GA 204 | How to Set the Stage for Your Lean Journey with Matt Kellett

How do we, as lean champions and change agents, broker those conversations and give people that awareness and that understanding, like, hey, this is the road we're going on. Are we all comfortable walking down this path? Because there are going to be thorn bushes, there are going to be rocks. But as a team, we can overcome those and get through those together by using our lean tools and our lean problem solving skill sets.

Starting a lean journey isn't easy. In fact, it may be one of the most difficult challenges of your professional life. The good news is there are many examples of companies that have successfully started and sustained the journey, including my guest today. His name is Matt Kellett, and he's a black belt who works for a large retailer in the Midwestern part of the U.S. now, on today's show, Matt and I talk about their journey. We talk about many of their successes, but as you'll hear, it hasn't always gone smoothly. And Matt opens up about some mistakes he's made and what he learned. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything Matt and I discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 204. 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, Matt.

Well, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me on, Ron.

All right. All right, so where are you calling in from?

Grand Rapids, Michigan.

All right. You got like 80 degrees up there right now or what's going on?

Yeah, you know, it's like, I think it's about 35 and raining right now. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

Yes, my, my colleague Steve Cain lives out in your neck of the woods. So, yeah, you guys will have to go out and, and meet up one day. But, yeah, he's always bundled up on our morning calls. You can see him in his little office there. Stayed warm. Stayed warm. All right, well, hey, Matt, let's go ahead and get started. Tell us a little bit about your background, Matt, like how you first came to discover continuous improvement and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Yeah, So I work for a large retailer in the Midwest. We are very similar kind of idea to, like, what Walmart does. Okay. We have about 250 stores in about five states. Okay. So I work for their corporate headquarters and they offer basically black belt training and black belt certification. It's a whole program that you can join within their own continuous improvement department. And I was one of the few people that was able to kind of finagle my way in there about three years ago. So I was able to join the team and become a certified black belt in Lean Six Sigma.

Cool. So that's kind of your full time job then?

Yeah. So for, for us, it is a full time job. We are basically a resource for the company. So we can. We work basically with any. In order to do kind of one of several things. Sometimes it's working on changing the culture of business group or business area. Other times it's about more tactical problem solving. So just maybe a big hairy problem that, you know, departments haven't been able to get a handle on and solve themselves. We'll come in and assist them with executing, determining root cause and figuring that solution out. So.

Yeah, got it, got it, got it. All right, well, before we get going, I'm curious if maybe you have a favorite quote that you want to throw out there.

Yeah, I think quotes to me are, I think a great vehicle to kind of really kind of describe the current scenario that you're dealing with. I think there's always a quote for any sort of given situation. The quote that I always kind of cling to and keep close to my heart is, it's not about you, it's about them. This was kind of shared with me kind of, maybe not quite at the very beginning of my journey, but kind of as I was struggling with kind of understanding like, what, what is my purpose as a continuous improvement leader? How do I lead others down the path of continuous improvement? You know, is it, is it something that I'm doing for my own good or is it something that I'm doing to really empower and enable other people? And you know, it's. It's kind of funny because as you dive deeper and deeper down the continuous improvement Lean Six Sigma rabbit hole, you start to realize like, you know, there's a whole body of knowledge out there about every individual and, you know, shingle principles about leading with humility. And for me, it's not about you, it's about them. Always just kind of help center me and bring me home to the fact that like, you know, this isn't my story, my journey anymore as much as it is how can I help the people that I'm working with to get to the place they need to be to better themselves? And by bettering themselves, you know, we kind of see that that helps better the company as well. So.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So the other day, you know, you and I were having a Kind of a little brainstorming call on what we're going to talk about today. And I think we came into a really good, a really good topic which is going to be really kind of how to, how to begin this journey, right, with continuous improvement. Whether it's lean, Six Sigma, any kind of continuous improvement. So I want to dig into that. But before that I actually, a question did pop up in my mind and I warned you that's going to happen. So, you know, this question just come out of the nowhere. So, so here's your first, here's your first one that we didn't talk about. You know, how does it work in your opinion when you have a big company such as your, the one that you work at and you have, you know, a group of continuous improvement? You know, let's just call you subject matter experts. I know probably don't like the word expert, but you know, people who have gone through some training and you've got some experience and then you kind of deployed, if you will, out into the wild, right? So to speak, to go help folks.

Into the Gamba.

Yeah, yeah, into the Gamba. So how do you balance the tendency that we all have? Right? Let's be honest, all of us that are into this field, we want to go and just fix, we want to go in and do. But how do you balance that desire to just go and fix and maybe even the desire of some folks that want you to come and fix, right? Just you yourself, without, I don't know, how do you say it, like kind of teaching them to fish, so to speak, and teaching them about these principles as well. Because obviously, you know, a small group can only do so much and you know, we've got to involve those that are doing the work. So how do you balance that with this, you know. You know, we used to joke when I had a job very similar to yours back in my corporate days, and we used to joke that, hey, I'm from corporate and I'm here to help, you know, and it was kind of a joke, right? But, but it's a fine balance. So how do you do that?

Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a great question. You know, I think, you know, it's not about me, it's about them. So the whole drive and the whole focus from the get go, from the inception, you know, regardless of what the ask is, is how do we, how do we take an ask, you know, whether it's to come in here and change culture, whether it's coming to here and Solve this problem or come in here, this team, to me, I always start with the mindset of it is people first, so how do I set the table? So what, what we do and the process we walk through is really one that they are grossly a part of and understand deeply. To the point where, you know, if we can do it, maybe two or three reps, they can actually start to do it themselves. Because to your point about like learning to fish, if they're not, if they're not learning how we solve problems, how are we helping them make their own lives better tomorrow and the next day when we leave? Because most of our stints are short term in nature, whether that's a week, a month or a year, three years. I don't think there's many CIA roles where you're somewhere indefinitely. I think there's a lot of movement to go where there is the most pull and the most needed. So for me, like one of the, one of the key aspects of, of how I've been able to kind of frame that is really listening to your podcast, to be quite frank with you, being able to hear other people and their stories where they've been able to be successful with putting people first and making the change and improvement really about, you know, really kind of to impact their lives for the better. You know, that, that's really kind of what I found in this whole journey of my own is like that, that to me is really mostly my calling is like, how do I really help other people in a sustainable way where it's not just a one time random act of kindness, but it's more of a system and a systematic approach, a systemic approach to instituting change in the Gemba, as well as change within the person, which is, you know, that's where things get really crazy and really dynamic. But that's, that's where, you know, that's my wheelhouse that I like to play in and, and have a little fun with. So love it. Love it.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about kind of beginning that journey, that, that journey with Lean. What in your opinion are some of the elements that need to be in place for that to happen?

That's, that's a great question. I think ultimately, what, what needs to be true or, you know, or needs to be built up so it can start to become true. And there's some clarifiers there that can kind of build on later, but ultimately I think you kind of need to need poll. I think there's ways to kind of get Poll and to prime for poll. And, and within that poll, ideally that poll is kind of coming from somebody at a high enough point within that organizational structure where they can start to kind of take on that sort of, you know, I think in kind of domic terms, you know, we look for a champion, quote unquote. From my personal experience, I think it's been hard to kind of find a champion that meets the operational definition of all the behaviors and characteristics of what a champion is supposed to do. Most of the leadership in my organization, they're still learning kind of what lean is and how can lean help them. So there's still a bit of a buy in process that has to occur. So we don't get kind of this straight like, hey, come in here and change us and let us become lean operators and really lean us out so we can be best in class. It's more like, hey, can you come in here and kind of work your magic to make things a little bit better and then we'll kind of see how it goes, you know, if, if, if what you, if what I say is true, like, because as all of us who are in the field of continuous improvement, like we start to understand and know that like things that are counterintuitive, like one piece flow or kanban or you know, even something as, as, as crazy as like A three management, right, where you're kind of testing hypotheses and doing this one plan, do, study, adjust sort of thing. We know those things work. Like we have kind of benchmarks across the industry. We have, you know, networks like this one that like, you know, GAMB Academy that we can hear from other subject matter experts to kind of see like, hey, this stuff really does work for people in the operation. They don't, I don't think they had that. Their trajectory really crosses these lines very often. So to be that ambassador, you kind of have to kind of lay a foundation with them and say, hey, kind of here's what we can do and here's what, you know, what we want to take an opportunity to work with your people on. And the whole time we're kind of priming these ideas around like, hey, what is, what are the behaviors of good leadership? What are those principles of leadership? You know, and that kind of throws back to this idea of shingle principles and you know, what kind of organizational structure are we in? Are we in one of traditional management where there's bosses, or are we in one where it's servant leadership? You know, somewhere we exist on the scale within those two Axioms and two extremes. And you know, in Lean, it's very nuanced because we are always kind of driving towards that servant leadership sort of model and not every organization is understanding of that and there's some friction that can build. So for me, kind of the elements that help us to get organizations lined up to actually kind of start this journey and start to undertake this is sort of conversations and really transparency around, like, hey, here is the journey that you're asking for, right? You're asking for like really wild and crazy results. Like, you want really awesome metrics and really awesome returns and really fantastic results and delighted customers, right? So I can help you get there. But here's kind of the way that we do it, here's how we do it. And I start to kind of roadmap out with them and show them kind of firsthand, like, here's how we're going to get there. We're going to do that by empowering your teams to make decisions. We're going to do that by making sure that your leaders operate on the same standard. You know, whether that's using something like coaching kata or whether that's, that's something that's a little more nuanced, where, hey, maybe it's just leader standard work. Like, you know, what is it that we really want our leadership to be doing? Do we want them to be kind in the details of every single part of the operation and literally trying to move every single wrench and turn every single nut? Or do we want them to kind of really be above the operation and start to streamline and start to directionally determine where to go within that direction? Kind of the first stop on the journey for me. And I think it's been, it's been an interesting learning. It's actually one of, one of, I think one of the people you're a big fan of too is Simon Sinek. Starting with why? Yeah, we've, we've gone out and actually part of our, part of our startup phase is to sit down with the people who really run the business and the operation and map out with them, like, what is, what is your vision? And, and I just cherry pick right from Simon Sinek because I, I'm a big fan of cheating whenever I can. So Simon's question is, you know, what would you, what would you get out of bed for? You know, like, what is it? What is it that. And it's such a funny question, like, what did you get out of bed for? But, like, immediately invokes this idea of like, Passion, excitement, you know, it's not go out and like, get better results or make more money. Like most people don't really wake up for that. But for the teams that I work with, it's very interesting. The items that come back are things like, hey, let's work together as a team. Right?

