GA 199 | How to Understand Your Current Condition with Drew Locher

You can yell at me, you know, I can piss people off like you know as well as the next person. But my co instructor, she's like the nicest person you can ever meet. And to yell at her, something's definitely wrong, you know.

Is it possible that most of us lean practitioners fall into the trap of rushing to countermeasures before deeply understanding important topics like the current condition and organizational goals? My guest today makes a strong argument that this issue is not only true, but that it may be more widespread than any of us ever imagined. His name is Drew Locker. And longtime lean thinkers out there have likely benefited from Drew's work over the years. He's a four time author and two time Shingle Prize recipient. He also works with many of the world's leading lean thinking organizations, including the University of Michigan, the Lean Enterprise Institute, and his own company, Change Management Associates. On today's show, Drew and I explore this problem solving conundrum in great detail before coming to some potential countermeasures any of us can and likely should deliberately practice. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything Drew and I discussed, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 199. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. All right, Drew, well, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Good. Thanks Ryan, for having me back. Yeah.

All right. Well, it's always good to connect with you, Drew. We were talking before we hit the record button here that I read your recent article that you posted and really resonated with me until I reached out to you said, Mandy, you got to come back onto the show and talk about this. So really appreciate you taking time, Drew, to come on and, and well, in case folks that didn't hear the first time you were on, I should have looked up the episode number. I'll. We'll put it in the show notes. I can't remember what episode you were you were on before, but tell us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff and then, and then tell folks what you're up to these days.

Okay. My first exposure to continuous improvement was back in General electric in the 1980s is kind of required.

Yeah.

Part of their management development program that I participated in. And from the early days I was sort of a deminite. I usually warn people of that. The teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Demin. Yeah, and I left GE in 1990 and interestingly, I went out on my own, but I also went back to school to learn more about organizational behavioral science because I felt that was a weakness. And I say interesting because I'm actually my next newsletter is on that subject. In any case, I've been working with organizations in different industries since 1990 and so I'm kind of a generalist. Got affiliated with the Lean Enterprise Institute in the early, early 2000s when Jim was kind of just starting up. Got affiliated with University of Michigan around that same time. So I teach classes for them at the U. And also affiliated with the Theticare center for Healthcare Value, which they rebr is Catalyst. So I just kind of, like I said, a generalist and just trying to help industry organizations in different industries wherever I can.

Yeah, you've also written some pretty awesome books, right, over the years? Yeah, many that I've used. And yeah, I think maybe that's what we talked about on the first podcast. I can't remember probably. Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, so let's talk a little bit about this article and we're going to link to it in the show notes, which will be this is episode 199 drew one away from 200. Yeah, yeah. So we're cranking them out, baby. Cranking them out. So. So, yeah, so episode just to go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 199. Definitely want everyone to read this article because it's, I would say it's kind of one of those like must read type things. You know, there's a few pieces that you come across where like you really need to read that. And it's a short read, so it's not. It's not going to take a lot of time. Sure, yeah. No, it was beautiful. I loved it. And I was telling you first to admit a lot of times I don't read a lot of our fellow Lean bloggers and all the rest of it right these days much anymore. I just don't have time. There's so much out there. But this one got my attention and I read every word of it more than once. So good stuff. So first of all, before we kind of dive into the meat of the article and what it was really about, I'm curious what compelled you to write it?

I typically write on things that I observe and not just once or twice, but recurring kind of observations. That's why my newsletter, it's not even monthly. If I don't have something compelling to say or share. I don't write it. And this particular subject was something I saw a lot of last year and I always tend to reflect at the end of the year anyway. But what I observed more specifically was just people not practicing process improvement, pdca, whatever you want to call it properly. And what's interesting that really made me write it is when I would kind of point out these things to folks, they didn't always respond very well, certainly not in the spirit of lean of continuous improvement. And I just felt that was worthy of sharing with the audience out there. From my newsletter I probably have about 4,000 names or so and then on the social media platforms like LinkedIn and the response that I got not just from you, but actually probably about two dozen other people tells me it was a good topic that resonated with people in particular people. It really helped a number of people or prompted them to reflect on their own PDCA practice.

