GA 200 | What We’ve Learned from 200 Episodes

On a warm spring day In April of 2014, I stood before a microphone in my then makeshift studio and started one of the most epic and rewarding experiments of my professional life when I said these eight words, you're listening to episode one with Ron Pereira. Now, close to four years later, I'm standing here recording episode 200, and I have to say that I'm a little blown away now, as regular listeners have likely gotten sick of hearing I do want to repeat again how thankful we are for those of you that listen to the show on a regular and even irregular basis. So we debated what to do for this 200th episode, and what I decided to do was to think about some of the major themes and lessons learned this show has taught me since, Believe it or not, I often have to catch myself during these interviews since I'm typing notes of things that I want to remember and try myself, and if I'm not careful, I forget that I'm supposed to be interviewing someone. So the first theme that I want to point out is the importance of knowing our why. In other words, as it pertains to continuous improvement, we must know why we're doing what we're doing. What's the purpose? What's the cause? What problem are we trying to solve?

All whys are positive. People say, look, I have a negative. You know that guy's a negative. Why? Nope, all whys are positive. The other thing is, all whys have nothing to do with product or service that you sell or offer. And you only have one. People are like, we have four whys. I'm like, no you don't. You have one why. It is the sum total of who you are, how you were raised, the lessons you learned as a young person, and the rest of your life simply serves as an opportunity to either live in or out of balance with your why. The same with an organization. A why is why was the organization founded? What problem was it attempting to solve? The founders? What vision did they have? It's an origin story, and there's no such thing as a North Star why. Objectively, this is why. A why is important because your why may resonate with some people, but not others. And that's the point of stating and knowing your why, which is you want to attract the people who believe what you believe, and you want to be attracted to the people who believe what you believe. That's why when we listen to political races, we want our leaders, or our would be leaders to tell us what they believe, not just what they would do. Because when we hear what they believe. We want to align ourselves with those who share our beliefs and that we trust that they will do the things to uphold those beliefs. And the same is true in a company. We want to know what the company stands for, why they do what they do, so that we can devote ourselves and our energies to helping them advance that cause. Otherwise, it's just a job, just a series of transactions. I do work, you pay me money. It's a transactional relationship.

Again, that was Simon Sinek. If you want to hear the whole episode, go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode. Now. The next theme or topic that I want to talk about is the visual workplace or visuality, maybe in a broader, broader term. And really what visuality is to me is the, the ability to just really, at a basic level, it's kind of like walking into a facility and you go out onto the shop floor and you look around and you see someone and you ask them, you know, are you winning or are you losing right now? You know, kind of the game of business. And this person should be able to, you know, immediately look at some form of visuality, some form of a visual tool or a scoreboard, if you will, and know whether or not they're winning or losing. And so often we find that people don't know if they're winning or losing because of a lack of visuality. So I was able to catch up with one of the world's leading visual workplace experts, Gwendolyn Galsworth, back in episode 133, and we had a lot to talk about. It was one of, it's probably one of the most popular episodes that we had over this past year. And as you'll hear if you listen to the whole episode, there's a couple times where Dr. Galsworth and myself, we didn't even actually agree, which was fantastic. I mean, it's great to, to have kind of varying opinions on different topics, but she is so knowledgeable on this topic and I really enjoyed hearing her take.

And the definition of a visual workplace is the same. It's the one I came up with, I don't know, 20 or 30 years ago. It's a work environment that is self ordering, self explaining and therefore self regulating, where what is supposed to happen does happen on time, every time, day or night, because of visual devices. It's so interesting. It's those physical devices that embed our intelligence into whatever our work landscape is, CEO or machinist. And the other thing that is core to this, these are the secrets of The Death Star, Ron. The other thing is to stop to look beyond the devices because otherwise we're just copying devices. And to see that visuality is about installing information. We are sharing information through those devices. Ah. And that means we're creating a language. We are creating a language of devices.

Again, that was Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth. And if you want to hear that whole episode, go to GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 133. Okay, now the next topic here is something that we've been spending quite a bit of time, you know, the latter part of 2017 and 2018 so far talking about, and that is this whole movement with say TWI and Toyota Kata in particular, and spending a lot of time just talking about this, this, this way of thinking and learning and the importance of deeply understanding our current condition and then kind of setting what we would call that target condition or, or where we want to go and be and maybe in a couple weeks, as we aim for that long term challenge. Now once we have that, that kind of near term target condition, we're going to identify some obstacles, those things that are in our way. And once we've identified those obstacles, we're going to experiment against those obstacles. Now what's interesting is when you come against these obstacles and we run some experiments, some of these experiments may not kind of turn out the way that we hope they would. Now, some might think that's failure. Well, I had Karen Ross on the show back in episode 138. Now, Karen is an expert on Lean and in particular in the service world, and she's deeply studied this Toyota Kata movement and she spent quite a bit of time talking about her take on what's failure and what isn't failure.

