GA 202 | How to Achieve Clarity with Karen Martin

You know, the truth sometimes is a bit scary, and organizations collectively avoid the truth and individuals avoid the truth for a variety of reasons. And so that fear is kind of at the underpinnings of all of it.

Have you ever been invited to a meeting and wondered why you were there? What about an email? Have you ever opened one and wondered why you were copied? Well, my guest today believes that a lack of clarity is the root cause to these issues and many other organizational and individual problems. Her name is Karen Martin, and her book, Clarity How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance takes a deep look at individual and organizational clarity. Now, on today's show, Karen and I really dig into this clarity topic. We talk about what it is, why you need it, why many of us don't have clarity, and some practical changes we can make today to improve the situation. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything Karen and I discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 202. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over@gembaacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. All right, Karen, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

It's going very well, Ron. So great to be back. Thank you. It's fun to talk with you.

I say welcome back because I was looking and I had no idea it had been this long since now. We've done videos and such since this time. But you were on the podcast back in episode five in May of 2014. We talked all about value stream mapping and. Yeah, so this is now. This is episode 202.

Wow, you've been busy, guy.

Yeah, there's been a few in between. So, yes. So good to have you back on. I always love talking with you, Karen. And so ditto.

Ditto.

Well, listen, so let's kind of begin with tell us a little bit about your background, how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff, and then definitely tell us what you're up to these days.

Oh, great. Good question. So my brother and I were just joking about how our entire family seems to have been born and raised with the same DNA around process and organization and neatness and tidiness. So I think I was born kind of a lean thinker, referring to lean management. But I started my career in science and so I was doing a lot of diagnostic testing in healthcare and just kind of dabbling around in healthcare. And then I really fell love with business. You just got really Interested in business, no matter what kind of business. And I started designing and managing operations. And then I learned about W. Edwards Deming and started following TQM and using TQM in all of my leading organizations and building operations, some of them from the ground up. And it was 2000 when I went down to San Diego, moved down there and got recruited for a job at San Diego State University overseeing their Institute for Quality and Productivity, which was a joint venture between the business school and the extension program. And they had this sellout program that was kind of the cash cow of my department that was called Lean Manufacturing. Now, at that point, no experience in manufacturing. I'd been all in health care, financial services, insurance, that kind of thing. I sat through the program since it was a cash cow. I wanted to see what was the big hubbub about it and just realized immediately, well, it was an extension of Deming and a far more practical extension of Deming and just fell in love with it. Then I went back out and I had already been consulting and I went back out after a stint at San Diego State and continued consulting. And that's when I started focusing primarily on Lean Management.

Very good. Very good. All right, well, listen, the topic of the day is your book that, well, at least at the time of this recording, hasn't been released yet. I believe it's coming. I saw on Amazon March 9th. I don't know, is that right? Right date.

That's the day, although it'll ship a little earlier.

Okay, so the name is Clarity. First, How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance. Now, as you know, I love doing these interviews before I actually read a book. I know that sounds weird, but I sometimes I like going in, like, truly curious about what's going on and all the rest of it. So I can't wait to read the book. I know I'm definitely. I think I have one on order, in fact, perhaps even coming. But let's start, Karen, with just a real basic question of, like, what is clarity? When we say the word clarity, what is it? And then why? Why is this Lean thinker named Karen Martin writing about it?

Yeah, so Clarity to me is first of all, an unambiguous, simple, easily easy to understand way of going about life and clear conversation, clear thinking, clear doing. And the genesis of this topic was actually back when I was writing the Outstanding Organization. Clarity is one of the four foundational behaviors, clarity, focus, discipline and engagement that I believe are the foundation of any kind of organizational or frankly, personal performance excellence also. And clarity got a lot of interest and People were more passionate about that, it seemed, than any of the other three. And when I started doing a deep dive into it, I had this big aha. That wow, you know what Lean Management is? It's all about generating clarity. I mean, every principle, practice and tool in the lean management approach methodology is about seeking and delivering clarity. And that's kind of the genesis of the book is, okay, well then why are organizations not better at seeking clarity? Why do individual leaders have a hard time delivering clear messaging? What does Lean really offer us to help enable that and what does that do to organizational performance?