Like, right.

Like it's something that seems like superficially, like if you're far enough away from it, it's like, well, that's kind of a silly vision. But when you're in the meetings with these people and you can, and you can see their body language and their behaviors and you start to see like, man, it's uncomfortable for them to like even talk about like what is a vis. And it seems so soft and so ephemeral. But then we get going and we start kind of get those creative juices flowing and they're like, yeah, you know what this is? This is what we want. We want to work together. And we kind of do a thing at the end where we say, hey, is this, you know, is this something you would sign up for? Would you really, like burn calories and put effort towards this? Because these lean journeys, and that's the other transparency part that goes into this, they take you as an organizational leader. You have to kind of be willing to step out of your comfort zone. So how do we, as lean champions and change agents, broker those conversations and give people that awareness and that understanding, like, hey, this is the road we're going on. Are we all comfortable walking down this path? Because there are going to be thorn bushes, there are going to be rocks. But as a team, we can overcome those and get through those together by using our lean tools and our lean problem solving skill sets. So, yes, that's okay.

So what I'm hearing is, you know, you began that section with the topic of pull, you know, that we have high level organization or someone high level within the organization, you know, wanting to get better. Now they may or not, they may or may not have the, let's say, skill set or the background or experience or whatever to like you said, step in and that initially as that champion. So it sounds like you're actually doing quite a bit of leadership development, if you will, with that senior level folks before you worry about doing anything else. Am I hearing that right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I guess I would characterize it as maybe more level setting. I think leadership development. That term implies, like, they aren't able to lead. I think it's more just level setting to say, hey, we're going to Ask that. That everyone leads in a slightly different direction or a slightly different way. Yeah, so. So yeah.

Okay. Cool, cool, cool. So what happens if. Have you always had pull when you've gone into an area or is there ever any pushing on your end?

Oh yeah, we've done the push before. Yeah, for sure.

So talk about that because if someone's listening to this right now, rolling their eyes are like, yeah, that's awesome, Matt. You got all these senior guys pulling you in, you know, I can't even get anybody to return an email, you know, you know, so.

Yeah, no, and that I think is, I mean, I think there's kind of two topics to distinguish. One is like, I. Eventually you will get pulled once enough people understand kind of how lean can help them. So that's kind of good. That's kind of the good silver lining there at the forefront, I think, what, what we typically have done. And I'll jump on your question about push in a second. What we typically do is prime for poll. So we'll sit down with leadership and I've actually got had the chance to broker a conversation between our, our merchandising team and our self manufacturing team to say, hey guys, you know, I was, I initially got brought in kind to look at a singular problem, like a very focused, scoped, narrow problem. And within that there, there appeared to be this larger opportunity around like, hey, how do we work better together organizationally from merchandising to manufacturing? And what I did is I kind of just got with senior leadership and said, hey guys, here's kind of the opportunity I'm seeing. Do you guys feel like there's an opportunity here like, you know, going back to shingle principles of seeing reality? You know, I'm very respectful, but also kind of very try to be very, very honest about what is the reality I'm seeing. Like, you know, there's very tense relationships. There's kind of, you know, behaviors that are somewhat hindering in terms of each side on either side of their fence, kind of, you know, lobbing rocks at one another instead of really coming back together as a team to work together for a better tomorrow. And those conversations are incredibly terrifying. They feel mildly career ending in moments because you're, you really kind of sticking your nose where nobody's asking you to be. But inside of those moments, you know, if, if you're going in with your own center and your own focus of what you really want to achieve again, it's not, it's not about me, it's about them. They can start to see that they can see, you know, people real knows real. I think at the end of the day. And they know that I'm not trying to build my resume or trying to, you know, showcase that, you know, I'm the savior of their organization or anything like that. It's just about helping them and, and being able to articulate that in a way where nobody feels threatened. To me, that's kind of how we've gotten pole. Because you're right, the real like, hey Matt, come in here and help us be awesome. That stuff's great in movies, but that's not really real life from my experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's assume that you've got poll. Let's assume you got a great leadership team who's ready to go and they're willing to be uncomfortable and they've identified their why, if you will, their purpose, their cause that they want to, they want to go fight for. What do you do at that point? Then you got them ready to go. Now they're looking at you like, now what, what do you do?

