GA 221 | How to Think Scientifically with Stephen Derksen

If I can teach people how to problem solve, the continuous improvement is a result of them being able to be good problem solvers, and it just happens naturally.

I'm now convinced that the ability to think scientifically isn't just important for continuous improvement success, it's absolutely critical. And the good news is, doesn't matter how long you've been practicing Lean or Six Sigma or any other form of continuous improvement, you can learn to think scientifically just like today's guest did. His name is Stephen Doerksen, and he's the continuous improvement manager at Barkman Concrete, which is located in Steinbach, Manitoba. Now, on today's show, Stephen and I explore Barkman's Lean journey with special focus on how they've really focused on thinking and managing in a more scientific manner. We also spend quite some time talking about the famous backwards bike experiment and what it means for us Lean thinkers. The show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 22 1. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over@gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. All right, Stephen, welcome to the show. How's it going?

That's going great. Thanks for speaking to me, Ron.

Yeah. All right. Well, it was good seeing you last week at the, up at the conference there in Winnipeg, the Lean Conference. I think it was a, it was a great week. And how did the conference go for you?

I really enjoyed it. I thought it was amazing just listening to all the speakers and trying to take in as much as I can. We're just in the process of trying to pull all that information together and see how we can get it across the company.

Yeah, I know you're, I know you guys are practicing kata. So did you have a chance to, to meet up with Mr. Rother?

Yeah, I spent a little bit of time with him. I was actually helping a little bit with the kick sessions and got a chance to talk with him a few times.

Yeah, he's such an approachable guy. You know, I, I, you know, I've known him for years, and to see him come down the little pathway there where all the exhibitors were. You know, we had our little booth there and, and I was like, oh, yeah, there's Mike. I'm gonna go say hi to him or whatever. And then I'd walk and all. Suddenly someone stops him. And the guy is pretty genuine. Like, he will talk to people Bad. Like, it's not just like this short thing. It's like, all right, Mike, move on. Yeah, yeah, no, it was really good. Really good. All right, well, hey, Stephen, let's begin the journey here with you telling us about. About who you are, tell us about your background, how you first came to learn about continuous improvement, and then what you're up to these days.

Okay. Well, I've been in manufacturing in one way or another for about 25 years now, and it's always kind of defaulted towards trying to make things better. My dad taught me when I was a kid, work smart, not hard. So that was really the mindset coming into any opportunity that I had was trying to find a way of improving it. So when I was in pharmaceutical company several years back, I did a little bit of Six Sigma training, green belt, and got a little bit more of the formal side of it, was moved into leadership and moved from there into a steel company as a quality manager and saw a real tight link between continuous improvement and quality. Just the way that we can use data to improve our processes and look at where our gaps are and where our problems are. I came over here to Barkman around 2014. Here we've started up a continuous improvement department, and we've tried a bunch of different things. We were at the Embracing Excellence conference back in 2015, and we heard some of the guys like Art Byrne and George Conisaker speaking and picked up their books and just wanted to focus on changing culture as we look to the business and the way we had been in business for so many years. Barkman's been around since 1948, and we done a lot of the right things to get to where we were, but we needed to change our direction a little bit and focus a little bit more on what our customer wants. And that was increased quality and decreased cost, like every other customer.

So what does Barkman do?

We are precast concrete manufacturers. We do a lot of pavers, planters, trenching products. We've been doing skate parks. We've had our hands over the years in things like stone veneer, pretty much everything precast. We don't do structural components, but we do everything else.

Right, right, right. Well, I want to jump into or really explore your journey there at Barkman with. With Lean and. And Toyota Kata and some other things. But before that, I want to kind of stay high level. Now you're in Canada, right?

Yes, I am.

Where in. Where in Canada?

Well, we're 40 miles southeast of Winnipeg, Manitoba, so very centrally located. Yeah, we're right Just about dead center of Canada.

Got it, got it. All right. So, you know, it was interesting being up in Canada last, last, last week. Just talking to a lot of different folks there everywhere from the, you know, talk to a guy in Winnipeg police and all sorts of Manitoba government folks and then obviously tons of different, different businesses in and around Canada. I wonder if you could just share just a brief update on your take on lean inside of Canada just as a nation. Where do you think it's at and where's it going?

