GA 218 | How to Harness the Power of A3 Thinking with Captain Brad Brown

I think earlier you asked Allen, sir, you said, how do you do two jobs? And I wanted to say, Allen doesn't have two jobs. Alan has one job. He just uses Lean to do his work.

The City of Grand Rapids, Michigan hosted the first annual Lean Municipal Government Forum on September 20, 2017. And the good news is they allowed GEMBA Academy to capture the presentations on video, enabling us to share these talks within the at the Government section of our Gemba Academy Live section of content. Now, these presentations explain how Grand Rapids was able to not only survive the Great Recession, but actually thrive in the years that followed. Now, this event includes talks on lean leadership, lean philosophy, and a detailed explanation of A three thinking and how it was used. We also toured the fire and water departments where excellent examples of lean and action are shared. Now, on today's show, I'm excited to share the audio portion of one of the talks where Captain Brad Brown of the fire department presents the power of A three thinking. During his talk, Captain Brown shows how the simplicity and streamlining discipline of this A3 process creates incredibly powerful results that save time, money, and most importantly, lives. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gemba podcast.com, just look for episode 218. 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.

So we're going to be talking about the A3 tool this afternoon. You heard Eric DeLong show many, many examples of how we utilize the A3 process. You went off and did some gimbal walks. You saw some things at the fire department, at the water. I still go back to A three thinking is what really started our lean journey down the trajectory and the path that we're on now. It's not that value streams weren't important. They were. We still use them today. But A three thinking is what really got us going down the path of continuous improvement. You've already seen this slide. Eric used it. I'm not going to belittle it. However, I will say this pitch point where you're trying to go through the transition of values and reality. I agree that to the Kubler Ross model of grieving and some people may chuckle. I'm here to tell you denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At first, when the city came to us and said we're going to do the A3 process, we have some structural problems we need to fix, it was nah we don't really need this. We've been doing this for 30 years. We got it. We're okay. And we realized we weren't okay. So next was anger. Anger in the fact that not only are you making me change, I have to change using this process. Now why in the heck do I have to do that? The third step is bargaining. Okay, okay, we'll change and I'll fill out this piece of paper. But then you're going to leave me alone, right? So you're starting to bargain with yourself. Depression. Oh, my gosh, are we going to have to do this crap forever? This is absolutely too much work. I want to go back to the way we used to do it. So you kind of enter that mode. Finally, the acceptance and standing on this side of about nine years of this process, I cannot and will not imagine ever going back, nor do I want to. If I ever do leave this place one day when I retire at a ripe old age, I will use a 3s in my next organization. I use them at church, I use them at home. I use them on the side. This thought process is so important to the city of Grand Rapids. I'm not going to belittle this either. Outcomes versus inputs. We have to provide the highest level of service to our community through a commitment to excellence. We're not private sector, we're government. People need us to be on our A game every day. We owe it to them. They pay our salaries. I will get on a soapbox all day and tell you why. We need to change and work hard for the people that support us. We are here to serve. Lean has allowed us to really raise our outcomes while keeping our inputs at the same level. When we do ask for an increase in inputs, they're very measurable and tangible things that the citizen can expect. That is all Lean. I have a 4 year old, so I'm very used to stepping on Legos at home. And so I thought this was appropriate. I love it. Are you too busy to improve? Nah. No thanks. We're too busy. There he is, pushing the square wheel cart. So Brandy made mention of this earlier. I made mention of with a few groups that came through. This is my tagline and I stand by it. Lean is not additional work. It's how we work. I think earlier you asked Alan, sir, you said, how do you do two jobs? And I wanted to say, Allen doesn't have two jobs. Alan has one job. He just uses Lean to do his work. You know, and I truly feel like that my job, Scott's job, Brandy's job as lean champions. It's not additional work, it's just how we manage our day to day operations. So first off, what do you think an A3 is? This is kind of presentation kind of class. I'm teaching an A3 class next week, so I mesh them together. But I always ask this question, what do you think it is?

Yes, it looks as though a way to get a solid definition about its current situation, the options or the option to approach it to facilitate improvement. The potential outcomes for return. Bad idea. To look at the return on investment you're going to get and then to measure, once there's acceptance of this, to measure the process as you're going through it to see not only the return on investment but also what lessons you learn from it to take into the next.