Yeah, exactly. Now you've got, got this whole empowered and passion team ready to get started. Usually at that point I like to kind of bring them back to center. It's very easy to kind of get in. So what I'm describing is kind of just different failure modes that I've avoided. So one of the failure modes at this point is that you get sucked into really random projects and really random acts of kindness where you're going and fixing sort of things that are broken, but they don't really drive value. So usually what we do is we take a step back and kind of work on at least a high level sort of value stream map or maybe high level process map to really understand like what are your value driving operations within, within the systems that, that these organizations play in. From there you can start to work with the team to have them help you focus on what is, what is the part where it's going to be the most meaningful. And, and you can do a couple things with that. You can kind of look at whether they have an internal P and L or an internal scorecard to see kind of where they're winning and losing. Sometimes depending on the levels of leadership that you're dealing with, they'll generally kind of know where the pain is, but they won't know necessarily. So it's kind of important to make sure you're stratifying your group and really talking to top level people, but also people that are really, really close to doing the work, if not the people that are doing the work themselves at that point, if the culture can enable that. And then that gives you a very good idea of where to go focus. Right? Because now you've got kind of this value stream map sort of built and you know, like hey, here within this, this piece is where we have problems or where we have issues or errors, quality, cost, delivery, type of things that are hindering or preventing them from being successful.

So okay, so like at this point then, so you've maybe identified some opportunities for improvement. Are you guys more of a project run a project type organization to you know, improve the process or event driven, you know three or combination or how are you doing it?

Man, that is a great question. We are more sort of. I mean the term is kaizen but I think kaizen is defined differently across different organizations. So we are kind of a kaizen focused organization. Kaizen for us is kind of structured and facilitated like two hour long meetings at set intervals. So maybe that's like every week. So every week we're meeting for two hours as a team with you know, team members from the floor to have the team really walk themselves through the problem solving process. So that's where, where I would facilitate and lead them and we follow. I think it's called a train the trainer methodology. I've heard it defined differently what we do, but it's kind of a very specific. It's a very specifically facilitated process where we are asking them a ton of open ended questions and having them really do the thinking about the problem or the issue. And we are basically kind of showcasing like hey, here's a concept or here's a tool that will help you get through this part of the problem. And we kind of give them like a 20 minute or 20 second explanation of it. Like something like process mapping. Most teams don't, at my organization have never built a process map. They've never even seen their own process on paper before. So. So we will have them like process map. Something kind of superficial like getting ready for work. Yeah, a whole separate process. And then we have them go into. Okay now based on the learnings from that exercise, go and actually build your own process map. And they're the ones building it. And then, and then we just follow that sort of, you know, for us it's kind of a sped up demaic process at that point where at that point, you know, we have them kind of identify the issues within that process. And that's hilarious because we give them red sticky notes and they Just pepper the whole process, you know, the whole thing. Because we're at the start of our lean journey. So there's a lot of handoffs and a lot of things that are not in control within these processes. They're not very stable, to be frank with you. So, so there's tons of different gaps. So then, so then like how do you take like 50 different problems and solve those? Well, we kind of do a, a, a four square sort of activity where we just rank them against two, two different categories. You know, maybe it's occurrence and severity and then whichever ones occur the most and are the most severe, those are, those are our Pareto at that point that we go focus on and then we walk them through root cause tools. You know, whether that's a fishbone or just a drill down, kind of technically called five why? But we don't ask why five times because it freaks people out. So we just kind of talk through it because it gets very intense. Right. Why, why, why? You know, people start, yeah. Start turtling at that point and crawling back into their shell. So.

Yeah, yeah. So how do you go about. Okay, I think you sort of just answered it just there. Like you might have this big VSM on the wall or process map or whatever with all these red opportunities for improvement all over it. Like when you are doing these, you've identified something that, that now you want to make that better. And so obviously you got to teach them some tools or some methodologies or whatever it might be. But like, how are you scoping those issues? Like, how severe are those issues? Are they something that they could maybe knock out in a matter of a few days? Or is it a few weeks, for a few months? You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah. Like you're kind of alluding to like a just do it type of thing.

Well, I'm just curious, like, like, you know, is it, is it these two hour meetings? Obviously two hours is quite a long time, right? I mean, so are you, are you trying to attack problems, I don't know, big, huge problems, or are you really breaking them down into really small chunks? Taking more of a kind of like Toyota Kata type approach of where, you know, we clearly want to accomplish something here a matter of a week or two and then readjust our course?