Well, I think over the years we, we've struggled. We've been trying to implement a lot of the tools of Toyota and there's a lot of folks that are, are really engaged in lean. I think in Manitoba here we have quite a number of companies that are sharing together and trying to figure out how do we use some of the tools that Toyota has been using and I guess trying to understand what the next steps are.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I think, I don't think, I just think Canada, by the way, I think it's everywhere. You know, I think we, I think it's just natural to, to. It's easy to grab onto a tool and experiment and learn and you know, we always poo poo that and say, oh, it's not about the tools, but I think it's important, you know, I mean people got to get in and try some things and, and you know, and I think there's just incredible learning that just I, people ask me which is the of the S's is the hardest and 5s and I say the hardest is start. You know, that's the hardest start. So yeah, so good on, good on you. I was really encouraged, honestly, talking to so many good folks last week up there, so fantastic. So, all right, let's jump into Barkman's journey here with continuous improvement. How did you guys get started?

Well, I'd say back in 2009, before I came in here, the top leadership of the company recognized that we needed a slightly different direction. So they started hiring an executive team that would bring them to where we needed to be. And one of the members of that executive team primarily actually had some lean experience from a previous company. So we brought Ian Marshall from CME in to do a lean assessment and kind of get an idea where we were sitting at the time. And then we started doing a little bit of training. We trained a couple folks internally on the yellow belt, teach them a few of the basic tools, and then taught those same two individuals the green belt. And then I Came in and did the same thing and really started to sit down with the leadership team and I guess pushed a little bit and said we can move this from the middle and we can have some of these things happening at the supervisor level and in the middle of the organization. But what's really going to help us is if you as a leadership team start to pull the other end of that rope and pull us along. And so that's what happened. We started a department in the fall of 2014 that was dedicated to continuous improvement for the first time. And then we started just practicing. We started focusing on Kaizen events and we did the an over 10 pace of improvements and 3% or we started to build ourselves towards a 3% full time equivalent support and started to really start to tackle the problems that the company was having. And the first couple years we were able to knock a little bit or a lot of low hanging fruit off and really fix some of the systemic problems that we had been having. The problem that we started to see was that our to do list coming out of each one of those Kaizen events was growing and nobody was able to keep up with all the different tasks that were coming out of it. All the different things that we wanted to do that seemed like really great ideas as we were sitting in a Kaizen event. And then additionally, one of the things that I started to realize was more and more folks in the different areas of the company were coming up to me and asking, well, when are you coming to my area to fix it? And what I realized, we were teaching everybody that it's my team's job to fix all their problems. And that always kind of bothered me because if I'm the only one or if my team is the only one that can fix all the problems, we're going to move real slow. I mean, one of the things that I've said over and over again, I'm just not smart enough to fix all the problems in the company. But if we can use all the resources and put all the brains together, then perhaps we can. So that's when we started to really look at the Toyota Kata method and try to get a little bit more engagement, teach people how to problem solve on their own and then guide them.

So before we jump into Toyota Kata, which I want to go deep there and learn more about what you guys, what you did, you mentioned cme and you know, we have a lot of folks that are outside of Canada listening to this right now, talk a little bit about what CME is. I want, I know Those guys are doing great work. I want to give them a little plug right now. Tell us about CME and you know how they've helped you.

Yeah. Canadian Manufacturing Exporters would be the Canadian equivalent of ami. And they are, they're a great training organization. They've, they've really helped us to not only bring the tools in and learn some of the concepts, but also plug in a number of companies together so that we can all learn off of each other. Probably one of the biggest resources that I have is being able to sit down with like minded companies and companies that are just trying new things and share. We've been willing to have all kinds of people in here and show them what we're doing and we've been invited to other companies to do the same thing. And that's, it's just an amazing way of communicating and building those bridges.

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Yeah, those guys are great. So, all right, let's jump into. So you guys kind of sounds like you sort of began like many folks begin. Right. Maybe running an event, doing a project, got some actions and we're making things better, but perhaps it's just not really moving the needle from a systemic perspective. Right. And you're running out of time, if you will, to get through these Kaizen newspapers. Right. So what was it about? First of all, how did you find out about Toyota Kata? Just read a book or what was it?