Awesome. So if you could just finish the rest of this for me, I would really appreciate that. No, that was fantastic. So that's a problem solving tools. Using this for several years, I've come to realize it's a management tool. So just as this gentleman said, to follow up with the action plans. It's a storyboard. When we present in front of city council, we have about 10 minutes to get across a story that's about two weeks long. This functions is a very fluid and normal procedure for us to flow through. You see my hand doing this motion? It's the left side to the right side. The left side to the right side. City commission can take a very difficult issue and really distill it down into one sheet of paper and understand it and make decisions. Finally, it's a mindset. It truly is a mindset. And like I said, this is what set us down the path to continuous improvement. A lot of times in the fire department we won't even use the sheet of paper for smaller issues. We do it up here. It's the questions you ask, it's what you're thinking about. It's the mindset of always approaching things via an AI. So we're going to get into the most common use of this as a problem solving tool. So A3 history. Why do we call it an A3? It's literally the sheet of paper. So it's 297 millimeters times 420 millimeters. Roughly translated to American terms 11 by 17. This was the largest sheet of paper that could be fast via Toyota plants. After World War II they had a lot of big issues they were trying to fix and they needed a better way to communicate. Email is not the best way to communicate. Phone is not the best way to communicate. Simple visual consensus building on a sheet of paper where we're all looking at the exact same thing. That's how we communicate. Why a three thinking. There's a 1971 article out of Harvard Business Review by Peter Drucker, what we can learn from Japanese management. I will boil down this 19 page document into this. Americans or western managers are very good at coming up with solutions. We are very good at coming up with solutions. Japanese management is very good at defining the problem. The A3 causes you to pump the brakes, hit the pause button, slow down, define the problem. When I teach my class, I say, look, you need to spend most of your time on the left side of this document. That's where I want you to focus. That's where you're going to learn. You'll get to the countermeasures eventually and then you're going to implement rapidly, rapidly. But it's going to take a long time to get there. And that's what the city of Grand Rapids has been very good at doing, is being, being disciplined enough to say, we know we need to fix it. We're going to go through the process. We're going to play catch ball. We're going to go through 20 revisions. It's going to take us four months. However, when city council finally gives us the nod, we're implementing. That's the difference between us and a lot of other municipalities. This is the textbook we utilized. Very, very good book out of the Laney Enterprise Institute by John Shook. It gives a dual narrative. The narrat is me as the user, you as the boss. And so when you go through and start to read these things, you realize, wow, they're going through those five stages. My employee is angry at me. They're frustrated. This book walks you through all of that. You realize how you need to proceed as a coach. And now my job, Scott's job, Brandy's job, Allen's job is not to do a 3s anymore. Our job is to be that other person and coach on the A3. Same thing. My phone rings quite often. Hey Brad, can you help us fix this? No. However, I will help facilitate you fixing it yourself. So that's where we're at. And one point I do want to highlight. It's not about how fancy the A3 is. It's really not the piece of paper. It's that mindset of slowing down and working the process. Legos again, sorry, four year old. So how are they improving? Going? Oh, we have a lot of suggestions. They're pointing all over the place, but nothing seems to get done. We need a focused way to improve. That's what this does. This takes the mystery out of where do I want to work hard, what do I want to work on? How do we coalesce all this information and all these ideas into something that makes sense? That's the A3 tool for us. We don't even think about it. I say begrudgingly, just because once you go through this, this process a few times, you understand how much work it is. We'll be in a meeting with the fire chief and a topic will come up. We're sitting there and it'll come up again, and it'll come up about the third time. And we kind of look at each other and we're like, oh, geez, here it comes. And the chief or us will go, you want to start an A3 on that chief? And he's like, yep. It's like, ah, all right, let's do this. You know, what lies ahead. You know it's going to be painful, but it's almost like running a marathon, which I've never done, by the way. But at the end of it, I would assume if I could run that far, I'd be pretty proud of myself. And that's how you are with A three process. When you get done with this big, huge, monumental packet of work and city commission says yes, and they grant you the resources you need to go do your job. That's a good day. I think you asked earlier, sir, about do you have an awards program or do you get anything for being a lean champion? What we get is to work, and that's why we're excited. We want to fix things for the city and we want to make it better. And as Alan stated, they give us autonomy, they give us the ability to go out and help other departments work through A3s, and that's really why we're here. You're going to see a lot of different formats. If you Google A three, I believe it's Caterpillar. No, Continental. Continental has a six box. Spectrum Health right here in town has a nine box. I was able to go down to Kentucky and present on some of the work we've been