GA 219 | How to Adopt the Best Mindset for Lean with Kyle Kumpf

When the light bulb goes off, that's very rewarding to me. That's what motivates me to keep on doing what I do. And that just keeps that cycle going of helping one person, one person, one team at a time and expanding that out.

Today I'm excited to welcome Kyle Kumpf to the show. I first came across Kyle on LinkedIn where I found his communication style to be extremely well thought out and respectful. On today's show, Kyle walks us through his eight year continuing continuous improvement journey, including how he started his career as a packaging engineer and now several years later leads the process improvement initiatives inside a bank. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 1, 9. 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. Welcome to the show, Kyle. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me, Ron. All right.

All right. Yeah, I think I was following some of your recent LinkedIn articles and comments and all the rest of it and always find you pretty intriguing on LinkedIn. So I reached out to you, saw if you wanted to come on to the podcast. So again, thanks for coming on.

Yeah, again, thanks for having me. And I'm glad you were able to get some value out of my opinions that I like to post on LinkedIn so frequently.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, before we get into the regular interview, I have to ask, how does it work? Is being an outgoing introvert. You say I'm an outgoing introvert. How's that work?

Well, it's funny because I have an engineering background and engineers, the stereotype is like to just dig in and hide behind a computer screen and work there and not really interact with people. Whereas I love to actually get out and interact with people and talk to them and collaborate. However, I do like to recharge by being alone. And so what I've been told is that like my wife who's an extrovert, she likes to recharge by being around more people and I'm the opposite. So I can go in small spurts of being very social, talking to people, interacting with them, but that zaps a lot of my energy, so I have to take that time to recharge and. And I recharge by being alone, whether it's just resting, meditating, reading a book or something of that nature.

No, that's really cool. A long time ago I took a. It wasn't Myers Briggs. It was one of these personality kind of profile tests or whatever. And one of the things they said about me was that I want to be invited to your party, Kyle, but I'm probably not going to come. So I don't know what that says about me. I want to be invited. Get my feelings hurt if I'm not invited, but I'm probably not going to come.

Yeah, well, I get invited to a lot of parties, but I also don't go to a lot of them. But yeah, it does feel good to feel wanted. So you have that option to go.

There you go. There you go. Awesome. Well, hey, Kyle, go ahead and tell everybody a little bit about your background, how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then definitely what you're up to these days.

Yeah, great. So I actually have a little bit of a unique background, or maybe I just think it's unique because it's me. But I went to school for engineering, specifically packaging engineering. Most people don't know what that means and my mom likes to joke that I went to school to become a glorified box maker. However, there's much more to it than that. It's very similar to it and I like to say it's a good mix of industrial engineering, graphic design and marketing. So it was a very fun and engaging degree to go for. Graduated from that, started work as a packaging engineer for a. I think they were the largest or one of the largest mail order catalog companies, the Swiss Colony, based in Monroe, Wisconsin, and worked as a packaging engineer for them for about three years. And that's where I was introduced to the whole concept of continuous improvement, lean thinking and those various tools that go along with it. And I left there and went out on my own to do consulting work. And that's where I started practice focusing more on lean, more on continuous improvement and helping other organizations on their lean journeys, wherever they might be. And that was very successful. I had a lot of clients here, locally where I live, and also out in Boston, which required a lot of travel. And then that's when I had to evaluate the family situation. We have young children. So I started looking for something else that didn't require so much travel, but still wanted to be able to practice what I was doing with continuous improvement and luckily found a local, local position. Which brings me to where I am now and that's working for a bank, of all places. I'm an engineer that works for a bank, trying to work with the various business units and frontline Workers and management to view everything that we do as a process, as a value stream and ideas, opportunities for improvement.

Nice, nice. Well, sounds like a fun journey.

It has been.

All right, well, let me start, Kyle, with just a general question here. What is continuous improvement to you? How would you, if someone asks you, hey, what's this continuous improvement stuff about? What would you say?