We actually went to another training presentation that CME had put on, but it had to do with Hoshin Connery and so brought the general manager and the director of operations out there to go on, look at Hoshin. Because I mean, I had been thinking about some of these things and let's, let's, let's all learn about it. And during that presentation, the, the presenter made a comment. He said, well, this seems like a lot like Toyota Kata. And that just clicked in with me. It's just, okay, I've heard this before. I need to find out what this is all about. I keep, you know, every once in a while I would hear Toyota Kata. Toyota Kata. And all right, I gotta, I gotta look into it. So I started reading and I mean, when I went out of the Toyota Kata website, I started reading the books. Probably that was June of 2016. And I'm gonna guess that I read 5,000 pages of either web or paper. Yeah, I mean, I was reading everything I could get my hands on, just trying to get my head wrapped around what is this thing.

Yeah.

And then in about September, I brought it to my team and said, you know what? I. I want to try this. I want to just real small, just within my team, maybe have one person from outside so that we can do a kata board of our own, and then we can use that as a learning tool as we implement another kata board. So that's really. That was our first kick at the cat.

And I'm not yet. I don't want you to share any, you know, confidential information or anything like that, but can you think back to that first storyboard that you guys created? Like, did you. Did you. Did you follow the whole Recipe and Identify1CF1 Identify the challenge and then current condition and all the rest of it? Is that how you went about it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So do you remember what the challenge was? Or can you maybe give us a sneak peek?

I think the first challenge for our. For the, for the CI team's kata board, it was to build a knowledge and have people trained in kata. It was simple as that.

And did you. Was that kind of like a. How long did you give yourself? A year?

That was. I was giving myself, what, six months.

Six months. Okay, so that was a challenge. And what was the current condition?

Current condition was we had nobody that even knew what kata was.

Well, it makes it easy to write it down on the, on the forms, right?

Zero. Yeah. Okay.

What was your.

What was your target condition first? Our first target condition was I want to have one person that at least has a basic understanding and a little bit of knowledge and has maybe started a first storyboard.

And you. How long did you give yourself for that?

And that was about a two week target condition.

Yep. What were some of the obstacles to that were keeping you from that?

Well, time. You know, everybody's in a whirlwind. Everybody is just trying to keep up with daily production, and we've got it. We're asking one new person on the production floor to try something new and add this to their already busy schedule. Yeah, so that was a problem. There was a. There was an obstacle of knowledge. We. We just didn't have the knowledge on the shop floor. And we had to figure out of those 5,000 pages that I had read, how much of those do we need in order to get started with this? I didn't, I didn't even. Didn't even want to ask somebody to go through all of it. Those were the main ones, I would say.

So what do you remember? Kind of like the first step? First experiment, first next step or whatever it was from that? Yeah. What was that?

I would say the first experiment was Sit down and give an overview. And what did we expect? We expected that this person would have a basic understanding and be willing to try. And what actually happened? It actually happened. Yeah, we were actually able to try it. And we learned that, at least at that first experiment. I would say that we learned that getting the buy in at that first person wasn't too terribly hard. But one of the things that we found fairly quickly, we actually, we were training the wrong person in the first go around. And we found that within probably a week or two.

Why do you say that? What did you learn to make you come up with that conclusion?

Well, what we. The person that we had chosen as our first learner was a lead hand in our organization. So that would be the one step above the entry level.

Okay.

And the person that was supposed to be coaching them was his supervisor. Well, the supervisor had no kata knowledge. Right. So we had the blind leading the blind. So we very quickly took a step back from that and started to work with the supervisor to help him to be a learner first.

Yes.

And then now he was a learner. He had some understanding. We used a Dreyfus model to kind of gauge his level of experience. And then when we felt that he was competent, then we made him a coach and he started coaching his lead hand.

Well, how did you handle, or what. What. How did you go about? I'm sure you didn't say, oh, I'm sorry, you're the wrong person to teach. We shouldn't have invested two weeks of our life into you employee. Right. Like, how did you handle that?