doing for elections in American society for quality. Got to tour the Ingersoll Rand plant, the largest H Vac plant in the country, and some pretty neat takeaways. They use a nine box as well. This was their standard work for doing an A3. This is why you have that document in front of you right now. Because I went out, and you know what? That's a pretty darn good idea. I'm going to steal shamelessly. So now when you go back and look at an A3, we've already written the questions in that you really need to answer. And so one other plug, totally unrelated to A3s, but I got to throw it out there. We talked about simple and Visual Management, Largest H vac plan in the country. Like, when you walk down the rows and racks of equipment, it seemed to go for miles. Do you know how they manage their inventory? Solo cups. Red, yellow, and green Solo cups. On the top of the racks, they would switch out the color of the cup. The operator could walk down through, see a red cup, deploy someone to move it out, move something else in. And I'm sitting there thinking, lean really doesn't have to be that complicated, Right? It just has to be effective. Here is the system that we utilize. It's a seven box. It's what we were taught by Tom Shuker. It's what we still utilize today. It's been very effective for us. If we wanted to change it, we could. However, this is the one that we've really adopted. So we're gonna get into more of the questions here in a minute. But this, this is how it starts. And generally, I start on a WIP or I sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil. That's where we start these things. You do not, I repeat, do not start in front of a computer. You're wasting your time. You don't need to make this thing fancy because you don't know what the problem is yet. You need to sit down and think. And it seems weird as firefighters, when Scott first came up, we were sitting there working on an A3, and he's like, this is just weird. I'm like, what? He's like, I'm getting paid to think right now. He's like, shouldn't we be doing something? I'm like, we are doing something, Scott. It just feels different, you know? So you actually get paid to think. The time you invest now will pay off in dividends on the back end. So paper, whiteboard, paper. It does not need to be that structured to start out. This is what a final one looks like, just to give you a little scope. This was the one we most recently did. Chief Lehman was here about six months. So there it is. That's the final version that was presented to city council. You can see it up here. One thing you may notice, it seems like quite a bit of information on Here, this is the information that's behind the sheet. This ream of paper and headaches and tears and blood and sweat is what finally went in to this. Now I'll call your attention to. You might not be able to see it, but I'll call it out. We have these things numbered. So under background you see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Under current conditions, 1, 2, 3, 4,. Goals and targets, so on and so forth. This is essentially a parent A three with five children. When we got into our analysis, we realized we, we didn't have one problem. We had five problems. Now, some people will break those five out into individual A3s and that's fine, that's cool. I'm just too lazy. So I try to keep it on one sheet of paper and keep distilling the information down. So when you follow leave day throughout the whole process, you can see we had to change it due to arbitration. You can see the overtime impact it had. You can see the goals and targets by 50%. You can see the data analysis. You can see the countermeasure was to smooth it by switching our schedule a little bit. Then finally we're going to follow up by evaluating this and this. That's an A3. But we essentially have five A3s on this one sheet of paper. So although the process, the thought process is standardized, you can make this thing your own and make it work for you and your municipality. Here's some do's and do not knots do get messy. Do use the A3 to control projects and meetings. When you go into a meeting for an A3, you should have the A3 with you. It sounds like common sense. You are working the A3. It is an active, living, breathing document. That is what you carry around. People will see you with this size sheet of paper in the hallway and run because they know you're going to ask questions. They know you're gonna ask for their input. This, this right here, Build consensus lockdown. That's what the A3 does. This isn't. Brad thinks one way, Allen thinks one way, Brandy thinks another way. Now, we're gonna sit in the room until we can come to an agreement on what this says. We had labor at the table for this last one. Labor was at the table with us working right through the problem. So how many issues do you think we had when we finally approached city council and said, by the way, commission, labor and management and fire department have come to a consensus and here's what we recommend. We had no issues. None. Don't strive for Perfection. You will never, ever, ever find it. You want to talk about being humbled? We were a few years into this, and I thought I was doing pretty good. Hey, I got my big boy pants on. Well, they're always big. I was learning lean, and I got invited to go down to University of Michigan to teach at their industrial engineering program. So firefighter up front talking about A3s, talked about all the wonderful stuff we did. And at the end, this is a master's level course. At the end, this engineer comes up and he goes, yeah, that's a great presentation. You misspelled that word on line three. I'd been presenting on that A3 for like three years. National conferences and everything misspelled word on it. So you know what? You're not going to get it 100%. That's fine, that's fine. Where are you at on your A3 journey? So when I talked