Yeah, that's. So historically we've kind of have done more of a prescribed sort of solution, like a quick solution identifier type of exercise where we're looking for something that's managed within scope. So to your point, like we have in the past said, okay, let's find something that we can kind of knock out of here within two weeks. And we've used that as a criteria. We've kind of moved away from that because it's not where the team's heart is at. Like they, the, the team, like we let them kind of self direct and self drive where they want to go focus. What, what I do is I just serve as guardrail. So if they're trying to solve world, world hunger, you know, I will throw the red flag and be like, whoa, we can. Does anyone here really feel like we can actually get this done? And, and you'll see like, you know, one hand will go up in a group of like 12. Yeah, yeah, we can get it. Everyone else is like, no, we can. It's like, okay, well you know, so for us, we kind of balance it with asking the right question at the right time, which is a bit of a, a pseudo skill set, I suppose. And that allows us to kind of get back to center to say, okay, what do you guys really want to focus on that we feel we can impact? Because there's other problems too that they're just not really within your wheelhouse to change. If you're getting really bad inputs from maybe a different business area through their process. Those kind of changes are much more long term. Like we identify them and we'll set up an action committee to go figure out. Okay, maybe that's a separate project then that will Kaizen and action out. Cool. But for our focus in this value stream map activity on this process, you know, we keep them moving forward with things that they feel that they can bite off and chew that they feel are going to really impact them in a positive way. That way it's not me giving them the quick win or the quick win or long term win or whatever. They're the ones getting their own wins and they see that at the end of the day, you know, they picked what they fixed. So that's always a cool feeling to not be steered so much into a single corner of, of what's wrong with your process.

Yeah. So I'm going to wrap this section up with a fastball and I'm going to ask you a tough question about maybe related to what. Maybe a failure or something that you had to learn from. Maybe hurt a little bit. But before we do that, I want to make sure I don't cut you off. Is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners as it relates to kind of beginning this journey and getting some Traction. Is there anything else?

Yeah, I think kind of the one thing that is always clawing at the back of my mind is it really is about how as a change agent, for continuous improvement, how you're connecting with the individual people that are on the team. I think it's easy to kind of lose sight of the fact that we're here for a purpose. So we are very purpose driven individuals already. Being in CI, I think it's easy to kind of maybe not run over other people, but kind of, you know, be dismissive of their opinions or, or blame the person for why they can't get on board with making change. You know, there's always that that story is like, well, you know, I've 90 out of 100 people. You know, 98 or 99 are gonna be great with the change in that one person is just not gonna be good with it. And it is what it is. You know, we just got to move on without him. I think to me, there's there that's not, I don't know, my experience has been is that person is just horribly misunderstood and probably, probably a victim of the bad process that you're trying to fix. And they don't know what to make of your involvement. You know, they don't really know who you are, they don't trust you. And yeah, they might make your life very difficult for the first couple meetings, for the first couple months, for the first year. But what we've seen is like, the more that we kind of work to understanding where that person's coming from and what their perspective is, the more successful we are as change agents with getting them to kind of see a different picture or maybe a bigger picture than what they're locked on to. We've had really kind of great success stories with people that are like the biggest stall wars. Like, you know, there's no way they're going to change. And everyone has a sort of version of that story, I think, on their CI journey. But for us it's definitely been like, you know, we have the detractors who kind of, you know, the light bulb goes on in this aha moment and then we have the people that are just, you know, basically out to destroy the world. And we, we, we managed to also bring them along and get them to, to see the light. And now are they going to be your number one fan at the end of this journey? Maybe not. Maybe that's not their personality. But that's, that's also not the requirement. The requirement is that we don't leave Anyone behind. So for me, that's where we used.

To call them cave people. Citizens against virtually everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's easy to kind of like write them off and be like, oh, you know what? Our process works. They're the ones that are the problem. But to me, that line of logic is no different than like what. What people are already saying about that person. Like, you know, that's no different than, Than what, what got all the people in this process where they are today. Because if you know, from, from. For most organizations, they don't see the problem with the process, they see the problem with the people. Yeah. So I think the more that we can lead and showcase and show people like, hey, it really is your process that's the problem. And even the people that. With. With my CI Process. Right. Like, that's okay. Yeah, that's okay. They don't, they don't need to be part of the means. They don't want. They don't have to be part of the means. But. But I'm also not going to forget about them and write them off and say they're a lost cause. It's, you know, they're somebody that just maybe needs a little bit more time or a little bit more.

Yeah, well, you know, back on the respect for people side, I mean, I found that if you, if you had a so called cave person who seems extremely against and they're negative, if you can find an opportunity to really understand and talk to them privately about why that is and really get at it, I mean, there can be some, you know, deep wounds, you know, even outside of work or whatever that cause that person to behave the way they're behaving. And if you can find a way to kind of overcome that. Gosh, those. What I found personally is the folks that are super resistant or, you know, you have the person in the back of the room with their arms crossed on day one, you know, they end up being the horsepower of the movement when you can turn their heart right towards improvement.