Things don't work out all of the time. Right. That's why we.

PDCA is right.

Pd Yay. Absolutely. And I'm going to answer your question, but I'm also going to tell you that I have a different idea about failure.

Okay.

Okay. So I think that oftentimes we like to tell people failing is okay. Right. Don't worry, try things out. It's okay to fail. When we work in big businesses and in companies, oftentimes, although we say that to people, it really isn't true. Right. Failure actually isn't an option. If you're designing a new product or if you're producing payroll checks for customers, failing really is not an option. Right, Right. I think that if we actually say to people, don't have in your mind right or wrong. Right. And if you do this, it's going to succeed or fail. Say, here's the idea to try to do something different to get towards a goal, try it out. It's either going to work the way you thought it did, or it's not going to work the way you thought it did. Right? So when it doesn't work the way you thought, that's okay. It's not a failure. You just learned something. You can dispense with that idea that that was the right way to go. Right. And that way, people are more willing to take a risk and people are more willing to try something and learn. So I'm not sure we, in the end, feel like we learn from failure. So I'm going to say for myself, there are things that don't work all work all of the time for me. And I'm going to say one of the things, and this is just a life story. I thought that I was going to be a professor, right. I took a master's degree in sculpture. I. I was all prepared. That's the way I thought that I could best help people in the world. And that didn't work out for a wide variety of reasons. Actually. Now I do a lot of the things that I would have enjoyed as being a professor. I teach people all of the time how to improve their business by using our principles and processes for service excellence. I had the fabulous opportunity to write this book. I get to do podcasts and keynotes at conferences. And really, in the end, I can't imagine doing anything more meaningful or that would have been better for me than what I'm doing now. Right. Helping people improve the world. What could be better? So had I hung onto that idea of what was that I failed, would I have been able to go forward and do this?

Right. Right?

Yeah. Beautiful.

Now, to hear this full episode, just go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 138 to find that episode with Karen Ross Again. Karen is a fantastic lean thinker, and she's one of the happiest lean thinkers I think you'll find out there. She's almost like she talks with a smile. So really, really enjoy visiting with Karen. Now, one of the most interesting parts of this whole podcast show that we do is the ability to connect with so many different folks. And, you know, growing up as a young lean thinker, I read all the books, the same books that most of you have probably read, and read these stories of these companies like wire mold and so forth, who have, you know, had done great things with Lean and been very successful and, and one of the names that you, that you will read in a lot of the early Lean literature is Art Byrne. And I was fortunate enough to be able to catch up with Art and we were kind of talking about some of his books that he had recently written. But in particular I was really curious to talk to Art about his take on kind of the state of the union of lean in 2017. And I was really interested to hear his thoughts because he's been in this Lean world since really the very beginning, even before it was called Lean, and wanted to hear what he had to say.

Well, I would say that there's certainly more interest in it and more companies trying it, et cetera, but I think we need to shift from this cost reduction tools type of focus to a strategic focus so that companies understand the strategic application and reason to Lean. You know, I look at it in a very simplistic way. You know, any company, whether it's manufacturing, non manufacturing is only really three things, right? It's a bunch of people and a bunch of processes trying to deliver value to a set of customers. And the only way you increase enterprise value is, is by delivering more value to your customers over long periods of time than your competitors can. And so Lean is going to drastically help you do that because all you're trying to do with Lean is to teach the people how to see the waste and remove it from the processes so you can deliver more value. So it's a pretty simplistic approach, but unfortunately most companies don't behave that way. They could agree, they could agree with me, you know, if I said, okay, companies are nothing but a bunch of people and processes trying to deliver value. I could get, I could get all the heads in the audience nodding to that. But when I went and visited their company, then they'd tell me, oh well, but you know, we agree with your basic principle, but our company is way more complicated and you don't understand all the problems we have and blah, blah, blah. That's just human nature, right?