about our managing for daily improvement system, I said, if you notice something in red, you know someone's going to ask about it. Now they just go ahead and say, hey, Chief, here's what this is. I've investigated. Here's my recommendation. Same thing with a 3s. Is your team bringing you a 3s or are they bringing you the same problem over and over and over and you're the one fixing it? Are staff still jumping to solutions? I had to shorten the presentation up, but my favorite is in office space with the jump to conclusions map. You know, that is terrible, but I always show that video in class. A 3 process encourages the plan duke check act cycle. And this truly is my favorite picture in the whole slide. I'll let it sink in a little bit. The A3 process gets rid of all the the crap. And I don't know how else to put it. You may think this sheet of paper is really, really big. When you start, what you're going to find out is you run out of space really, really quick. What you find out is after five months of work and research and working with all the stakeholders, here's what I need to tell city commission, here's how much room I have. So it forces you to really put things on the paper that add value and are meaningful. There's no room for fluff in an A3 when you've worked the process. And so by the time that goes forward, it's a pretty solid document. I want to get into managing using the A3 a little bit. Let me see if I can get this to play. There we go. So in lean, you'll hear A term called catch ball. That's the back and forth between the coach and the mentor. I call it Rudy. So last fall I had the great opportunity to fly to Austin and facilitate a three day strategic planning session for the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation. That's a pretty noble calling and I certainly was humbled to do that. One night we went over to Michael Anderson. He's in charge of half the country for this program, for the advocate program. And he had a dog, little Datsun called Rudy. And he had a favorite and he said, you don't need to throw the ball. He will never stop bringing it back. And we threw it. And we're firefighters, right? So we're going to see how long this dog will do it. Tell you what, the dog would not stop. It was hours and hours of throwing the ball and he kept coming back and the light bulb went off. That was myself and Eric DeLong, Greg Sundstrom and Scott Dewar. On many of my A3s. It's not uncommon to have 20 to 30 revisions of an A3. That's a very common occurrence. We would get in the elevator, Scott and myself, the doors would shut and we'd go, oh, God, is this ever gonna end? It's just everywhere you turn, you're getting deeper and deeper into the root cause. And what we realized was that is a very natural and real process of catch ball. That's James sending me off to dig just a little deeper to make sure when we were approach city council, we do have the right answer. So it's gonna happen. Be aware of it and just think of the little dots and going after that ball when it happens. So here's some questions not to ask on the sheet. You have questions to ask. Here's what you don't ask. Do you really need to be working on that? Hey, why don't you look at this? Are you sure that's gonna work? No, we're not sure. That's why we call them proposed countermeasures, not solutions. We're saying at this point in time, that is the best information we have available. And we think it's going to work, but we don't know. We're running an experiment. I am absolutely terrible at this. I have to work on this as a coach. Do not interrupt when they're running through the A3, you're gonna have about a hundred questions. The first time someone comes to you, you could spend an hour in the background box and just beat them to death. And they will just leave frustrated. Let them work through it. Then go in and start asking your questions. I'm not gonna go through these. They're on your paper. That's why I handed it it out. Save a little time, but there's some very distinct questions that you want to go through when you're working the process. Okay. It's a storyboard. Like I said, stories sell. Data doesn't really sell. I have a four year old son. I step on Legos. I also read him stories every night. This is one of his favorite, Curious George. I love reading to that little story sucker. Also, I love doing. Yeah, I can read them that too. I love telling a good story for city commission and for our community. So let me frame this up for you. Grand Rapids Fire department has about 200 personnel. We protect about 200,000 citizens. 45.3 square miles, 11 fire stations, 15 rigs on duty. Every day we run about a structure fire a day in the city, we have about a 97, 98% save rate. So out of all the fires, we save about 98% of the property and contents because we deploy pretty darn effectively. We have the speed of our response and we have the weight of our response. What if I were to tell you 82.7% of our fires were in residential occupancies? Does that seem reasonable? Yeah. Yeah, it does. We have commercial fire inspections. We have fire inspectors. The vast majority of our work is in residences. What if I were to tell you in a city of neighborhoods, over 30 neighborhoods in the city, and you heard Eric talk about the racial disparity earlier. 40% of the fire or in five neighborhoods. You think we have a problem at this point? What do you think we were doing about it? Not a damn thing. We were going to fires and we worked through an A3 and the data came out and we were like, oh, my goodness. We have a serious issue in these neighborhoods. I'm happy to say one group of you saw him, Ryan Sparks. He walked by and ducked into the office. That's our grant. Right. He's a lieutenant at Chester Street. We just got our fourth federal grant two weeks ago. $345,000. That brings us up to right under a million dollars for what you're gonna see next.