So who is the book for? Is it for kind of lean thinkers or is it for really anyone?

Well, so my editor, when I first approached her with the book, said, oh, here we go again, Karen. You have the split market. And so it really is very much for the improvement community to help them understand what's been kind of missing in the way we're applying lean thinking and what we can do to be more explicit about the outcomes and the benefits of lean thinking. And it's also for any leader or any want to be leader, that whether you like lean management, have any experience with it or not, it's just foundational. Clarity is foundational for any level of success and performance excellence in any endeavor. So it's two different audiences.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, well, I have several why questions here. The first one is just generally speaking, why do we need clarity? And maybe we could answer it in two different ways at the individual level and then organizational level.

Okay, so at the individual level, actually, I'm going to answer one that is for both. The overarching problem with not having clarity is that you waste time. It's frustrating, and it sometimes leads to very poor decisions and inappropriate action. And so no matter if it's an individual level or an organizational level, there's just a lot of waste around not being clear. And with clarity, what you're able to gain is just much more efficient understanding and up to information, much more efficient use of resources, because you're not having resources competing with another thinking. Well, they meant this. Well, no, they meant that. And you're able to streamline the whole process of doing thinking and doing and deciding. And if you don't have clarity, it just prolongs all of that. If you start looking at the level of frustration and stress in a workforce, very often it's around them having to kind of muddle their way through this murkiness that is not very fun, frankly.

Can you give maybe an example of a situation where There wasn't clarity, and then perhaps they sought clarity and got it.

Yes. So I'm going to take a very simple and a very common problem I see with the lack of clarity is in just simple things like a meeting. You get people in a room for a meeting, and you don't really know exactly what the objective of the meeting.

Is and why am I here and.

Why isn't Joe here? You know, and that, you know, it's just meeting Management 101, but it's not commonly applied where you need to have a mission for that meeting, who needs to be there to accomplish that mission, and what do you expect to get at the end of that meeting? And that level of clarity helps meetings be far more effective. Same with emails, same with phone calls. What's the mission? And then at an organizational level, you know, just understanding what are our priorities, really not what this division thinks they are and that department thinks they are, and this leader thinks they are, but collectively, what are our priorities? And if you don't have that level of clarity, then people just spin and waste resources. Unfortunately, it's pretty common that organizations don't have a collective level of clarity around the priorities of the organization.

Now, what's the relationship between clarity and what. Oh, I don't know, someone like Simon Sinek would call your. Why, like, how do those two play together?

Yeah. So in the book, I decided that I wanted to look at five different kind of buckets of clarity. So I have purpose priorities, process performance, and problem solving. And Simon is actually one of the most influential voices in my thinking about purpose. And I love his book, Start with why. And when I started looking at organizations deeply and Lean has been kind of quiet on the issue of why, you know, a purpose for organizations. And so I started looking at organizations trying to do lean. And very often they just didn't even have fundamental clarity about what are they really in business to do, not what, but why are they doing it. And if you start getting clarity around that, then decisions start becoming easier to make. Deciding new products starts being easier to decide which products should we go into. And people align much more easily around that. And it's an emotional hook as well. People have. They have a hunger for contributing to something larger than themselves and what does not answer what's larger than me. Why does.

Got it. Got it. So why is it so hard? Why is clarity so hard?

Well, you know, it's a great question, and it's a very big question because there are so many different reasons why clarity is hard. To me, they all kind of drill down to fear. And I don't want to get too psychobablish, but, you know, because fear is a pretty powerful thing. And so, for example, we talk about clarity pursuers and clarity providers in the book. And so clarity pursuit is not being afraid of the truth. The truth sometimes is a bit scary. And organizations collectively avoid the truth and individuals avoid the truth for a variety of reasons. And so that fear is kind of at the underpinnings of all of it. You know, if you take it up to the next level, then you've got things like we're rushing. We're not taking time to really slow down and understand. We're dealing with pressures from deadlines and things like that that make it so that we're not necessarily seeking clarity. Then there's the psychological problem we all have with biases and assumptions and not really having the humility to understand what our thinking is really around. And then there's just lack of curiosity. You have to have a rabid curiosity in order to be an effective person that continuously seeks clarity and delivers clarity. You have to have that I want to understand. And so curiosity and humility are very closely tied in my book. And curiosity gets kind of drummed out of us as children. And so part of what businesses have to do and leaders have to do is kind of stir that back up and give people a safe spot to allowing that curiosity to shine and not punish them, frankly, for seeking to understand.