Yeah, I've got kind of a quick definition that I actually talk to those about when I'm doing trainings and things or presentations at work. And I think continuous improvement to me is two things. One, it's a mindset, and two, it's a system. So by mindset I mean it's a form of thinking. So constantly thinking what can be versus what is. I have an example of the term is lean thinking, not lean manufacturing. So lean thinking can be applied to any process, any organization in the industry. So that's the mindset piece of continuous improvement. And then there's the system side, which view as simply the process and tools for bringing those new ideas, those that come from the thinking, into reality.

Talk a little bit more about the mindset. I also, I remember seeing something on your, on your LinkedIn profile that I really liked. Tough on, critical on process, not people. Right. So talk a little bit more about what that means to you.

I've learned very early on that you're not going to get very far if you start criticizing people. And at the end of the day, people are just following a process that they've likely been given and they likely weren't even involved in creating it. And that process is what's outputting or creating the errors and the defects or the problems. So it's about going to the people who are using that process and asking them, okay, what about this process is not allowing you to perform the way that, you know, is desired? So it's a, it's a, it's a softer way of going back and figuring out a problem without, you know, attacking the person and making and tearing them down.

Yeah, it's funny, almost don't even want to mention this, but speaking of LinkedIn and social media, there's a, there's a couple folks out there in our lean world who almost have a. They're just, I don't know if they're just angry people or what, but they're, they're very critical about other folks within the continuous improvement movement. Heck, they recently attacked again by Academy for being online training and, and laugh out loud, you know, or something, you know, just being really ugly. And I often wonder, like what, what draws people to this? I don't know. This. This way of. It's not even just way of being, you know, just like, negative and, And. And attacking people, just flat out saying just being really ugly. So, yeah, it's. It's great to hear you talk about, you know, being critical on the process, not the people. But, gosh, there's so many people out there who just are the opposite, and it just sucks the wind out of me, you know, just. I don't even want to respond to them because, like, I don't want to waste my energy just acknowledging them, but it's still here. I am talking about on a podcast, you know.

Yeah, they're. Those people are out there. And I have friends who are very popular on social media. They actually build their businesses around LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and that's how they build, you know, they generate their living. And there's some pretty nasty comments to get put out there about them. And I like to tell them, like, you know, what, if. If no one's being negative to you, if no one's, you know, criticizing you, then you're probably not doing something right.

Yeah.

The fact that they are, you're probably doing something right. So keep it up. There you go.

There you go. Okay. We got attacks, so we're doing good.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's. That means you're making an impact. I mean, you're obviously doing something because if you weren't. If you weren't making an impact, then no one. No one would notice you, and therefore they couldn't criticize you. Yeah. So that's kind of my thinking on it.

Yeah. Good way of looking at it. So let's talk little bit more. You touched on it in the opening there about, About. About your beginning, but talk a little bit more about how you got started. Like, what were those early days like?

Yeah, so my early days at Swiss Colony, I was. The position I was in was actually split. So part of it was around packaging engineering. So, you know, developing, testing, packaging for our products so they could survive the distribution environment. From our warehouse, from our suppliers to our warehouses to our customers. The other side of it was more on the operations of a fulfillment site. And we had. The site that I was in was at the time, I think still is the largest one. You know, it's over half a million square feet. They had combined another fulfillment site into this one, and that's really what created the opportunity for my job to be there. And so we took another large warehouse put into a smaller footprint, and obviously that comes with its own challenges, like you don't have as much space to utilize. You can have much room for inventory to fulfill orders. So I worked with our process, I think it's called our process Engineering manager. And he had a background in Lean and had applied it whenever he had run some other operations with other organizations. And he introduced me to it and said, all right, let's take a look at this problem. Here's what we have to achieve. Here's where we are now, which is not where we need to be. So how can you go back and look at this process? It's easy in that realm because it's physical. You can see what's going on and how can we increase the capacity for orders or order fulfillment? And so that's when we started just basically using the basic lean tools of pull, tact, time, and those types of things. And that's where I first got introduced to it outside of a classroom session. I learned about a little bit in college, and quite frankly, it kind of intimidated me at that point. I didn't have a real world experience to apply it to, so I kind of. I didn't pay too much attention to it. But once I was out there in the real world and realized, yeah, this stuff is powerful, we need to use this because what currently is in place is not going to work and it's not going to carry us forward to the future. So that was my very first beginning of just going out and observing what happened as far as order picking orders, fulfilling the orders on the packing line, shipping them out, identifying kind of using the basic. I got education a little bit on the seven waste or the eight waste and learn how to identify those and working with the people doing the work and saying, all right, I see you're doing a lot of waiting here. I see there's a lot of inventory here or there's a lot of rework happening. So tell me more about this. So that's my first start in it.

