from that. And you never know where it's going to come in a project 10 years down the road. That little bit of learning that you had can help you understand that root cause and overcome it much quicker.

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

For me, the pride comes from mentoring. I really love working with people and helping them see how to actually apply the tools. To me, one side of this equation is a science. You have to learn the tools. But where I really get enjoyment is from teaching the art of Lean and Six Sigma to somebody who's new to practicing it. To. To me, there's no greater joy than seeing that childish curiosity evolve in somebody else. To me, that's the best part. I mean, you can. Almost anybody, I think, can teach just the tools, just the science, but that art. That art is so hard to teach, but it just gives me so much joy when I see it. When I see the light bulb. Come on for somebody. Love it.

Read any good books lately?

I have actually a couple of them that I've really been enjoying. The first One is Anticipatory Organization by Daniel Burris. In that book, he's really looking at how can we better predict the future? And I think that that's one of the most difficult things, especially in Six Sigma, when we get into those Six Sigma projects and we're trying to see exactly what the future looks like so that we can measure against a future outcome, so that we can understand how we've changed. It's been a very powerful book for me that way. It's helped me really understand how we can look at the future.

What was it called again?

Anticipatory Organization by Daniel Burtz.

Got it. Okay.

Absolutely. Great book. And one that I feel like it's going to have a major impact on, especially Six Sigma. Like I said, cool. The other is Entrepreneurial you by Dori Clark. And really, it's all three of her books. But what I've been really impressed with, with that. I don't know if she would agree with me on this or not, Ron. But what I've really enjoyed is that it's almost a continuous improvement map or path for individual. It's almost a way to look at yourself as an individual and say, how can I improve my odds of success in this changing workforce? And where I've gotten really excited about these two is when I bring them together. I see one major risk for the future of employment, but also a roadmap to deal with that. Mm.

Last question. Is there a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve on? And if so, what's your plan?

Yeah, so the biggest one that I see right now is in predictive analytics, predictive and prescriptive analytics, bringing a more solid foundation for that into. Into especially Six Sigma. You know, when I look at Six Sigma for services, all of the special cause variation that we see in that makes it much more difficult to predict a future outcome than we would have with, say, a machine, something that's experiencing more random variation. So I've signed up for a master's class dealing with data analytics and really looking at how I can bring prescriptive analytics, more machine learning, more data science, into a lean Six Sigma approach. Love it.

All right, well, hey, Attila, it was great chatting with you. We're actually recording this in early December, but I think this episode will probably come out closer to Christmas. So thanks for coming on. Do you have any maybe final words of wisdom for the folks? And then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you?

Sure, sure. So final, final words again, to me, it's Just always learn. You know, we work in continuous improvement. We have to continuously be improving ourselves. Always be learning. Always learn for the opportunities before they present themselves. Maybe that's the key to luck.

Yeah, I think it is.

It is. And yeah, I love to get questions from folks that are looking to get into Lean in Six Sigma, or even people who are practicing now and just want to discuss a tool or method or even just discuss the field in general. And there's a handful of ways to get a hold of me for that. Of course, I have a LinkedIn profile like everybody else. I also have a blog that I've recently started, which is Zinnership.com and I have an email address where they can reach me@tillaxinnership.com and go ahead and spell.

Your name for the LinkedIn folks. They might only be listening.

Here it is. A T, T, I L, A D as in dog, O B as in boy. A, I.

Awesome. And what was the name of your blog again?

Zenership. It's Z, Y, N, E, R, S, H, I, P. And what's.

What's the story behind that name?

So really, I was looking at synergies, right? How can we bring together different fields to learn from different approaches to a problem so that we can. We can better improve or continuously improve? And to me, continuous improvement is about not just. Not just Lean and Six Sigma. It's about leadership. It's about strategy. It's about data analytics, data science. It's about bringing all of those together in a synergistic way. So we settled on the name Zinnership.

I like it.

That's awesome.

Very unique.

I'd love to see it catch on. Yeah.

Awesome. All right, well, hey, thanks again, Attila. It's great chatting with you and maybe we'll meet up face to face sometime this coming year.

Ron, that would be awesome.

All right, you take care.

Thank you. You too.

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