All right, so the title of the piece is you have to be a player before you can be a coach. And then the subtitle is this article discusses a key obstacle to developing a continuous improvement culture. So again I want everyone to read this article, but go ahead and give us the highlights of the article and maybe talk about the situations that you that you experienced there in those training classes that you were in.

So the article refers to some personal experiences and delivering several workshops, one of which is the Kata for Daily improvement at the University of Michigan, of which I am a co instructor for. And during that, that workshop we have a simulation. You know, you always have to have games for adult learning and in a simulation they are to practice improving the simulated factory. And then we would use that experience to provide the basis for practicing what Mike Rother, the author of Toyota Kata, what he refers to as the coaching kata, how do you, how do you teach and develop the problem solving and process improvement abilities and mindsets and others? So the workshop is pretty tightly integrated with the simulation and you just can't kind of separate them. You know, it's all based on experiential learning, gives us a common experience that we can have a dialogue about and that's really the purpose of such simulations. But what has been amazing to us, myself and my co instructor, her name is Tony Benner and it's caused us to do a lot of reflection because what has been amazing to us are these very, very strong emotions that are generated during this program, this multi day program in particular, from quote unquote, seasoned continuous improvement professionals. And as I get into in the little article is, you know, as we are doing the simulation, a lot of the CI professionals are like, well, I know how to improve this. You. And they are very predisposed to implementing lean concepts and tools in the simulation without really understanding the business case, without understanding the current conditions of that simulation. And it's a simple simulation. It's a little product, goes through three workstations, assembly, nothing complicated. There's some variations to it. There's variable demand, it's ship every day, there's raw material, there's material movement, there's other aspects of it. But as simple as it might seem, it really can vary based on the group itself because we actually measure performance of the simulated factory. We do a formal profit and loss statement. We looked at quality metrics on time, delivery type metrics, back orders and such. It can really vary from group to group based on the makeup of the group. So the one particular offering of this that I referred to in the article, it's a typical CI guy saying, we know what to do, we got to go rip apart the layout, set it up as one piece, flow and all this. And they wanted to do that at the very beginning. As usual, we would push back and say, well, you really got to follow the process and, and see where it leads you. Let the data kind of help you with all this and practice basically what we preach. Don't jump to conclusions. And of course, for the most part, the attendees and in particular the CI professionals in the group, they really can't help themselves to the point where, as I said, it generates lots of emotion. And Ron, some people don't believe me, but people yell at us. Now, you can yell at me, you know, I can piss people off, like, you know as well as the next person. But my co instructor, she's like the nicest person you can ever meet. And to yell at her, just something's definitely wrong, you know, so it really generates a lot of emotion. I share in the article where, you know, one guy got up and was screaming and then later he acknowledged he really wasn't yelling at us, he was yelling at himself because he came to the conclusion he was not practicing PDCA properly. And I said, well, would you be willing to share that with everyone? He was, no, because I think he was embarrassed. We've had others that yelled and told us we didn't know what we were doing because the solution is obvious. And as much as we tried to encourage them to stick to really the proper process and really the proper thinking, don't jump to Conclusions, let the data and the facts drive you. They just couldn't help themselves. And the last time we ran it in 2017, it was another situation like that we ran. When we have large groups, we run two simulations concurrently. I take a group and my co instructor, Tony, she takes a group and her group at that. In this particular time, they just couldn't accept following the process and the methodology. And they insisted. And she goes, you know, what do I do? And I'm like, you have to let them, just let them do it. So they go and they change the layout and they do one piece flow and put pull systems in. My group's looking over saying, hey, how come you're not letting us do that? And I say, well, you know, tell me, I'll let you do anything if you can show the proper thinking. You know, what's the data telling you? The current conditions, you know, what is our direction of our business and how does that all align and support what you want to do, or vice versa really? How does it, you want to, you know, experiment changes you want to make, how does that align with our direction, our goals? You set the current conditions and you know, they would usually couldn't, couldn't make those connections and then they would kind of concede and I said, okay. And then they would follow the process which was, you know, look at the data. And a lot of it in this particular group was they had quality problems. So frankly, to put a flow system in, when you have huge quality problems, all you're going to do is flow more crap faster. I didn't make that statement to them, but I knew that's what would happen. So my group stuck with the process, stuck with the thinking and they kept looking over saying, how come, how come, how come you're not letting us make those changes? And at one point, because there's about four PDCA cycles that we have the attendees go through in the two day. During the two days I said, go take a look at how they're doing as we have like a scorecard of their factory performance. And they came back and they were astonished that that group was still not making money even though they made all these changes. They went to a layout change with a flow line and a one piece flow and they still were not making money. And my group was making money. And I just said to him, I was like, listen, I can't show you anymore. You know, what the, you know why it's so important to stick to the methodology? Because even in a silly little game, which again amazes me the emotional attachment people have to it in a short time. It really brings out a lot of real world issues in terms of proper PDCA process practice or improper, which makes it a great experience, I believe, for the attendees as long as they can learn and accept. So my group was like, wow, I really got to look at how I've been doing things all these years. And subsequent emails and communications I had with some of them. They indeed did. Where the other group that just jumped to solutions without understanding current conditions and tying it to specific goals of the organization, they just did what lean people do. Yeah, they had a pretty bad experience and just tossed it up to all this silly simulation. Yeah. Again, this is not just one experience. We've run into this quite a bit. We're very upfront with the groups now and we tell them exactly what I'm telling you and that's helped a lot. This particular group just couldn't control themselves.