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So how's this for an ending to that story? A million dollars in grant funding. We've been in over 7,000 private homes in the city. We don't have have jurisdiction over private homes. We're asking for permission to go into your homes. Over 7,000 homes have let us in. We've installed over 42,000 smoke alarms in the city of Grand Rapids. We have a 98% customer satisfaction rating. And in those five neighborhoods. This is David. We're up over 13% now for fires down in those five neighborhoods. Non participant homes are 2.8 times more likely to experience a fire. How is that for a story? For an A3. So what's your story? How does this actually link in? I like concepts, but I like concrete things as well. Background, that's your pertinent topic. That's why we're here. The current condition, these are all the components of your story and where you want to go. Now where are we going to trigger that? And motion. We formed a gap, but the punch in the gut is that analysis. That's that analysis and the data. That's what really gets you to go. 80% of the fires are in homes and 40% are in five neighborhoods. Why aren't you guys doing something about that? Then finally propose countermeasures and ensure the story has visibility throughout multiple mediums. We work with a lot of different groups. We like to put a 3s online. We present them at city commission. It's a good way for us to convey the good work that we're doing. So one little tidbit. Psychology Today explains that neuroimagery shows consumers primarily use emotions, not facts and information when making decisions or purchases. So I can stand up here all day long with daily to talk about an A3 to commission. But if I don't evoke that emotion, I may not get the resources I need. So you have to tell a darn good story. Finally, we're wrapping up here mindset. As I told you, we do a 3s in our head a lot of the times. We want to Know what's going on? Where are we at today? Where do I want to be? I just formed the gap. What data do you have? Have? How do you think you can address that? Who's going to do the work and when will it be done? And when can I go see that work we just did in a 3? It truly is that simple. But it's not easy. So back to the plan slowly. Implement rapidly. You have to slow down. You have to engage the people doing the work. I did it the wrong way the first few times. We try to come up with eloquent solutions to simple problems. As Scott Buer would say, we would sit in a room and cook up, well, maybe this would work. Maybe this would work. Maybe I should just go talk to the person who actually uses that tool. So you have to slow down, you have to talk to people. But in the end you're going to be able to move forward very quickly. Once the A3 is implemented, you have to put a wedge in there. It's very easy to go backwards. You have to have the 2 week, 30 day, 60 day, 90 day, 6 month checks built in. Scott is very good at that. Before we leave the room, he has those scheduled. We know in 60 days I have to go before the fire chief and talk about our progress. I also know that the changes have to be memorialized via standard work. If you don't implement a standard work in an auditing system to capture that, you can backslide very, very quickly. And wouldn't that be a shame after four, five, six months of work? So you're not done. When that is approved, you still have some work left to do. So let's wrap up here. The Toledo Blade ran a column in 2015 comparing us to Toledo. Now I know we're better because we're Grand Rapids. However, I read the article and here's basically what it said. Here's the big difference. Grand Rapids has lots of stated goals and objectives. We're measurable as a citizen. You can go out and see how we're doing. We employed lean. We use plan, do check, act on all of our processes. We involve the community and we have robust management and accountability systems. Employees place, they said that is the reason that we're doing this and other people are doing this. I'd like you to make this the default mindset. Feel free to reach out to me, get some repetitions in find a coach. That's what Eric said earlier. You need to find a coach. This is, it seems very simple. Once you get into it, it's actually pretty darn tricky to get the hang of, but get your reps in and that's all. Have for a 3s today.

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