So thinking about packaging and whatnot, and, you know, I guess the stereotype is, you know, racks and racks and racks full of cardboard. Right. So how do you balance that waste of inventory in the packaging world?

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, so one of the aspects of packaging is not to over package a product when you're shipping. One of the things we would ship would be these large electric fireplaces. You've probably seen them in people's houses. They weigh 120 pounds or more. Sometimes they come in multiple different cartons and those. Yeah, you could easily throw a lot of corrugated boxes at them, a lot of, you know, foams and things of that nature to package them in real nicely and they would never be damaged. But you're going to spend a fortune on it. And you're also going to. Then that increases the cube size of those products for storage. So then you have to have more space to handle a smaller amount of smaller volume of products. So in the packaging side, it's how do we use the least amount of material as possible but still achieve the basics of packaging, which is to transport, contain, inform and protect the product?

Yeah, well, and I guess, you know, being a lean thinking organization like I sound, you were. I mean, it's no different than anything else. Right. I mean if you have Kanban set up and whatnot, you, you, you hold a set amount of inventory, I guess.

Right, right, right. And like within our. We essentially had in that small operation for the. So the specific area I'm referring to was in our. The new area was what they called, I forget now. It was basically small items. So things that weighed like 20 pounds and less versus the other side of the warehouse, which was the larger items that were 20 pounds and up, you know, 50 pounds, those things. So we essentially had a storehouse or store of the inventory that would then be brought in to the picking areas with those orders to be picked. And so speaking of Kanban, our order replenisher or our inventory replenishers would get notified when something needs to be replenished. And we had them, actually we had it organized to where they would start an hour earlier doing their replenishment than the pickers. And essentially as they were going through replenishing, the pickers would follow right behind them picking those orders. So we had minimal inventory down in the actual picking locations. That way we could be flexible to order changes in demand. We didn't have a whole aisle full of one product that sold one day and then the next day we had to move all of it, just move something back in. So yeah, it's all, it's people, you know, they think about, they think, oh, this is really easy to do and some of it is. But when you got to do that synchronization of things like that, that's where it becomes really, really powerful. But it's also a little more complex to pull off.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So what about today, like within the banking industry? Like what, what, what? I don't know, things from your packaging life and whatnot, you know, apply over into this very transactional environment.

Well, I wouldn't even say it's the packaging side, it's more of the. Just the process. Yeah. You know, if you, if you're just trying to, you know banks, the common things everyone thinks about when they think of a bank loans or I take my money there and deposit it into an account. So no matter what kind of loan you're doing, whether it's a car loan, all the way up to a complex multi million dollar commercial loan, there's a process starting from start to finish. There's a supply chain life cycle of that loan that goes through from the time a banker meets with the customer to when that customer gets money in hand. And when you start to look at it that way and start to actually be critical on that process, on why things are happening, why there's quality issues, why there's defects, why it takes longer than we want it to take, it's very useful. And it goes to show that this whole form, this whole mindset thing is applicable to the service industry.

Do you see more acceptance, more resistance or pretty much to say between say a transactional environment like a bank versus a manufacturing industry?

Yeah, and I would say because I've worked in other, when I was a consultant, I worked in other service environments, office environments, say across any industry. The frontline people, people doing the work are very receptive to change. It's easier to get them to figure see what needs to be changed, what to change to. And then I think it's more difficult with the management side of the people who aren't in the work day to day trying to get them to see that same thing. Okay, here's the problem, here's what needs to be changed to. But then getting them to actually enact the change, that's where I find it to be more difficult or more resistance to be there.

Why do you think that is?