Well, now I've not been in the workshop, but I'm assuming that we're kind of perhaps exploring the improvement kata, coaching kata and so forth. And, and I'm, I believe it was in your article or something else that I, that I read from you. We are talking about the tendency for the so called guru. Right. The continuous improvement, you know, expert with air quotes. Can't see my air quotes, but air quotes who. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm here to learn the coaching katana. Yeah, right. And then. Okay, cool. Have you, have you heard or practiced the improvement kata? Well, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm a lean guy. You know, I've been doing this for 15 years, worked at Toyota, you know, whatever it was, you know, and come to find out that they don't really have any experience on the prima kata, but because they are the experienced veteran, they need to be mastering the coaching kata. So I'm guessing you've, you've seen this, right? And it has to be problematic because to your point, if you don't understand the mechanics of the improvement kata, how are you ever going to coach it?

And these are people in roles and part of their responsibility is to teach others and develop the skills in others. So if their skills are questionable, what are they teaching? That's really my concern. A lot of people in our lean community are concerned by that as well. I know. You know, Mike Rother is a good friend and he and I have had this conversation numerous times before. Yeah, that's one of his teaching points of the whole kata. Methodology is proper practice. Yeah. You know, among other things like, oh, PDCA can happen pretty quick. It doesn't have to be dragged out projects and things. You know, we can practice rapid pdca, but it's got to be proper, proper practice.

Well, it's got to be. I don't know the thing that's, that's really taken me aback from the whole kind of kata movement or whatever. I don't know what the right word is, but it's the, the essence of deeply understanding the current condition. You know, we've all grew up on, you know, even Mike's book, right. Learning to see. Right. We all learned how to do value stream maps back in the day. And, and, and it was a, I think it was a good step in the right direction of forcing us to at least map a current state right before we, we even thought about the future state. But somehow over the years we, I don't know, we've lost our way a little bit in the lean community of maybe there's just so many tools and so many fun things that you can go out and do that stopping and deeply understanding your current condition. It's just not fun, you know, or I don't know what it is.

You brought up value stream mapping. And I have two books on this subject and I get a lot of emails and questions and such from folks on it and I find quite often they're doing a current state map without going to sea.

Yeah.

And that is a huge flag right there. Red flag.

Yeah.