Yeah, you've converted a nonbeliever, man. That's a big moment in time right there.

Exactly, exactly. Good stuff. All right, well, let's wrap up this section, Matt, with maybe tell us a little bit about maybe, I don't know, a failure mode or something that didn't go as well as you hoped it would and maybe what you learned from it.

Yeah, yeah. This kind of goes back to the whole push idea at the onset of the conversation. So we dovetail quite neatly into that. So I Started my journey kind of three years ago. I had no CI experience before then. I never knew anything about lean. I was able to kind of go through the training process, training courses, and that definitely opened my eyes and showed me a whole different world. I mean, it's a night and day difference. If anyone has kind of not been through the actual training, whether it's black belt or green belt, and really kind of dove deep and try to get a deep understanding of this sort of subject matter stuff. It's ridiculously powerful and amazing. So I was totally green, no pun intended, for green belts up there. And our organization was being asked to kind of help with a different department, distribution, with kind of launching continuous improvement inside of distribution. And nobody really had a frame for what that was going to look like, but they said, hey, was anyone here willing to volunteer? I volunteered. And it was kind of me and a couple other black belts that were a little more seasoned were kind of the tip of the spear, so to speak. Following a master black belt and his plan for how to really execute continuous improvement inside of a very large organization or distribution network is incredibly massive. What we learned on this journey was it's very easy to kind of get caught in the trap of igniting really, really passionate fires in people to go fix things. I think in some cases that part of the journey can be actually almost super easy if you're not careful. And within that, you kind of spawn all of these sort of just do it projects. So, like, it's all these quick wins. And what, what we learned and what I learned kind of firsthand as I was executing it myself at a facility, was that it's really easy to have people stop believing in what you're saying when they are executing changes, but not seeing any sort of residual value from that. And what I'm talking. I guess the example I'm talking about specifically is we kind of rolled out with them a bunch of different projects and initiatives. So, you know, the lesson learned there was like, a, don't start a bunch of fires that you can't sustain yourself because you will. You'll burn yourself out and you'll burn out the people because they're not going to be able to make progress on it themselves without your help. B, once you do start, if you do start a bunch of fires, you know, be very tactful with how you address and handle that with people. We tried to make everyone their own owner of it without giving them the skills and tools to actually solve any of their problems. That just frustrated them a lot. We Gave them kind of this, this great tool that we thought A3 management. And we hope that they'd be able to kind of go through iterative learning loops and learn their way to the solutions. And we found like, you know, I think, I think in theory that that can work, but I think that that has to be a much more guided, a much more hands on sort of activity. It's not something you can just kind of passively throw at people and be like, hey, here's your A3 management board. Here are your A3s that you've all now individually own. And we didn't really talk to you about the fact that you were going to own these and now you're going to report out on them and like, like on paper it works. But, but in terms of like human behavior and like, you know, like, like how quickly people are able to trust and actually believe that what you say is true. Especially in terms of the fact that we are changing culture. So there's already kind of an inherent lack of trust maybe baked in a little bit. It really created this giant chasm and vacuum where now we've done exactly kind of what we don't want to do. We've just empowered a bunch of people to make change. Kind of showed them that making change is really hard. And now we're not really going to be there to support them through that change because our resources were changing and we were shifting people all over the place to solve different fires. And it got bad enough where I actually had to walk away from the facility I was at, which was a huge failure for me personally. And then they ended up, of course not really liking this idea of continuous improvement. Lo and behold, destiny and fate work in weird ways. I feel like the hand of God is kind of watching over me at this point because now I'm back at that same facility. So within, within that whole structure, like, you know, some of this is kind of my perspective of, of how the change went down. Their perspective was that, you know, it wasn't my fault per se from, from, from through the lens that they see it through. I don't think, because what we're doing now is, is kind of like what I talked about. We kind of are reigniting those fires that have been, been extinguished and really working to kind of get that trust back and get that buy in back to go, to go make change. So it's really a bizarre sort of experience to kind of go back to your greatest failure and have to like really rebuild and salvage it in a way that's going to be sustainable. Yeah. People know what they're doing and know how to do it without you, so.

Right, right, right. Yeah. I mean, I think with any aspect of continuous improvement, whether it's, you know, DMAIC or PDCA or, or anything, you know, anytime you kind of swoop in and say, well, here's, here's the theory and now good luck, you probably are going to fail. Right. I mean, whether it, you know, you need. This is the, the power of, of coaches. Right. Like, or, you know, subject matter experts who can be there to, to, to help navigate through those difficult journeys, you know, and it is, it's difficult.

Right.

So. Well, it sounds like it's come full circle though, so I'm excited to hear how it, how it's going to go for you.

Yeah, we are about like maybe four months into, into this new assignment, so it'd be kind of cool to follow up and kind of update if we were able to reach that sort of fusion ignition where the reaction is self sustaining and they can sustain it themselves. Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for.