Now you kind of touched on it just now. One of my questions that I wanted to ask, I was poking around on your website and just kind of reading some more information about the book, and you mentioned clarity pursuers, clarity avoiders, and then the clarity blind. Can you maybe just kind of. I know you touched on pursuers a little bit, but maybe just touch on those three and what's different about them?

So in the case of clarity pursuing, there's the active interest in understanding and getting the truth, no matter how hard it is. I've always been a believer that I'd rather know the truth no matter how painful it is, because then you've got power. You know what you're dealing with. If you don't know the truth, you don't know what you're dealing with. And so you can spend all kinds of time and money doing things that aren't going to really get you any kind of solution to whatever problem it is you're trying to solve. So a clarity pursuer is someone who's just constantly seeking the truth and lean principles, practices and Tools are all about seeking the truth at all times. And so strategy deployment, for example, is you have to understand current performance and you need to be clear about what your mission is, where you want to go, and what performance you want to achieve. And then you can get very much more clear about how you're going to get from point A to point B. Clarity avoidance is an interesting one because that one comes again back to fear at the core of it all. But then there's all kinds of reasons why we avoid the truth. We think we're going to be punished, we think that it's going to make us look silly. All kinds of things like that that get into clarity avoidance. Clarity blind is the interesting one because you don't know what you don't know. And clarity blind is when you don't even understand that you are operating without clarity. So part of what we talk about in the book is mindfulness and starting to oper with a far more sense of being present and being mindful of everything. That helps you start reducing the risk of being clarity blind in every situation.

You know, when you say mindfulness, are you talking like meditation, that kind of thing, or is it something else?

Well, mindfulness is being very, very present in the moment and acting without judgment. So mindfulness meditation is one practice that helps you develop greater mindfulness. And there's all kinds of meditation. It doesn't necessarily mean sitting in a room, there's walking meditation.

Unless that's your thing, then go for it, man.

Exactly. There's all kinds of ways to meditate, but meditation is a wonderful tool to train the mind. And that's what mindfulness gets easier and easier the more your mind is trained to focus in the present.

So I do know in your book you coined a, I guess maybe you would call it a problem solving approach that you acronym is clear. What is clear?

So clear is I really struggled with what to do with this. Since your audience is primarily improvement professionals, I'm going to kind of go geeky for a moment and talk straight to them. Yeah. What I have found lacking in problem solving methodologies my entire life and looking at everything from PDCA, PDSA, DMAIC, OODA, Ford's, 8D Toyota, TBP of them are they suffer from not being explicit on what you're doing, what you're really doing in each one of those stages that is represented by the acronym. And so, for example, pdca, PDSA Plan. Well, plan is a pretty vague word. And what you're doing in the P of PDCA is not much planning. You're actually discovering and you're learning about the current state and forming a very clear problem statement and all those things. So it's just, I just have felt like the average Joe or Sally when they're learning how to solve problems. You know, it just isn't very helpful to have these acronyms that are not very explicit. And so I came up with the questions that are what people actually, you know, should be doing and good problem solvers are doing in each one of those stages. And I struggled with whether to label it as anything other than a bunch of questions because I don't want it to be perceived as another problem solving, a different problem solving methodology. It's not, it's just making explicit what's in all of those problem solving methodologies. So I pray it becomes an overlay onto these other ones just to help people be more effective. And clear just happens to be a easy way to remember the different sections. I just don't mean for it to be a substitute for DOMIC or pdsa.

Yeah, got it. So what's it stand for?