So I don't know if we always were clear enough about what we mean by grasping current conditions and mapping out current state. And it has to include a strong, strong dosage of Go C. We do go see in the simulation, but we also go see. Sometimes we'll do the class at a host company in years past, the attendees will go and look at processes in the host company. And it struck me there even a few years ago and kind of was just starting to get going and that people were not looking objectively. So they would physically be there and watching. And then when you would talk to them, well, what do you see? They're seeing, oh, we need to do 5s there. This is out of place there. And it's just like, wow, they're not even looking objectively to understand current conditions, current state. So that leads you to a different conversation. Why are people taking these biases? That's clouding their vision. I've seen it with value stream mapping as well. People map what they think it is, not what it actually is. People will have procedures out and say step by step, here's how you. Here's the steps for the map. And I'm like, that's in a procedure. What do we really do? And they don't want to accept that the procedure might not be reflective of reality. So why do people have these biases? And we actually talk about this quite a bit. I think the CI professionals have been so trained to do, to just get things done, check the boxes of lean tools, lean concepts. The more you implement, the better you're doing your job. I think then because of that, they've not taken the proper approach, which might require some additional time and all to actually go see, because you can't just go and look for 15 minutes. You got to sometimes look. I used to go out and look for a day at least. I processes in the 90s that I was being asked to change, facilitate change. By that point, it's just like, so if that's where their mindset is, it's all in this just do, do, do that is kind of, I think, clouding their vision. So they're just looking at what lean tools are we not applying, rather than what's the problem here? What's this process and what problems are associated with it? And Toyota folks are brilliant at this, right? The whole Ono circle that people have heard and referred to, it forces you to watch and don't come back with solutions is what I was told they, they would frown upon. So, you know, we have to, I think, teach people again how to look objectively. Now, part of that is gathering data. Part of that should be gathering data and facts. But if we're so biased, so prone to just doing, and we skip the whole plan stage of pdca, we're still going to struggle with that because we gather data and in the simulated factory and workshops. And I run into the same problem, Ron, when we do A three workshops, you see these predisposed biases jumping to conclusions, not really taking the time to grasp current conditions, not really setting goals and targets before they jump to coming up with countermeasures. You see it in that environment as well, or I see it in those teaching A3, just another methodology of improvement. So you can certainly see an improper practice pretty easily given the visual nature of the storyboard, the A3 storyboard. So, you know, so we've, we've got a problem in the lean community where we are imposing our predisposed biases. We're not seeing what is really happening in a lot of cases. And we're all, we're all human. So we all are prone to this. We just have to be aware of it and stop it as it's happening.

Yeah. So what's your thoughts then, Drew? We've talked a lot about maybe the problem and some of the issues that are out there for all of us. Right. So what's the appropriate countermeasure or perhaps what sort of experiments should we be running ourselves as we try to improve the way and learn more about the way that we practice continuous improvement?

So with any improvement methodology, whether it be a personal one or, you know, business process improvement methodology, it all starts with acknowledging. Acknowledging a problem. So I think people have to, every step of the way, whatever methodology they're using, stop and say, am I doing this right? And remember, you know, kind of have a mental checklist or maybe a physical checklist that you go through and say, all right, I'm in the plan stage. You know, did I grasp current conditions? You know, did I get data and facts? Am I interpreting those properly? And if I'm not sure the answer to those questions, go ask somebody, hey, this is what I did. This is what I gathered. Do you think that was sufficient, Ron? You know, are you interpreting this data the way I am? You know, get others involved that might not even know anything about the process that's being looked at? You know, if it's a problem solving kind of, you know, issue that's being addressed? You know, when you get to root cause, you know, just stop and pause and say, you know, are these really potential causes? Do they look like, you know, I'm jumping to conclusions? You know, any of these I can kind of test, you know, so every step of the way, we should be reflecting. One of the beauties of storyboards, Deming storyboards, which Mike Rother has as an integral part of Kata and also Toyota uses as part of their A3 methodology, is, you know, there's these chapters of the story, these sections of the storyboard, and there should be. When I teach, I say there should be reflection every step before you move on to make sure, okay, yeah, I'm doing this properly. We actually have a series of questions for each of those sections to ask, some of which I just shared a moment ago. So before you get too far along and realize, you know, I'm not, you know, not exhibiting proper practice of PDCA with a storyboard itself, particularly A3 storyboards, you can sometimes physically see it. People are filling in the countermeasures before they have current conditions, or you'll see countermeasures before they even have a target or goal. And it. And then you can See that? Well, if I can see it, anyone can see it. Yeah. I would hope and say, why, why am I filling that box in before this other box? Now? I'm not. You know, I want to make sure people don't get to the thought that, you know, you, you have to be very inflexible with these methodologies. I don't believe you. You can be. I think you've got to have some flexibility given the nature of your undertaking, the process improvement initiative, the nature of your problem, nature of the story, really, if you're going to use storyboards. So you have to be a little flexible. But there's some real key red flags where again, I'm filling in countermeasures and I haven't really done an adequate job with current conditions or I haven't even set a goal or target. Well, how do you set countermeasures without doing that first? I don't, I don't know. Yeah, people do it.