So good stuff. All right, well, listen, let's jump into the reflection section. I just got a couple questions. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. First one is, I'm curious if you yourself, we spent a lot of time talking about your organization and, and all the stuff you do there. But what about Matt? Like, does Matt practice, I don't know, daily, daily management, personal leader, standard work or anything like that. Like you yourself, how do you manage yourself?

Oh, great question. Yeah, I would say that I do daily reflection. I've actually kind of on my lean journey that started three years ago. I realized there was a gap within myself and who I was actually kind of has brought me closer to Christianity with God and Jesus. So for me, I try to do a daily sort of Bible reflection to kind of center myself. Now that's not quite lean in perspective, I think, from some points of view, but for me it's all about that servant leadership sort of aspect. So like to be able to kind of hear how, you know, Jesus and the disciples were able to lead and get people to change their mind about it. How they saw the world and how they saw something as personal as religion has been just interesting parallels between that and a CI journey to me at the end of the day. And I'm not trying to push that.

Yeah, no, no, no, I get it.

You know.

Yeah, a few people made a big, made a big impact back then, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so right, wrong or indifferent, it's been that. That's certainly been. Been one area from a more sort of tactical answer. One of the things that Lean has brought to everyone's forefront is this idea of kind of like visual work and. Or visual triggers, so, you know, like, something's going to go bad before it goes bad. One of the things that our department has done is also used the same idea, but with trigger words. So like, hey, how do we call attention to somebody, let them know that, hey, maybe they're going a little bit askew or a little bit off the reservation or whatever. And how do we let them know that they are out of bounds? So we use trigger words within some of our Kaizen events and even within some of our processes. Trigger words are what I took back to home because I think it's easy within families to kind of get frustrated with one another. So how do you identify that you're getting frustrated with each other without actually getting to the point of frustration? Well, for us, we use a trigger we're. Which immediately diffuses the situation. So we've had a lot of success with that. And we've been rolling that out for the past. That's actually pretty recent for about three weeks now. So, yeah, that's been. I tried rolling it out about six months ago, but that was a push.

Yeah. Okay.

That didn't work. I kind of had to wait for it to build into a poll where my family could, you know, I just asked them the question, like, hey, would it be helpful if we had some way to identify when we're getting frustrated? And they're like, yeah, like, well, how do you guys want to do that? And one of my teenage sons said we could use like a word or something. You're talking about a trigger word. You don't know it? Talked about it six months ago, but it's the exact same thing. And lo and behold, here we are with this idea of trigger words which builds off a visual trigger.

Is it too personal of a question to ask what the word is?

No, no. We had them come up with it because when they create it, they own it. So it is. It is the term. So like a bee buzzes.

Okay.

So, yeah, so we'll say buzz or we go bzzz. And that's kind of our. Our way to let each other know that, you know, things are getting a little bit hot.

How often does the buzz go off?

Lately it goes off quite a bit. Probably like each person does it about three times a day. Okay, so cool.

Well, that's Awesome. I might have to try that. See if I can get some pole in the house. See if we can do that. Listen, I did a podcast with this guy.

Yeah. If the family can buy into it, it works really well. But getting that buy in is always the challenge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, so is there an area of lean Six Sigma, just continuous improvement in general, that you struggle with? And maybe you wonder, does this really work?

Wow, that's a fantastic question. I think for me it would have to be something. Something along the lines of, like, I think personally it has to do with data, which I think sounds like a horrible thing to say as a black belt, you know, like it, like superficially, but sometimes I don't know that, that always making a data driven decision is always the best way to go into a project. And what I mean by that though is if people feel really passionately about what their issue is like, and the data is saying something else is their issue, when that gets presented to those people, it's. It's funny because they tend to kind of ignore that data because the emotional charge of pain that they feel is. It's so distinct and so real to them. Like, the data just must be. That's not right. Right. We're not reporting it outright or the way the Met captured or wrong. So what I'll do is I'll let them go back and fix the problem that they see. And then once we get that wrapped up and kind of stabilized and done, we go back and start measuring again to show, okay, hey, did that really do what we thought? And let it kind of be a moment of self discovery for them because. And in some cases too, it's kind of funny, like, you just. There's that element of. I think it's called the Hawthorne effect, where like, once you make change, like, people just get fired up to start doing things better and more correctly. Right. Like, they just get like. It's like. It's like an internal fire burns inside them to like, get to be passionate about their work again and they get to like, put a. Their best foot forward. Yeah. So. So, like, to me, it's better to go down the path of like, what is it that irritates you? What bugs ya? Yeah, let's get that fixed and then we'll come back and see. Did the data matter? Did it not matter? Because some nine times out of ten what I find is like, that data never mattered.

Like, well, here's. Yeah, here's the other thing. And you know this as well as anybody as a black Belt. Now, the problem with data is that I don't want to throw out any crazy number because I don't have data to back it up. But I would, I dare say that at least 70% of the data air quoting data floating around there out there is total garbage because the measurement systems are so bad.