Just talked with them and helped. And. And he's. He saw right away that as he was being coached, he wasn't getting any further. Yeah, the coach wasn't able to answer the questions that. That he had and was giving him more to do. Lists the same things that we've always been doing. Firefighting. Okay, just go fix this, go fix this, go fix this. As opposed to what do you want to fix and how do you think you can fix it?

Beautiful. So, I don't know, fast forward four or five months into that. That journey towards that initial challenge, and what were things looking like?

Oh, we started. We started to see a great uptick in learning in the first several months after we had gained a little bit of stability at that first board. And in our. In our CI board, I rolled it out to the executive team and had them do a cat in a classroom session.

Yeah, that was great.

They were aggressively putting puzzles together, so that was a lot of fun. So they Kind of started to see the concept and then we started to move into a couple different areas. So we went very, very slowly at first. Somebody would never, we wouldn't have somebody as a coach until they had been a learner for an extended period of time. And we were very careful about that because we didn't want people to run into that issue that with the obstacle that we had in the first one. So each one of the supervisors, we would add them on one at a time. And then the CI team, we would be the coach for them and then they would be the learner. And we would again use that same Dreyfus scale to evaluate, you know, how are they doing, are they, are they catching all the different components of it? And then we found it was about a three month turnaround where somebody could be doing that on a daily basis. And now they were comfortable enough to start coaching real fast.

Talk about, about that Dreyfus model a little bit. The skill acquisition, whatever. Talk a little bit about that. And because folks aren't familiar with it, because you've mentioned it twice now.

Yeah. We started to look at, I mean, our first introduction to kata. My first introduction to kata was at a company locally here and Brandon Brown was the trainer. Yeah, we did domino simulation and they had been using this Dreyfus model for a little while where we basically looked at four components of, of kata of the different aspects and just evaluated are they doing well in these pieces. And you know, if they're doing well here, then they're a novice. If they're doing well here, then they're an advanced beginner and then they were competent and then they were expert. So they would move up the scale as they started to have more and more, lack of a better term, green lights go on.

Yeah, well. And I'm sure you guys, as the CI team, who I guess don't want to make an assumption here, you guys were kind of acting as the original first coaches, Is that right?

Right. Yeah, I was, I was actually the only person in the organization that didn't start as a learner.

Yeah, well, I'm sure you learned a lot, right?

Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting because, I mean, I didn't want to have a whole pile of people doing that. So I said, I'll start off as the, as the very first coach in the company. Yeah, but everybody else needs to start as a learner and we're going to coach. And I learned a lot as I was evaluating myself and just getting feedback from the learners. Well, you know, you missed this or you missed this. Or how about we ask this or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. I guess another model is to bring someone like Brandon or whatever in, you know, Mark Rosenthal, one of these guys in to kind of help that initial takeoff or whatever. But no, I think it's. I think it's a great way to go about it, so. Well, you know what, let's kind of fast forward a little bit. And you know, it's 2018 now. Like, where are things at today with. With your use of kata and more importantly, just scientific thinking in general?

Well, we are. We have 42 learners around the company today, and I believe 16 of those are coaches. So our learners are. Or our coaches are always going to be learners in some ways. So they have their own storyboard that they're working on, and then they're coaching their learners on their storyboard. We're using a direct line reporting for. For the coach learner relationship. And we've kind of been going back up through the organization, and we're starting with a couple of the directors and kind of getting them to start as learners, and then they'll start working their way down from their legs to, I guess, meet in the middle.

So if you walk around Barkman, do you see, you know, Cotta storyboards all over the place, or how is that working?

Yeah, we have. We have three facilities, and our. We. Our Alberta plant has two storyboards in it, and it's a very small plant. Our Steinbach plant is our main facility. And I'm going to say we have 17 storyboards in Steinbach and then we have one storyboard in Winnipeg. So, yeah, you go everywhere you see it. And then one of the things that we've started to do is actually we modified it just slightly at the frontline level, where the lead hands are coaching their learners on a daily huddle. So they're not looking at the challenge or the target condition, those kind of things, but they are asking questions about what is the current condition? How did we do yesterday? Did we hit our key performance indicators? And if there was any problems yesterday, which one do we want to work on? What do we plan to do? What do we expect to happen? What actually happened? What did we lear? Yeah, so we're teaching a little bit of that scientific problem solving all the way down to the guys that just started yesterday.