Yeah. You know, I was talking to my colleague Steve Kane today. We were talking about a customer who's interested in kind of more. More wants to kind of start learning how to practice the so called kind of daily kaizen, you know, like, you know, making little improvements each and every day, which is obviously good stuff. But then we were talking about, you know, the only danger in that is, you know, or maybe it's not danger, but it's like, yeah, so this. Imagine just everyone just runs around and just make a little bit of everything just a little bit better. But there's not really a purpose behind it, aside from the fact that I'm supposed to make something better today. Right. So this, this we were talking about how like, you know, within kata, it's like, oh, yeah, but we always had this target condition, right. Which is whatever it is a couple weeks out or something that we're trying to aim for, which then leads us to this long term challenge. Right. A year away or something like that, but without those beacons, if you will. You know, I think there's a lot of potential for these little improvements. I won't say they're a waste of time because that's probably way too over the top. But man, it could be so much better if you took that same effort and aligned it towards a purpose or in this case, a target condition.

Right. Dr. Deming was very, very clear on this. All improvement should be directional. And it's that directionality that Mike Rother included in his methodology that gives people that common purpose. So we're kind of all rowing in the Same direction. So that's got to be part of it. In A three methodology it's the background section, the very early, the first section basically of the storyboard is where you make that connection or ask for help to get you to make that connection so you're more assured to working on the more appropriate things. Because like you said, we could be doing drive by or kamikaze Kaizen and not really improving performance at a higher level.

Yeah.

And you know, there could be short term benefit to that if we're doing proper PDCA practice. The short term benefit would be, let's say I'm engaged in just rapid PDCA and just kind of working on my own that proper practice is developing my skill. So that's a good thing. But I shouldn't have any sort of delusions that what I'm improving is going to help the business in any significant way if I've not made those connections to a direction of the business longer term challenge. So like I tell people, we have a lot of people have like idea boards up and this was a subject of another newsletter I did, you know about get er done. That generated a lot of response as well. And it talks about how people are just focusing on getting things done but not really proper practice. You know, they're PDing but not PDCA. Sometimes they're not even PD, they're just peeing and they or d quite happened.

Yeah.

Or happen in any effective way.

Yeah.