Yeah, that's the other frustration, you know.

That you truly are wasting. I mean I've, I've, I've, I've been in organizations, I obviously won't name names or anything like that to where they, they were producing product. I'm going to be super vague here. And they, they measured this product in certain ways using certain instruments and we did a real basic Gage R and R with them and come to find out they had no earthly, they couldn't distinguish between good and bad. Their number of distinct categories was one for the gage R and R geeks out there. Like they l couldn't determine between good parts and bad parts and yet they measure parts day after day, hour after hour. And they were so blind that I'm like, I, I don't even know how you, how the company stays in business, you know?

Right.

Yeah. So, yeah, so, so data, I, I think you're, I think good data is, is, is really important obviously, but unfortunately so much of the data floating around there. So that's the takeaway. People go do gage R&Rs on your machines or on the measurement equipment because I bet you, you can't do, you're not doing a very good job, just put it that way. Super passionate about MSA and just good measurement systems.

Yeah, MSA is huge. It's so funny. And for anyone who's listening, who has like great data that they can draw accurate conclusions from, you are rock on, baby.

Rock on. Yeah.

You're in utopia. Enjoy it.

Yeah, no, but I think it's a great point, you know, and especially, you know, we pick on our, you know, I'm a Six Sigma guy as well. I mean I actually cut my teeth with it many, many years ago. And there's, there is a tendency that we can get lost in our minitab, man. You know where. Get off the minitab, dude, and go out to your Gemba and go observe. Because that's the truth, man. The truth is not inside minitab. It's out there on a shop floor.

Yeah. And perception guides reality, right? So like if people's perception of problems start to change, so does the reality around that problem. Right. Regardless of data, like it's still a people dr, Especially in people Driven processes, mostly people driven processes. Like just getting them to see things differently change their perceptions. Worth way more. Way more weight and gold than having the data to show them that they're wrong. That just tends to irritate them anyway.

And I didn't mean to pick up my friends at Minitab. Same thing for Sigma, Excel, Jump. What's the other. All the other ones doesn't matter.

No, that's why we caveat. If you've got good data, it is the best. I mean that's where the understanding what a normal distribution is and standard deviation, that knowledge is pure power because that can be applied in many different realms in many different ways. Even if you only have a loose understanding of what the data is you're dealing with, you can start to at least have a conversation with people about like, hey, what is normal and not normal? How do we know that from what you do so.

Exactly. Yeah, we're getting way too geeky here for this. All these lean guys are like what the. Quit talking about Gage R and R. Oh man, that's good stuff. All right, well, hey man, I've had a great, great time chatting with you, Matt. It's always fun to talk to as I say, kind of practitioners who are out there making it happen for real on a day to day basis and really appreciate folks like you who are out there making, making companies better and people better. So keep up the good work and, and thanks for taking time to come onto the show.

Hey, thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you. And your team kind of behind the scenes that's doing all the work. So thank you so much.

For sure. For sure. All right, well, hey, any final words of wisdom? Anything that you want to leave folks with?

I think, I think I just go. Go back to, to keep it about the people. You know, the change in the process and the change in the business doesn't happen without the change in the person so.

And measurement system analysis. Go do that too.

You want an IOP experience MSA with a Gage R and R. You'll be horrified. Probably.

Yeah. Good stuff, good stuff.

It'll be great learning.

Hey, how can people connect with you, Matt?

They can connect with me via email atmattcibusiness group.com.

Okay. Are you LinkedIn guy, Twitter guy, all that kind of stuff or.

Yeah, and then I'm on LinkedIn. You'll. You'll see I don't have much of like a presence on LinkedIn now.

You don't but own all the listeners pummel your thing to connect with you.

I guess the other thing too, that I would leave with, you know, if, if anyone just wants to really just kind of talk through what they're doing or what their approach is, I've got kind of a unique skill set in terms of how to understand and connect with people maybe on a different or atypical way than what kind of we are traditionally taught. So for me personally, like, if there's any way that I can help other people be successful with what they're doing, I always look forward to those sort of opportunities because that's, those are the things where, like, you know, if, if you don't have, like a person that you can bounce ideas off of, it becomes very difficult to discern if your idea is a good idea or a bad idea because it's just, just kind of system, this, this vacuum of being, being a concept.

So give, give, give your email one more time.

It's Matt. Mattibusinessgroup.com okay, cibusinessgroup.com all right, we'll put.

It in the show notes as well, folks. You can find that@gembapodcast.com this is going to be episode two zero four. Yeah, two zero four. So go check it out. Matt, thanks for coming on. Hopefully we can meet up face to face at a conference or something like that this year. And if I'm ever out in your neck of the woods, we'll definitely swing by and say hello.

Cool. Thanks, Ron.

All right, you take care.

All right, you too.

Thanks. 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.