Nice. Nice.

Yeah.

So talk about maybe the. I don't want to make any assumptions here, but has leadership. The leadership. I don't. Leadership style, if you want to put it that way. Has it changed as a result of thinking Scientifically, like this.

Yeah. We're early on in that change, but there is. There is still a little bit of a tendency to firefight.

Yeah.

But we're starting to ask the right questions. We're starting to lead through helping the people to be problem solvers as opposed to giving them the answers.

Yeah, yeah. You know what I think it's all about? I was recently talking to a colleague of mine, and I was horribly guilty as anyone of bad management. And, you know, called him up and I said, hey, let's. We're working on this big initiative. I'm like, hey, let's. Let's try X, Y, and Z. I think that would be great. What do you think? And come to find out this person had been working on another way. Right. Totally different approach, you know, and was frustrated, and it was like, oh, great. The boss just called me and told me to go a totally different direction. And I'm like, what's wrong? And then we got into this kind of discussion, this and that, and. And, well, there I was, you know, like, just. Just randomly throwing out ideas, you know, countermeasures, if you will, experiments without deeply understanding current condition and all the rest of it. So it's so easy to fall into that. I don't even call it bad management. I don't know what it's called, you know.

Yeah, it's. That's probably one of the biggest struggles I have personally is I want to. I want to help people.

Yeah.

And tell them, well, if you do this, this will fix the problem.

Yeah. But there's no learning there, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I've had a couple people come back to me and say, well, you know, Steve, you're preaching this.

Yeah. Yeah.

Maybe you should do what you're preaching.

Yeah, for sure.

And I got to remember that.

For sure. For sure. Well, it's also about that, what they always, you know, the common term, you know, is that threshold of knowledge. Right. Like the idea of holding the flashlight in front of you. And a flashlight only goes so far. You know, I just went camping with my sons this weekend, and it's like, yeah, walk into the bathroom. It's like, oh, boy. I can only see, you know, 10 steps in front of me. Well, how do you find more? You keep walking. Right. You keep shining your light. And I think that's a beautiful analogy to scientific thinking. Right. Just stop assuming you know what's outside of the light. Right. Because you don't know for sure. Right. You gotta test.

One of the quotes that I really love is Mark Twain. He Said, it's not what you know that's a problem. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. So.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You should make a T shirt, man. Should make a T shirt.

Yeah, I mean, we've been having a lot of fun with some of this stuff. I saw smarter every day. You know, this backwards brain bicycle that so many people have heard about, and we had one made here, and I started to practice how to ride this thing. And, you know, it was a great example of how much effort it takes to change the way we think. You know, I would go out and ride this bike, and I'd come back in, and I got my nice clothes on, I got an office job, and I'm coming back in. I'm sweaty. I've been working for the last 15 minutes trying to ride this stupid bike. And I mean, I just. I wasn't getting it. Wasn't getting it, wasn't getting it. It just. I kept having to force myself to go out and spend the time to ride this thing. And eventually I started getting, you know, it was a little bit further before I'd fall down a little bit further, a little bit further. And, you know, at one point, you know, I even had the general manager of the plant come out and ask, what are you doing?

Well, don't leave us hanging. Did you get it?

I started to learn how to ride the bike. I can ride it around the parking lot now.

Wow. Can you ride a regular bike still?

I don't know. I haven't tried that yet. My wife has been asking me to go for a bike ride with her, and I've been kind of putting her off a little bit. So probably in the next couple weeks, I'm going to try riding a regular bike again.

Hey, I think we know what the next step is, you know, because, you know, and if people don't know what the heck we're talking about, everyone, as soon as they're done with this podcast and you get to where you're getting, don't do it in the car. Go on YouTube and Google backwards bicycle. And it's the most fascinating story of the scientists, you know, social scientists, who figures out how to rewire his brain to ride a bicycle that goes backwards so when you turn left, the wheel goes to the right. And, yeah, when he figured it out, then he couldn't ride a regular bike. And then eventually it clicked back in. Right. But goodness gracious, you know, it's. It's so true that our brains are wired a certain way, and to get them to behave or go in a different direction can be super, super hard.