Okay, so clear is an acronym that stands for clarify, learn, experiment, assess, and then rollout. So rollout, for example, is one of the areas that's been missing from all but one of the problem solving methodologies. You know what, you can do all the great problem solving possible, and if you don't have a proper rollout of that new way of operating, people aren't going to understand it, they're not going to do it, risk of it rolling back to the old way. And so rollout is the kind of execution of the end state of problem solving. So clarify is really a big part of what is in the D of dmaic, the P of pdsa. Clarifying what the problem is, how do you know it's a problem? Who's the problem for that type of thing? Learn is the current state piece of it. What's the reality of the situation? What are the most significant root causes? Then? Experiment is another thing that isn't as explicit in the methodologies where you're forming a hypothesis and you're testing a potential countermeasure or countermeasures and studying it to see what worked and what didn't work, and tweaking along the way. I think the missing question is what do you think is going to happen? Being very explicit about what you expect. Then of course the A of assessment is, well, what did happen? What really happened? And then being explicit that at that point you don't necessarily either abandon or adopt might need to adapt and tweak it and run another experiment and then finally roll out, which I mentioned earlier.

I like it. Clarify, learn, experiment, assessment, rollout, assess and roll out.

Yep.

Oh, assess. Yeah. I'm making my own notes here, so sorry for the listeners. I'm learning myself. Good stuff. All right, listen, last question that I have for this section and we'll jump into the reflection section since we definitely got some new questions since episode five.

Yes.

So, you know, I want everyone to go buy this book first and foremost. So if you're listening to this and you have ears hearing these words, please go buy this book.

But the book is called Clarity First.

Yeah, Clarity First. But before that, give everyone listening just maybe one or two practical things they could do today or to be at least begin to do today. I'm sure they can't solve the problem in one day, but something. Some things for them to take away from this episode that will help them get closer to having more clarity in their life or in their business.

You know, I think one of the first things is becoming aware of the degree to which clarity is not present. You know, awareness is the first step of breaking any kind of habit, and we really have become habituated to ambiguity. And I think a lot of people believe that business is necessarily ambiguous and by design, and it needs to be. And that's so not true. So just start paying attention to every conversation, every email you read, every email you send, every meeting you attend, every objective you write, every goal you write. Start just being very clear and aware of what you are actually communicating and the degree to which you might be just not being explicit enough and test it. Ask people to respond. Ask people to react to what you're saying, writing, or planning, and see if you're really clear that awareness is very, very important. I love it. I love it. That's number one. Number two is, you know, actually executing. You know, just do not write another email unless you have a. At the top of the email, very first paragraph, hopefully first sentence. What's the ask? Are you asking someone to do something? Are you asking them to make a decision? Or is it just an FYI? Be very clear about the purpose of that email. To set people's mental. The receptivity. The mental part of this is like, okay, I need to read this from a. I need to do something perspective. Just simple things like this that are just not commonly done that we need to get better at. I also think that everybody should go start talking to their leadership team right now. No matter who you report to, no matter what level it is, and say, here's the organizational cost that we're experiencing because of the lack of clarity. And let's just start talking about creating a culture of clarity where it's safe to seek the truth, it's safe to tell the truth, and no one's going to be punished because there's a problem, for example, you know, it's just. It's just that's what gets people not wanting to be clear about anything because of the risk of being ridiculed or punished. So talk to your leaders. Stop, you know, stop writing emails where the ask is all the way at the end of it. Put that up front. Have a mission for every meeting and be aware.

Yeah, I almost wonder. The email one is really interesting to me. Like, sometimes, you know, I'll even find myself, you know, if you're forwarding an email to like, you know, for me, like, I might forward an email to Kevin, you know, my business partner, and it's more of like an FYI. So you just almost say, just FYI and then you hit send. And I almost wonder, like, how much value is that really adding? Like, do they really need to know the FYI? Maybe perhaps they do, but I know.

Well, it's a great question, and it's something that is worth a conversation because, you know, with my own team, I found that two people on my team were just constantly saying, God, all the emails. And I thought that the FYI emails were something that were helpful to them. And then I sat down and we had a really long conversation about what types of things they want to know about and what types of things they don't want to know about. And so I was not practicing what I preached there for a moment, but then I finally got back on the path and everyone's happy, so it's good. Can I mention one more thing?