Yeah. Now to hear this whole episode, Simply go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 154. It's called the Real Meaning of Lean with Art Byrne. Now I've been throwing out all these URLs and to remember and episode numbers and all that. If you want to remember just one, remember GembaPodcast.com and then look for episode 200 and we'll go ahead and we'll link to all these, these various episodes. If you want to Dive deeper now. I had a fantastic time with this next guest. Katie Anderson is her name. And we were. Katie and I had been kind of exchanging emails and communication for the better part of two or three years trying to find a way to get this podcast done. And Katie had lived in Japan for a while. We could just never seem to get things lined up and was finally able to get her on and we had a great chat. The title of her talk was or the episode was how to use A three Thinking. So obviously we spent a lot of time talking about the A3 and so forth. But there was another aspect of the, of the podcast that really resonated with me and is when Katie started talking about the word intention. And in particular, what does the word intention mean?

So that's a.

That's a great question. I always have thought that the word intention is something very important, certainly over the last five to 10 years and in particular with get my focus on continuous improvement, that we need to be intentional about what we're doing and have intention for how we're behaving. And when I moved to Japan, I got a deeper appreciation for the word intention. Short story, when I first arrived there, I realized that I needed to create some business cards. Who hands out business cards anymore? It's LinkedIn or whatever here in the U.S. but the ritual, the kata of handing out business cards is very, very important in Japan. So I worked on getting some business cards and I didn't have a logo, so I asked the company to use the word intention in the Japanese symbols for intention on my business card. Now, I didn't know what it would look like. I just feel the power of the word intention. And so I got the card back. I thought the two characters looked really kind of cool. And I started handing out my business card to, you know, in. In bulk. You hand it out every time you meet someone and quickly. Many Japanese people would say, oh, this is very, very important and powerful word. And I said, yeah, you know, I like the word intention. You know, it's important for us to know where we're going and feel like we have awareness of our actions, both on an individual, organizational level, said, no, no, no. Do you know what these characters mean? And they described to me that the first, there are two kanji. So the original Japanese characters that make up the now Japanese word shiko, the first one comes from the character of representing a heart, and the second character means direction. So really having your intention is your heart or what's important inside of you and your direction and your compass. So are you pointing yourself and your behavior in the direction of what's important in your heart? Think of now intention as your personal true north, aligning yourself to what's important to you. And then obviously you also need to create a plan to get there. But first to have awareness of what is your intention in life, in your profession and are you aligning yourself that way. So I now have this deeper appreciation for the word intention and share that with many people.

Again, that was Katie Anderson and the title of that episode was how to use a three thinking. It's episode 173. So go to Genba podcast.com and you can find that one. Now obviously the, the problem with this sort of episode is that due to time and whatnot, we're not able to, you know, share, you know, dozens and dozens of episodes. And so, you know, I'm leaving out a lot of episodes that we're not touching on. Definitely no disrespect to those ones. We were just picking out a couple of the ones that really stood out to us. This really over this last hundred episodes or so. And there's one in particular that I definitely didn't want to leave out. And Brandon Brown did a keynote address at the it was actually the TWI and Katakan Summit that the guys over at Lean Frontiers put on over this past year. And Brandon actually gave a talk, I believe it was actually the talk was to the TWI side, but he was talking about Toyota Kata. And Brandon does most of his work within the healthcare industry and in particular he spends a lot of time at one particular hospital, this Baptist Memorial Hospital in Tennessee. Skip Stewart is out there and they're just doing fantastic, fantastic work out there. And towards the end of this keynote, Brandon shared probably one of the most powerful stories that I've ever heard as it relates to continuous improvement and really demonstrates how powerful the things that we as continuous improvement practitioners can do and really the responsibility that we have to not just businesses, but to the world. And this story really touched me and I can't think of a better way to close this show.