I think part of it is probably a lack of understanding or education. You know, it's, that's one of the things I've been working on a lot lately was helping people better define problems so that you can very quickly say, here's what's going wrong, here's the quantified impact, here's who it's affecting, here's where it's happening, here's the frequency, those five basic things. So you can very clearly and succinctly take that to someone who's not familiar with the process, but who, I mean, who doesn't do the process daily, then they can look at that and say, oh yeah, this is a problem. And you're recommending do this. Okay, now I see why you're recommending that. Here's what I can do to help you. Or they can also. They can do that collaboration. Whereas some people, we aren't educated to break down problems that way or actually create clear problem statements. So we just tend to word vomit our frustrations, which then it's hard for people to then, okay, figure out. Okay, what's actually the problem there that I can try and help you solve.

Yeah, exactly. So one of my favorite books is called the Obstacle is Away by a guy named Ryan Holiday. And it's a lot about stoicism and different things like that. But also he talks about when you come up against an obstacle, that's actually a good thing because it's probably the way that you need to be going because you need to work through that obstacle. So thinking back on your journey here with continuous improvement from the very beginning to present day, what sort of obstacles have you experienced?

That's a great question. Well, obviously the first one that probably comes to everybody's mind is just the resistance to change. You're moving my cheese. I'm very comfortable hearing what I've been doing, whether it's the way I've been doing this current process or the way I've been managing people doing this process. And now you asked me to change that. It's always the most difficult obstacle to get through. But what I found is, and this is, I think you'll see, you'll see this on my LinkedIn profile is just that takes this patient persistence. Yeah, I'm actually, I've taken a personality test and it says that I'm patient, but I view myself as actually being quite impatient. I like to get things done. I like to work towards deadlines to keep things moving. Otherwise things tend to fall or stall out. But yeah, it's just taking that persistence, continuously going back and taking different angles, providing different information, or just trying to, you know, convey the same problem to those obstacles in a different way to help them understand it. It actually reminds me of a quote that I have hanging on my door in my office. I look at it daily, especially if I'm going against an obstacle. But it's by Warren Bennison. He says that innovation or any new idea by definition, will not be accepted at first. It takes the repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. And this requires courageous patience. And that's really, that's the only thing I can tell people. They ask you Know, how do you overcome these constant obstacles? It's patience, persistence. That's how you get through it. And if you keep coming into them, like you said in that book, it's, you're probably hitting on the right thing and eventually you'll hit that tipping point, the obstacle will fall and you move forward, and you'll move forward to your next obstacle or your next problem and just keep tackling them one by one.

Yeah, love it. What else? Any other obstacles besides resistance to change?

So I think it kind of ties into the resistance to change. So you ideate where the problem is, what needs to change, what you need to change it to. You implement the change, and then people start this new. Following this new process, and then it's not going the way that was designed or intended. And then you go on back to, oh, well, we, you know, we didn't quite understand the current condition or we misinterpreted the initial process, which it happens more frequently. And a service environment where the process isn't something that's physical and visual in front of you, it's likely in a computer screen. So it's that disconnect between, oh, we thought we were going to do this, here's what actually happened. So there's a frustration which then after that leads to more people becoming a little more resistant. If you're working at same group of people again to change something else, they're like, yeah, well, this other time we did this and it didn't quite turn out this way. And so it's managing those expectations and saying, hey, we've done our analysis. We're not going to let perfection get in the way of progress. We're going to move forward with this new solution, this countermeasure, and if it doesn't work, we're going to evaluate why. So following that PDCA or PDSA cycle, and then reevaluate and act again and go back and try it again. So that creates a little bit of some, I guess I would say, secondary obstacles after you actually implemented this solution. But as long as you set those expectations and explain to people what your process is going to be, if and when that happens, it helps to knock those barriers down in the future.

Yeah, you know, I was actually talking to a Game Academy customer today. This guy's a very smart engineer, very similar. Sounded very similar in nature to you, in fact, talking to him and just really calculated and super smart. And he said, unfortunately they were doing a smed quick changeover and they were really, this organization was really hung up on what Kind of benefits they were going to get after doing this smed, you know, and they were trying to set a very specific target and this and that. And then we're spending days and days. I said, listen, come on, you know, set a goal, 50%, how about that? And see how close you can get to it. Maybe you beat it, maybe you approach it, but make it better. Right. And so I think sometimes we can, we can go off on a deep end and just, you know, we won't even take action because we're just so paralyzed with what's going to happen. Well, let's see. Run the experiment, right?