Yeah.

You know, I forgot to mention performance. And so, you know, when you talk about clarity, most people respond really well to knowing the score. I have a story in the book about being at a football game. And, you know, what if the scoreboard didn't work, you know, how would that work? And organizations are just not very forthcoming with organizational performance at a work team level, department level, division level, and the overall organization. If anything is hidden in a computer, then, you know, people don't actively seek information. We have to give it to them. And so I think that's another thing. Back to your question. What could people do today is start defining, you know, the relevant few measures that say, how you doing? You know, Are you on track or you're off track? And that, that is really important.

I love that. Like, one of my favorite questions when I, when I tour a facility is all just asked the people, like, can you at any moment in time tell me if you guys are winning or losing?

Yes, that's a great question right now.

Like, are we winning or are we losing? You know, and they're like, you know, a lot of times they could be like, no, it's tied, you know, you know, they have this visual management over there, but yeah, that's what it's all about. Are you winning? Are you losing? Yeah. The sports analogy is awesome. How awful would it be to watch a game, football game, basketball game? Imagine coaching, but you didn't know what the score was. How are you going to do it? You can't.

Well, yeah, and even the players, you know, if you watch a. Well, I don't watch high school as much anymore, but if you watch college and NFL games, they're watching that scoreboard a lot. I mean, a whole lot. They know, you know, what down it is, what yard the ball's on, you know, all that stuff. So it's, it's, it's important.

Exactly. Good stuff. All right, so clarity first. Can't wait for it to come out. March 9, 2018. So let's jump into the reflection section, Karen. So this first one, you know, you, you, you're very influential in this lean world, and you've been practicing it for, for, for some time now, and I really, really respect your opinion on this. So what do you, where do you think just our lean movement in general is going in the future?

That is a good question. I, you know, I think we have a impatience and always want the new flavor of the month and flavor of the day. And lean has had pretty long legs. I mean, it's, it's. And it's. Because if you really understand lean and a lot of people really don't understand lean fully, if you understand lean fully, there's nothing about it that's going to ever become. Oh, we don't need to have, we don't need to know what our mission is for the year. We don't need to know how we're performing. I mean, that's just not going to happen. And so I think the fundamentals are going to always. It's the new norm that we're now understanding is what helps boost performance, whether it takes another shape or form. I actually don't think it will really, but I think people will label it as such. So for example, there's been a lot of criticism in the past years that Lean is very light on the issue of innovation. And you know, so what if you're able to deliver a great product to the marketplace because you've gotten your processes all well wired and all that stuff. If it's not the right product or it's not priced right, then so what? Well, you know, it's just that no book has been written or not many books have been written that are applying what Toyota and WL Gore and all like all the great Lean companies. Of course innovation is a part of what they do. And of course they're applying Lean thinking to get to the place of excellence and innovation like they are. And so I think we just been silent on some of the aspects of Lean. So I don't know if it's going to change name, I mean, or change its form much. I think we just need to keep understanding it more deeply. And I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we still understand Lean fully.

Well, and to your point with the whole clarity concept is like we so often we Lean thinkers, we get all excited about fixing the do, do, do or problem solving, but we don't deeply understand the problem. You know, we don't take the time to deeply understand the current state, you know, and. Because that's not fun, Right. That's boring.

Right.

We want to go fix.

Well, yeah, it's not only is it not fun, but it's also, I mean, every bias in organizations is against it.

Yeah.

Because it's like chop, chop. We need to know what the problem, you know, what the solution is now. And you know, I have that saying, go slow to go fast. And that's what clarity seeking and problem solving requires you to do, is to trust that if you slow down and really understand, the execution is going to be much better. And actually your overall time period will be a net gain over having ambiguity kind of dragging down your problem solving efforts.

So imagine you could jump into a time machine, Karen, and you could go back in time anytime for one day and you could shadow anyone in the world that you wanted. It could be, I don't know, it could be someone continuous improvement, could be some president, could be some anything, any person. Who would you go see? And more importantly, what would you want to, to ask that person?