I want to get to the end here basically because I wanted to talk to you real specifically about a situation and it starts here with the deliberate practice and some of what these nurses are doing. 2014, in July, mid summer in Arkansas, my mom, whose health has been deteriorating over the last few years, fell coming back from her neighbor's apartment. She set out for 45 minutes. I got a call from my sister. The ambulance was coming to get her. She ended up at the emergency department with first and second degree burns on her hands after sitting out there on the asphalt in 104 degree heat. Fast forward another year. We began talking to her about being able to care for herself. Was she able to be able to do that on a regular basis? She wasn't eating three meals a day. I'm not in a situation where I can be there. My sister has three kids under six. She has difficulty being able to care for. May of 2015, she fell as my sister was taking her out to the car to go get some groceries. Broke her elbow. Plate in the elbow, four rivets. 60 days of physical therapy, not at a Baptist hospital. She came back home, wasn't doing her exercises. We kept talking to her about she had to stay in shape, had to stay lower body had to stay. I got a text from my sister the other day that they are evaluating her for Parkinson. Parkinson's disease. I think she's coming into some early stages of that. Fast forward another six months. I got a call from my sister, she's fallen again. Coming from her neighbor's apartment. This time she fell on the same arm. Broke the bone on her upper shoulder here, just below the ball. Clean break. The doctor says by the time we get there the next day though, they're ready to discharge her. So I go to sit down and we're having the conversation about, you know, where are we going to. My sister and I are talking to her about, you're not caring for yourself, you're just not able to mom. And if we move you to my house, that's great. I'm on the road 165 nights a week. My wife works during the day. You saw the violinist. I also have a three sport athlete. We just transfer the fall point from her living room to my living room. The sister can't take her, take care of her. So I sat down by the nurse by the bedside, and I'm talking to her and I just happen to look and I see the word bed alarm. This is not a Baptist hospital. There are no lights on. I said, mom, show me your left arm. There's no fall band. I go outside the door, there's no fall sign on the door. So I punched the nurse's call button and I said, has my mom been evaluated for fall risk and fall prevention and been put on fall watch? No, sir, she hasn't. We didn't know she needed to be. I said, she came through your emergency department with a broken shoulder due to a fall. I'd like for you to Please set the bed alarm. Please put the band on. Please put the sign outside. They were there in about two minutes. Fast forward two more months. She's now in a nursing facility. She had the shoulder, reverse shoulder replacement. I say all that to tell those nurses at Baptist and all those, thank you for educating me. Thank you for being my teacher, to helping me be able to help my mom to prevent her from having a fall. But she's fallen twice. Once in the nursing facility, once at the radiology department. They gave her to the radiologist because she had fallen in the bathroom. They were going to X ray the shoulder to make sure that it was still intact and everything was there. The radiologist hands her the gown, says, I need you to take the sling off, put that gown on so that we can do the X ray, and turns and walks out the door. Five minutes later, he comes in and she's on the floor, chipped a bone in her femur. She now has a chip bone in her hip. So now, along with the recovery of her shoulder, she's now having to do lower body physical therapy as well. All because someone didn't follow a standard procedure and wasn't trained properly to not leave that, leave my mom alone. You see what these nurses are doing at Memphis, what they've been practicing? I can get this to go forward. Their CADA started six months back here, 39 fewer patients will fall. Those patients won't say what I'm about to say to those nurses at Memphis. You're moving the culture. Those patients. Families won't say to you, thank you for taking care of our mother. Thank you for taking care of our grandmother, our grandfather, our aunts, our uncles, our cousins. Thank you for following the job instructions that we put in place. Thank you for taking care of our family.

Again. That was episode 189 with Brandon Brown. The title of that episode was how to Use Cotton Healthcare. And would definitely encourage you to listen to that full talk as it's pretty powerful and Brandon is a pretty special guy and I'm really, really thankful to. To know him and to be able to learn from him. So that's what we have for this episode. Again. There's so many other episodes in there. All you got to do is go to gembapodcast.com and just start scrolling again. 200 episodes now, and we got a lot in store for really the rest of 2018. And we don't ever plan on stopping this podcast. We've been going at a clip of every Thursday we release a new episode. And I don't believe we've missed a single Thursday. I think we had one time a couple years ago where there was some weird itunes stuff going on. But as far as us producing content, it's never going to stop. It's one of the favorite things that I do on a weekly basis. And if you guys have ideas, I know there's been long time listeners, there's been people who told us they've listened to every single episode that we've ever produced. If that's you and you've listened to the show and you have ideas for how we can make things better, Obviously, you know, like we've made a little small format change over the last few episodes just to try to keep things fresh. But if you ever have ideas for, for ways that we can improve, improve the show, or maybe there's aspects of the show that you think are growing stale or they need to be refreshed, please shoot me an email. It's easy. Ronimba academy.com definitely want to hear from you. And if you love the show, and we love hearing that too, it's great. We put a lot of effort. There's a lot of people. Greg over here to my right, edits every one of these episodes. And when I say edit, I mean he edits. If I stumble on my words, he makes me sound like I know what I'm talking about and even when sometimes I don't. And Greg does a fantastic job. Jessica writes up our show notes, so if you go to our show notes page, you'll see how good they are. She listens to again to every, every minute of every episode and she puts in little markers of various times of when certain things are talked about. So thank you, Jessica, for everything that you do and again, thank you to all the listeners out there. We obviously wouldn't do this show without you. The listenership, if you will, continues to grow and we're just so honored to, to be able to reach so many of you out there. So next week we're going to get right back on schedule with some normal interviews. We've got some really fun episodes in the can already ready, ready to be released. So look for those and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of GembaCademy.com gain immediate access to more than a thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at GembaCademy.com.