So that newsletter got into that another, you know, kind of a variation of improper practice. But what's, what's interesting is that. So I was going around and to a number of companies and they were showing me their, their idea boards and you know, I'm looking at these ideas and I'm thinking okay, great, engaging people and all, you know, what do you do with these ideas? You know, are we going to try to follow through on every one of them? You know, it could be a thousand, may not be practical. You know, if we do follow through on some, how do we know the kind of, the more correct things to work on? The thing that I learned in those interactions was that I would explain to people every idea that people give you for improvement is an opportunity for personal development. So you might look at an idea and say ah, this is really not going to help us much. Well, first I would ask how do you know? You know, let's go gather facts and some more data to maybe you're wrong. You know, as a manager or leader that's, that's judging these ideas. There was a number of ideas that I picked up off of these boards. And we started the conversation and the manager's like, yeah, you know, we're not gonna do anything like that. I'm like, why? You know, that's not gonna help. How do you know? And, you know, make a long story short, after a little more conversation with the idea initiator, find out this is a very good idea. So not to be too, you know, quick to judge again that predisposition or bias. We got to get some data to kind of decide do we do this or not? What's the scale of this problem? What's the magnitude of this problem? So if, let's say it's like, all right, it's not going to be such a big idea or have a big benefit. We gathered some information, but you know what? We could do this pretty quick and it would help that ID initiator, with some coaching, develop further develop their problem solving and process improvement abilities. Let's do it. Let's do it. But let's be upfront with that person and say, listen, we know this is not going to cure world hunger, you know, or are part of it, but we want to go through this as a. As a learning opportunity for you. And I've done that many, many times. And people be like, sometimes they'll say, oh, let me pick something else to work on. Or sometimes it's like, okay, let's do it. I'm like, okay, just realize when you get to the check, it's not going to be some huge improvement, but that's okay. We can get through this. Maybe this PDCA cycle in a week or two. Yeah, and you'll learn. And the more you practice, the more you learn and the quicker you develop the skills. So I think as long as we're up front with people, we can still take advantage of some of those opportunities to practice properly. Pdca. Just knowing up front, we're not going to be helping the business in any significant way.

Yeah, yeah. Last thing I'll say on this section and we'll jump into the reflection section here. But I couldn't help but think earlier when we were really harping on the importance of understanding that current condition, you know, the current state, if you will. I couldn't help but think about our friends, you know, way back when the Four Horsemen, you know, when they were kind of coming up with these Jihad JR and JM programs and job relations in particular. What's step one, get the facts right. And, you know, it's just that. But we just, especially on the on those interpersonal problems, or people problems, if you will, we very rarely get the facts. We just jump to conclusions. Right. And assume we know what's going on. And goodness gracious, most of the time, when we assume, we're wrong. Right.

And the danger of assuming. Yeah, be great. Yeah. You know, the last thing I would say on go see, like, we'll have people go time operations, and they'll come back with a number. Oh, the average cycle time for that operation is, you know, whatever, 30 seconds. And I'll say, well, what else did you see? And they're like, well, it's 30 seconds. I'm like, you know, I always kind of try to prompt people up front when they're going to go do something like time an operation. Say, you know, there's two purposes for you going to time that operation. One is to actually, it's going to force you to look closely at the operation. You got to look at, you know, and understand and pick your points of what you're going to time. Number two, and part of that is as you're timing, what else did you see? You know, let's say on average, it's 20 seconds. Sometimes it was 40. Ooh, why was it 40? I didn't make notes of that. Sometimes it was 10. Ooh. What happened when it was 10 seconds? I didn't make notes of that. And I'm like, those notes, you know, and those observations are probably more important than the number.

Yeah.

But more often than not, they come back with a number, and that's all they come back. And when you start asking, you know, probing, what else did you see? They look at me like, what? I don't understand. This is the number you asked for. It's like, well, I asked for two things.

Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. All right, well, awesome. We could talk all day on this topic, but it's really good stuff. So definitely, again, want everybody to go read that article. So go to gemba podcast.com this is episode 199, and you can find a link to Drew's article. And also sign up for Drew's newsletter, which I highly recommend that you everyone do. So I just got a few questions here I want to run past you. These are some new questions that we've rolled out here in 2018, Drew. And this first one is interesting one. You've been around for quite a while and you've seen a lot, you've learned a lot and done a lot. But I'm curious if there's one thing that if you could kind of go Back based on what you know now about lean and just continuous improvement. If you could do anything differently, maybe the way that you've personally practiced lean, is there anything that you would change?

Well, I would accelerate my own learning. You know, what took decades sometimes to learn. I think back to the 1980s and the work that I was doing at GE, I could have been much, much more effective. I had some very wise people point things out to me of improper practice. Sometimes they worked, quote, unquote, for me, and sometimes I took that in earnest. Sometimes I did not. Sometimes I didn't fully understand the depth of what they were suggesting. So I think, like any human, you spend a life of learning, and boy, if I only knew then what I know now, I could have been much more effective in a lot of ways.