Yeah, it's the analysis. Paralysis.

Exactly.

My supervisor. Now, I still say, and I'm probably going to butcher this, but you know, let's use the marine approach. You know, you have 70% of the information, you've done. 70% of the analysis. Analysis. Let's, let's move because the other 30%, it's going to take you more effort than the previous 70% and you're probably never going to get it and then you're never going to move forward. So if you got that much, just go and then learn as you go.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. So. All right, well, hey, last question I have for you, Kyle, in this section, talk about the journey, you know, overall, and do you think it's been worth it? Like all of the, all the hard work and all the effort?

Absolutely. You know, just for me personally, the growth has been. I don't know how I can measure it. I mean, I've only been out of school, out of college for eight years now, so I've had a relatively short career, you know, in the continuous improvement area. But I feel that it personally has helped me improve myself and identify my opportunities that exist within my own self and my skills and my competencies to, to better myself. Which has then translated into me accelerating faster in my career. But from an actual tactical day to day piece, the journey, I say that it's, I tell people that continuous improvement isn't glamorous, especially at the beginning. And I like to show the picture from there's a GE commercial that came out a couple, two, three years ago. I think around ideas and how they're ugly and it shows this like ugly looking creature and it kind of goes through with the right nurturing and the right environment. It can turn into something beautiful. And that's kind of how I view continuous improvement. It starts off kind of ugly. There are certain things you have to get going and it never goes as smoothly as you think. You can have all the education, you can have all the leadership support and all the resources you need. But those first few projects and things of that nature, they may not go the way you're expecting. Expecting. So. But yeah, it's definitely worth it to push through those. You know, those could be viewed as obstacles because things don't turn out the way that people thought that they should. You don't necessarily always get all those quick wins, but yeah, and then, you know, at the end of the day, what really makes it worth it, you know, to the company is yeah, there's hopefully some bottom line impact. You're saving time, so you're increasing your capacity to do more with your current people. You're collaborating more with your people doing the work. So you're improving that employee engagement factor which is so critical in the workforce today. And then for me personally, it's just seeing others succeed. So when I'm able to help someone else have that aha moment, it's easy for them to see what a problem is. But then working with them to identify themselves, what does that need to change to, to make this better? When the light bulb goes off, that's very rewarding to me. That's what motivates me to keep on doing what I do. And then that just keeps that cycle going of helping one person, one person, one team at a time and expanding that out. It starts to have some long term returns. You're not going to see these huge returns necessarily off the gate, but if you can stick with it for one or two years and get through the initial, you know, quote unquote ugliness, then you'll start to see those, those large returns that are sustainable and, you know, carry your company to the next generation. Yeah.

Love it. Good stuff. All right, Kyle, well, let's jump into the reflection section. And before we hit record, you said you were ready for my, my standard question. So I gotta throw you some, I gotta throw you some curveballs here, man. I got, I gotta pull out some different ones.

Full disclosure, I've not played, I've not played baseball in a while, so I don't know I'm gonna be able to hit.

Yeah, I got to change up coming here. All right, well, hey, so what about, let's see, is there an area of lean that you struggle with or maybe you wonder if it even actually works?

Great question. So last fall I became, I started to become more curious about humble inquiry because I'd heard that so often and just learning to ask better questions to get people to identify what's going on in the area or understand problems or why something needs to change. But that takes a lot of patience to do that. So I started reading the book Humble and Quarry. Haven't finished it yet. But that's an area that I feel like I struggle with because sometimes I just like to get right to the point and I have to ask some open ended questions but and then my impatience gets in and I just kind of want to get us to that answer. So I start throwing out more pointed questions, more black and white questions that aren't really causing those that I'm working with to think. At the end of the day, that's what we want people to do. We want them to think because that's where the best ideas. So just I think that that practice, the practice of humble inquiry is great and I think it's useful. It's just I struggle with right now that's an area where I could use some development to ask better questions.