Oh, yeah. It takes a lot of effort. It takes. It's focused, it's uncomfortable. Everything about it. When I'm riding this bike, I equated it to riding a bull. I'm just hanging on, and as long as I can hang on, I'm doing okay. But, I mean, the first little bit, I was, you know, one second, two seconds, and all of a sudden, it was 30 seconds I could hang on to this bike. I still wasn't riding it. I wasn't telling it where to go. It was just doing its own thing. And I was trying to stay on as long as possible. But, you know, it's just that concerted effort of. I just know that I need to do this. I need to reprogram my brain. And if I think and if I move slow enough and I think hard enough, I can think through this. But every time the natural or the subconscious kicks in, I fall down.

Okay, so everyone's watching. Not everyone. A lot of people in the kata movement have watched this video, and I wonder if they really connect the dots between just riding a bicycle, a backwards bicycle, and, you know, working in a business or changing the way that we go about learning. I don't know how to say it. How do you connect the two? What is it about that story that is similar, you think, to practicing something like kata?

Oh, it's. It's. To me, it's exactly the same with kata. We're so used to thinking a certain way. You know, we make our plans. We go step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and execute. Go. MBAs are taught plan and execution, and we're trying to retrain that. We're trying to get away from firefighting. We're trying to get away from telling our folks how to. How to solve problems and trying to get away from even continuous improvement. The way. The way I look at it today is I'm not focused on continuous improvement. I'm focused on neuroscience. Yeah. And if I can teach people how to problem solve, the continuous improvement is a result them being able to be good problem solvers, and it just happens naturally. But first, I got to teach them how to be good problem solvers.

Yeah.

And it's hard work, and it's everything about it. You want to default to the way that you used to think. So you've got to slow down. You got to take the time, and you've got to go through the process and hold on to that bike and steer it slowly and eventually it becomes more and more natural, and eventually you start to get it. But one of the things that I. Again, I haven't ridden a regular bike yet, but I noticed from the. From the video that it did. Destin did when he went back to ride a regular bike. He said it took him eight months to learn how to ride this bike, but it only took him 20 minutes to learn how to ride a regular bike again. So the time. The way I look at that is you put a lot of effort in to learning a new way of thinking and to learn scientific problem solving, but it takes only a little bit of time of you letting your foot off the gas.

Yeah.

Before you're gonna be right back where you started and you're gonna be in firefighting mode.

Yeah. I'm so.

This is something.

Yeah. I mean, I'm so glad you said that, because I think people missed that. I missed that. I watched that video a million times, but I've missed that many times. Like, oh, that's great that he was able to ride a regular bike. Well, no, that's not great. That's bad. You know, that it was so easy for him to learn how to go the old way. Because you're right. I mean, it's just like anything in life, you know, exercise or losing weight or getting healthy or whatever. Super, super hard to get there. But boy, oh, boy, blink your eyes a few times, the next thing you know, you're back on the couch eating old Dutch potato chips and you know.

Yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly it.

Yeah. Yeah. So good. So good. Golly, this has been a fabulous conversation, and time's going to get away from us here. But it's so good. I want to wrap this section up, Steven, with you just maybe telling. Sharing one or two lessons learned, big lessons, holistic lessons learned from this whole journey that you've taken over the last few years. Can you think of any?

Oh, yeah. I would say, number one, don't. Don't regret where you've been, all the things that you've been doing, and whatever your journey is got you to where you're able to go to the next step. So I don't regret the path that we took to get to where we are. It was things that we needed to learn and where we are today. It's going to be hard. It's going to be focused effort. We're going to have to put all of our thoughts and dedication into it in order to think a new way. It's gonna be uncomfortable as Mike. Mike Rother likes to say, if it's uncomfortable, you're probably doing it right. And that's okay because eventually riding that bike is going to get easier and it's going to become more and more comfortable.