What's next for the lean movement? What do you think the next, I don't know.

Next thing is, I think there's going to continue to be this understanding and the importance of the human side of lean. As a matter of fact, again, that's going to be my next newsletter. I'm not talking about quote, unquote, respect for people where, oh, geez, humans are our most valuable assets. I think that's great that more and more organizations are understanding that. What I'm referring to is really getting personal. And I think I never worked at Toyota, but some of the folks I've known that did like a John Shook, it gives me this sense that they really do get work one on one, developing others, because you're dealing with humans, and we come in a lot of variations, and to really figure out how to develop another person, you got to get personal. So what has been very interesting to me, and I've seen it in the last several years, particularly at the fall conference that you attended with ame, more workshops on, you know, like the. Like, there was the group from Capital One has been doing a workshop on. And I'm going to probably not get this right, but Addicted to the Status Quo. I think that was the title of one of their presentations or workshops. And when I sat with them and asked them, you know, what are you doing? What's the key points of your presentation? And it was basically taking what people have been doing for decades now on addictive behaviors, therapies and treatments for those, and kind of applying it to, you know, continuous improvement, and I said, okay, that makes sense. And I said, what do you mean? You know, this is like, you know, brand new. And I was like, no, this actually goes back about 100 years. So, you know, it's what I call. It's not what I call. It's what was titled the Psychology of Learning and it goes back to 1913 by Dr. Edward Thorndike that really gets into, you know, what makes people tick. And he did experiments with people, also did animals. You know, it's all that affect behavior. You know, the bit, you know, everything from Pavlov's dog, you know, hey, positive reward kind of thing. It's all that, that type of behavioralist, you know, Maslow, Skinner that I always, it really always resonated with me because again what, what I Learned in the 80s at GE is I was, I did not understand the behavioral side of all this. So I intentionally, when I left ge, I went back to school to learn organizational behavioral science. And that's where I got my formal education. And that's when I started thinking like, wow, I just knew this, you know, 10 years before, five years before. So what I'm seeing a lot more of is people are starting to recognize the need to get personal with people. You know, one on one. You know, it's not, you know, we too quickly just, you know, dismiss people as ah, they'll never get it, they're concrete heads rather than really sit there down with them and understand where are they coming from. And that's really very supportive of the respect for people which is one of the pillars of Toyota system. But if we keep just kind of dealing with people with broad brushes and all, I think we're going to continue to struggle with creating cultures for continuous improvement. Because cultures are made up of humans and if we're not treating them properly and understanding how humans learn. You mentioned TWI and the J's JI is actually based on the psychology of learning and the need for repetition to put things to short term memory. We've known for 100 years what it takes for people to learn. And PDCI is a learning cycle, it's a learning process. You know what it takes them to change and create new habits. We've known that for really 100 years. What's sad is not many business leaders or CI folks understand therefore they're not thinking and considering these things in their interactions with people they're working with and developing. And we're probably losing a lot of good people on the way to again just dismissing them out of hand as ah, they're just concrete heads or anchor draggers. I'll never get it, you know. Yeah, and, and so I see more sensitivity to that and more understanding of the importance of it, which warms my organizational Behavioral science, heart. So I see more of that happening. Yeah, the tools have been out there, the pull, flow and combine that. There's not much more teaching there. We've got enough experience in the high mix, low volume environments. That was like the last knowledge gap I thought out there.

What I think what's going to happen now? A lot of people have kind of transitioned out of manufacturing into healthcare. I think healthcare in some cases has maybe passed manufacturing in some organizations as far as their. So I wonder when it's going to happen where some of these healthcare folks are going. Okay, okay, we fixed here. Now we got to go back to manufacturing.

You know, wouldn't that surprise me?

Yeah.

You go back years ago, spc, Statistical Process Control, found a better, a better, more welcoming home in the highly transactional financial institution industry.