Got it, got it. So looking back on your kind of eight years out of school and working within the lean world and just business in general, if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be and why, if anything?

Well, I wouldn't be a true lean thinker if I didn't think there was any opportunity or area for improvement, would I? I. I would actually say I would go all the way back to my college days and some of those operational classes that I took and just take the time to pay more attention because now looking back, I had opportunities there where I could have gained a lot more knowledge, a lot more actually experience. Probably even met some of the people that you hear about in the lean world that have written the books, that are the speakers that have been credited with the lean transformations and that would have definitely got me going a little faster when I got out of college in the workforce. So there's that. I would offer that bit of advice to anyone in college right now who is in really any type of role. But specifically if you're in an engineering type of role or even a business administration type of degree, you know, take every opportunity to learn about just doesn't have to be lean, but just continuous improvement in general. Learn about it, embrace it, and learn as much as you can about it.

Last question. Do you practice lean at home or in your personal life?

Actually I do. I actually started last year working on a personal A three just to kind of get an idea of where some of my blind spots, what can I work on in 2018? So I do practice in that way. And it's. Whenever we have little household projects, I'll put together little action plans. I'll keep little post notes up, and I'll kind of move them like a little Kanban system of what's done, what needs to be done. And I'm trying to convince my wife to let me test some 5s with the kitchen.

Oh, man. I was just about to say, don't try to 5s your wife's pantry.

Yeah. I told her, because we always. She's like, there's. She goes, there's the. She. There's one way to load a dishwasher. And I'm like, well, that. That may be, but I. I think we can so it. So, you know, I'm not allowed to load the dishwasher because I don't do it the right way. I don't pick on my wife here, but she. She. We joke about it, and I'm like, honey, actually, I saw there's a video out there. I think I. Is it a gimmick? I got.

Yeah, it's my daughter's.

Yeah. So I watched it, and I'm like, I watched this video, and I. I want to try this. Yeah. I don't want to make it try, but I want to try this just to show you how we can maybe improve this. This kitchen operation since our lives, we've all around it so much here at home, and. Yeah. So speaking of that change obstacle, I'm working past that one right now.

There you go.

There you go.

All right, well, good stuff, Kyle. So glad we got to connect. Keep up the great work on.

On the.

On LinkedIn. Now, as far as connecting with you is. Is LinkedIn, I guess, the best way.

Yeah, that's definitely the best way. I'm most active on there, and, you know, if you shoot me a message or a connection request on there, that's the best way to get ahold of.

Me and go ahead and spell your name out, Kyle Kampf.

That's K U M, as in Mother, P as in Peter, F as in Frank.

Okay, Kyle Kumpf. All right, well, we'll find you over on the. On the linkedins and all the rest of it, and we'll keep up the great work. Do you ever get out to any conferences, going to go to the AME this year or anything like that?

I would love to. That's more conferences. I went to one last year. It's the Iowa Lean Consortium 1. I'll plan on going to that one again this year because I think they're bringing in one of the keynotes is Lancaster.

Oh, yeah, Jim.

Jim, yes.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah.

Lantec. Sorry. Yeah, Jim, Lancaster. Lantec, Right. Yep. So I definitely got there for that one. That's really the only one on my calendar this year. Yeah. But next year I'm planning on getting out to more and getting to some of the bigger ones and, you know, and connecting with the Lean community more. But for now, I can connect with them via LinkedIn and.

Yeah, hey, Iowa's got some good little conferences over there, man. We go out to several of them. Gemba Academy does. And, you know, they're not huge, few hundred people, but there's some really good Pella Windows is out there.

Yeah.

Some really strong companies out in that part.

Yeah, there's. There's a lot of. It's actually good because they are small, smaller, so you actually feel like you can get more out of them.

Yep.

But, yeah, I mean, I get you, but then you can get your. You're more likely to be able to get in with the, you know, the keynotes and speakers and just, you know, pick their brain. They've been. They've been very responsive to that, which is. Which is great. Yep.

Very cool. Very cool. All right, well, keep up the good one work, my man, and I'll catch you over on LinkedIn.

Sounds great. Thanks, Ron.

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