Yeah, Yeah, I love that. Don't regret where you've been. You know, we mentioned that earlier. I think it's so easy for all of us to beat ourselves up for all. We're focused on the tools or we're focused on this or that. And, you know, but, you know, it's this, but it's. Well, not a journey. Right. I don't remember what was it, a keynote or a. One of the workshops that I attended last week, the guy, systems control, John Harry, he said, they don't call it. They don't call what they're on, their journey, their lean journey. They call it a lean safari. And I was like, I love that, you know? Yes. Because it's a safari, man. It's not a journey.

Have no idea what's in front of you until you start moving.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So good. So good. All right, Stephen, well, hey, I. I want to fire a couple reflection questions off. Off at you. I'm just as really, really curious to hear. Hear your thoughts. You know, if you could. I know the obvious answer would be to do kata here, but. And that's okay. If it is, maybe you can expand on it. But if you look back at your own career, just your career as a professional, based on what you've learned now and what you know now, if you went back and could do just maybe one thing differently, what would it be, if anything?

Probably to step back and rely more on the people around me. I came into leadership years ago because I was maybe the smartest person in the room. And I figured that I needed to fix everything. And if I would have relied on the people that are around me that are way smarter than I ever was, we would have been able to use more of that combined knowledge to actually fix the problems, instead of fixing the same problems day after day, because I hadn't actually fixed them myself.

So imagine you had access to the time machine, and we've talked about the time machine many times on this podcast. And you can go back to any time in the past, and you had one day, and he could shadow anyone. And by shadow, I mean you could talk to this person. You can ask them anything. It totally open. Who would you go visit and what would you want to learn?

I really think it would be Deming back in the late 40s and 50s, the way Deming was helping with North America, trying to get TWI up and running, get these manufacturing facilities that had lost all the men that were off to war and now had a whole new workforce coming in. He had the concepts. He was the one that started to teach Toyota all these things. And to be able to pick his brains and just try to understand what made him tick, I think that would be a real win.

Mm. Mm. What are you most proud of as it relates to your. Your journey, your safari, with continuous improvement?

I think the position that I'm in now is not a boss, it's not a director, but a coach, somebody who is. I'm more focused on other people learning and helping them to think differently than telling them how to fix a problem. And I think that builds into them and allows them to succeed and to really be proud of what they do when they go home at the end of the day.

Yeah. So good. So good. All right. Well, Steven, I don't want to keep you all day. I know we've had you on for a little while here. This has been a great, great conversation. I've really enjoyed chatting with you. But let's go ahead and wrap things up, share some final words of wisdom with the folks listening, and then definitely tell people how they can best connect with you. Social media website, something like that.

Well, I think the biggest thing is enjoy the journey or enjoy the safari.

Yeah.

Enjoy the direction that you're going. Know that you're going to learn something new tomorrow than you know today, and you're going to look back and you may have regrets, but the fact is, if you can engage your team, if you can bring the entire organization around you, trying to solve the problems that bother them and that bother the customers, you will be in an organization that just cannot be stopped.

Yeah. Beautiful. And how can people connect with you, Steven?

Well, I'm on LinkedIn, and that's probably the one place that I'm. I'm actually connected, is through LinkedIn. So you can connect with me there. You can connect with. You can look at The Barkman website, www.bachmanconcrete.com and see what. See what we're doing there.

And spell your name. Stephen.

Stephen Dirksen. S T E P H E N D E R K S E N. Okay.

And we'll put that on the show notes as well. People can find out over@gembapodcast.com this will be episode 221, so go check that out. We'll link to Stephen. Hey, thanks for. Thanks for taking time. It was really, really great meeting you last week. And I normally say, hey, maybe we can meet up at a conference, but we've already done that, so.

We have. And I'm planning on being at the next kata conference, so hopefully we can meet up there as well.

Beautiful. I'm sure I'll be there. I'm sure I'll be there. All right, well, thanks again. Hey, enjoy your Canadian summer up there. Best time to be in that area is right now, man. It's lovely.

Thank you very much, Ron.

Okay, you take care.

All right, we'll talk to you later.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached full of fully functional test drive of gembacademy. Com. Gain immediate access to more than a ousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge@gembacademy.com.