Yep, yep.

And then people started coming back and applying it and learning to apply it in manufacturing. So it wouldn't surprise me. And healthcare people, by the nature of their industry, tend to be a little more empathetic, more understanding of human behavior, human emotions that were a huge part of all this. So that's my thought.

Cool. Well, I think that would be a great thing to happen if it does, in fact happen. And I could see it happening myself. So I got one more question for you, Drew. This has got. I'm really interested to hear what you say about this one. So. So, I mean, as you know, back to the old days of our lean tools, one of the most popular tools that we all kind of learned very, very early on was the seven wastes. Right. And then it so happened that seven wasn't enough. And, you know, we had to add, you know, the 8th, and that was some form of, you know, we're not utilizing people or their skills or whatever it was. So some use of people's abilities. That was the eighth waste. And. And so people are very passionate about that now. We do the eight ways here. No. Okay, that's all good. If you had the power, Drew, to add one thing that everyone focused on as hard as they focus on these seven or eight ways, what would that one thing be?

Wow, that's a tricky question, Ryan. Yeah. So what would be the one thing I would get people encouraged to focus on? I think the behavioral side of change, it's not easy, it's not expedient, but I think we've always. When you go back and you reflect, and I remember doing this many, many years ago, like in healthcare, my colleague and I were trying to do CIA and healthcare in the early 1990s, and failing pretty badly. And, you know, we would sit there and reflect, and it was like, it's not because it doesn't apply, so it's something else. So you start getting into the behavioral stuff. Are these people even ready for change? Have we made the case for change? Are we hitting them over the head, or are we really engaging their mental aspects of all this? And I think that is what people need to really focus on, is the behavioral side. Much like I learned after seven years at GE in the 1980s, I realized I was not fully equipped to do, be a manager or to be a change agent in general. And I recognized that. I went back to school, I learned, and I think I've used those that knowledge and skill ever since. What is it now, 25 years later? So I think that would be what I would emphasize to people, the whole emotional side of this, the behavioral side of this. And if we reflect and think about those, there's initiatives that didn't work so well or didn't sustain. Was it related to our approach? Now it goes to the JI mantra. If the student did not learn, instructor did not teach. So you have to go back and look at our approach. And I think a lot of it, sometimes most of it is the approach.

Yeah. Good stuff. All right. Well, Drew, we've been going on for, gosh, over 45 minutes. Time flies.

Very easy, Ron.

Well, yeah, I was gonna say time flies when you're having fun. This is great, great, great stuff. So. So thanks so much, Drew, for. For coming onto the show. I definitely want to wrap things up with you telling folks how they can best connect with you, how we'll link to everything, but tell them how they can get on your newsletter and website. Anything else.

The website is www.cma, the letter CMA for Change Management Associates, the number 4 resultswithan s.com and on that website, there is a place to sign up for the newsletter. If you click on Learning Portal, you'll see all kinds of historic newsletters and articles that I wrote or contributed to. People can download them, print them out, and use them however where they see fit. So that's the easiest way to do it. People want to reach out to me on Twitter. It's just my name, Drew lockerrewlocker. And that's also on the. On the website as well. Click for that.

L O C. H E R. Right?

Yes, exactly. H E r. Yeah.

H E R. H E R. Well, hey, Drew, I know I mentioned this to you before, but this guy's like you. It's crazy to kind of talk to you because I remember back in my early days learning about all this stuff and, and reading every book that I could read. I definitely learned so much from your work in those early books that you wrote. And so guys like you and Mike Rother and all these folks who have. You guys have really made a huge impact. So thank you for all the work that you've done and are going to continue to do so. It's an honor to know you. And I'm a better practitioner for having friends like you, I can tell you that.

Thank you for those very kind words, Ryan. I always appreciated our relationship.

Yeah. All right, well, you take care, and I'm sure we'll see you around at a conference here or there, wherever it might be, and always fun to catch up with you, Drew.

Okay. All right.

Thank you. Take care. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand in Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at gembaacademy.com. Sam.