Hmm. Well, on the improvement side, I think that's a great question. I think I'd want, There's so many, but I think I'd take it down to taiich. I Think I'd want to. Just, you know, One thing I've never really understood, you know, he's had this reputation of being really brusque and kind of cranky guy, and I'd like to see him in actual action, because what I always am kind of noodling on is there's respect for people. And I don't believe that respect always means that you're just all, hi, how are you? You know, I think that there you can be direct and a bit brusque at times and actually be more respectful than not. But I like to see him in action. Like, I'd like to understand that. That kind of fine line between respecting people and getting them to, you know, pushing them to the next level by being brusque. I don't know. I just would like to see him in action.

Yeah, that'd be cool.

Yeah.

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

Two things. One, never give up. And actually the other one is never be afraid of the truth. The truth really will set you free. And so I never give up. Keep going, you know, tenacity kinds of things, and don't be afraid of the truth. And that last one I actually heard many times. I heard it from a teacher early on. I heard it from an early boss, and I certainly heard it from my mother.

Yes, our moms are our best teachers, I think.

Absolutely.

So, last question. What are you most proud of, Karen, as it relates to your work?

You know, I think I'm the most proud of being, like, never wavering from what really matters. And we sometimes forget what we're doing in the improvement community. If you take it to a pretty big level and think about the bigger mission we have. Yeah, it's to help this process get better. Yes. To help this person perform better at work. Yeah. It's to get this organization performing better. But at the end of the day, what we're really doing is we're saving jobs. Because if organizations do well, then they're not going to succumb to the kind of quick and easy layoff mode that so many do. And it's just so ineffective, ultimately. But to do that. And when people come to work, they want to serve and they want to be able to do that with a lot of obstacles. And so by doing the work we do, we're creating this much more fulfilling environment for every individual, which, oh, by the way, happens to be the very essential thing that we have to do to deliver greater value to customers. And that's what it's all about. Is solving customer problems and delivering greater value. But it comes from being, you know, creating a work environment where people can thrive and become the best versions of themselves. And that is what we're doing, and that's, that's important.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, so what's 2018 have in store for Karen? Are you going to be up on a big stage anywhere talking, or what do you got going on?

Yeah, you know, the requests are just now starting to come in for speaking because when the book comes out, they'll start coming in really fast. So I don't know the full picture of where I'm going to be. I am speaking next at Ohio State, the MBOE program in. Is it April? I think it's April, yeah. I don't even know when I'm speaking. I think it's April. And so that's my next one. And then the other thing is, you know, we're. We're moving to Texas.

Yeah.

And so moving from California to Texas. I've been in California since 1980, so this is kind of a big deal. And so new book, new city, new state.

Well, you have a new coffee partner, because I'm here in Texas, so we're gonna do coffee.

Yeah, I can't wait. Yeah, I can't wait to. In person. It'll be great, Ron.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, well, hey, Karen, tell people how they can connect with you and you know, social media, website, all that kind of stuff.

Sure. Thanks. So the website is ksmartin.com. that's S as in sue ksmartin.com and if you have any interest in free resources, we have all kinds of webinars and free resources there. Social media, Karen Martin opex on Twitter and then Karen Martin group on Facebook and on LinkedIn. And then also Karen Martin Opex on LinkedIn for my personal page.

Nice. Yeah, we'll link to everything. This is going to be episode 202. So if you want to remember one website, GembaPodcast.com and then look for 202. We're going to put everything. We haven't even talked about your other books. You know, we just ran out of time here. But you've written some epic books that have helped me tremendously as a, as a, as a person and a lean thinker. So we're going to link to all those as well in the show notes. So definitely want everyone to go out and, and, and pick up clarity first. I can't wait to read it myself.

Oh, thank you, Ron. And you know what? Thank you for what? You do to help spread all of this messaging that you do in the improvement world and beyond into, you know, just business in general. You guys play a really important role. Thank you for what you do.

Oh, you're welcome. Thank you. All right, Karen, well, I'm sure we'll. We'll cross paths sometime this year, so I can't wait to see you.

All right, I'll call you as soon as I get settled.

All right. You take of care. Take care.

Thank you. You, too. Thank you, Ron.

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