GA 223 | How to Apply Lean to the Government with Justin Kenney

It is so great to have those connections with people. And it feels really, really good when, you know, someone gets done with a facilitation and they're like, that was great. Like, I learned a lot about that, and I think that I've grown professionally as a result. Like, that's awesome.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Justin Kenny to the show. Justin works for the state of Vermont, where he, along with thousands of other Vermont government employees, are working hard to improve their state with lean and 6s. Now, on today's show, Justin and I talk about how they got started with Kaizen events and eventually transitioned into a more mature, balanced approach of continuous improvement. And before we get started, I want to give a shout out to my very good friend Allison Fisher up in the state of Connecticut, who was kind enough to introduce me to Justin. So, as always, thank you, Alison. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything Justin and I talk about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com to just look for episode 2, 2, 3. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over at gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial. Now let's get to the show. All right, Justin, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Hey, things are good. Thanks for having me on.

All right, well, where are you calling in from?

I am calling from Montpelier, Vermont.

Beautiful part of the country.

Oh, it's amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm down here baking in Texas, you know, so I guess you're not probably. Well, you got like, 78 or something like that.

Yeah, it's probably around 80 degrees. Yeah.

Tough life. Tough life.

Oh, real tough.

All right, well, hey, I'm so happy that our mutual friend Allison Fisher from. From Connecticut introduced us. So, Allison, I know you're listening. Thank you for being awesome and. And for connecting Justin and myself here for the podcast. So how long have you known Allison?

Oh, I would say probably three and a half, four years at this point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Well, just to kind of give everyone just a heads up on who you are and maybe your background. Justin. What? Tell us a little bit about. About how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff. Obviously, we're going to go deep into your lean journey there in Vermont, but just give us a heads up of what you're up to these days.

Yeah, it's kind of a circuitous route. I studied environmental science in college and had a concentration in ecological design. So trying to design with nature, I would Say, that was really my first bout into problem solving. A lot of ecological design is all about throwing a bunch of stuff together to see what happens and trying to solve a specific problem. So I did that in college and then worked a variety of jobs. Had been working at the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps time, and actually my first exposure to Lean was an A3 problem solving workshop that was a day long. Nice. Which, yeah, it was great. That was back in 2008, I think. And I was really excited about that and used some of those principles at the youth core and continued to do that type of work over the course of a variety of different jobs. Studied Baldrich a little bit, used a little bit of that. But most recently when I was working for the state of Vermont in a previous role as a Green Infrastructure Coordinator, still doing some ecological design stuff, the LEAN initiative had actually come to the department and it was really kind of a pilot program in the state. And there was an opportunity to get trained as a facilitator to conduct a variety of process improvement activities. And I immediately jumped on that, so excited about the opportunity, got trained as a facilitator, did a number of events as a facilitator, and then there was an actual position that had opened up coordinating continuous improvement activities throughout the department. And I applied for that and got it. And then all of a sudden I was just thrown headfirst into the world of lean. Right. Way more than A three, way more than process mapping, all sorts of different things. And it was super exciting. And now I'm actually doing continuous improvement on a statewide level, which I've been doing for about three months now, which is even better because now I get to share the LEAN love with everybody in state government, which is really great.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, I know you listen to the show, Justin, and we kind of prepped ahead of time here, but I know you had a quote you want to share with the listeners. So what do you got?

Yeah, so folks probably know this one by Taichi Ono, which is data is of course important, but I place the greatest emphasis on facts. And I think about that quote a lot and find it especially important as we kind of see ourselves moving more and more towards a data driven world. Personally, I would call myself a data geek. So whenever I get involved with teams, I tend to do a lot of the data analysis for them. And I think it's really easy to get stuck in the data just to kind of lose yourself in it and believe that the data kind of speak for themselves. But I always want to bring that quote back, because I have to remind myself that the reality is that data is really just a cover page to a story. And as that saying goes, right, we never want to judge a book by its cover. So our job is really to take data. Well, not take data at face value, which I think is what we often do, but to really, like, see data as an opportunity to open a book and read through the pages, uncover what's inside by asking interesting and sometimes very basic questions like why or how. And, you know, I do a lot of reading, and, you know, Peter Drucker has said that the purpose of data is to provide insights which lead us to action. So the actual act of gaining those insights and finding that truth is something that I can think. I think we can all be better at, especially if you want those actions to be the right ones. So I come to that quote a lot. It's a good reminder that there's a truth to data that's not necessarily there on the surface, and we have to dig a little deeper to find it. Yeah.

Amen. You know, last few days, I've been working with some of our folks going through kind of our black belt program. And, you know, one of the things that we do early on is really hammer down on measurement system analysis. And I would say probably nine times out of ten, what we find is that the initial data that the person has to kind of quantify the badness of the problem, if you will, they come to learn that they really can't even trust it because their measurement system's so bad. So before we can even truly quantify the problem, we got to go back, we got to fix the measurement system, you know, and I think it's. I think it just plagues the world, really. I mentioned this on a previous podcast that we just. We got to get back to the basics sometimes and. And make sure that, you know, you can trust that data to begin with before you even think about forming a hypotheses or thinking about countermeasures or whatever it might be. So, yeah, I love it. I love it. All right, well, hey, Justin, let's kind of jump in a little bit into. I guess the theme really is making continuous improvement work in the government. And obviously, we're going to be focusing on Vermont and all the work that you guys are doing, but I think it's safe to say this is going to be applicable to. To anyone listening right now, no matter even if they're outside of the United States. You know, we were just up in Canada, and. And I can tell you they're doing a ton of work up there. We were in Manitoba, so we were speaking to a lot of those folks in that province and, and they're really getting after it and they're trying and all that. So I'm really hopeful for. I mean, it's obviously easy to be critical of the government and you know, politics in general or whatever it is, but at the end of the day, we're all people, we're all trying to, to make things better. Right. No matter what side of the, of the fence you're on. So I think we can, I think continuous improvement could be a nice way for, for everyone to kind of pull together. No matter if you're Republican, Democrat, you know, it doesn't matter. Independent, we can all agree. Let's try to make things better. Right, Right.

Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it. So, so let's go back to the beginning of the journey though, in, in Vermont and tell us a little bit about you. You touched on the history a little bit, but dig a little deeper and tell us what, what did it look? Oh, I don't know, six months. Was it kind of, you know, you went around and five S' ed everything or ransom Kaizen events or, or what did you do?

Yeah, there's. Well, it's actually, gosh, a really long history of continuous improvement in the state, although it's been somewhat piecemeal, I would say, over the past couple decades. So I've only been in state government roughly five years, but you know, I talk with people from Agency of Education and they bring up TQM. Department of Environmental Conservation did a kaizen event in 2008 that was wildly unsuccessful, unfortunately for a variety of reasons. So couldn't use the term Kaizen when we brought lean back. Right. That like, visceral reaction to the term.

Wow. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. Oh yeah, it's interesting. But you know, and then we've got like the Agency of Human Services who's been using results based accountability, which is a framework around continuous improvement, and their own continuous improvement model called AIM, which is the agency improvement model based on PDCA. They've been doing that for roughly 10 years. So it's like, you know, there were these pockets of continuous improvement, but no like formal thing to pull it together. Lean really as a formal thing didn't come into the lexicon until probably 2012, 2013 at the Department of Environmental Conservation where I used to work. So at the time, the commissioner had been talking to a bunch of other states, Connecticut, New Hampshire, et cetera, et cetera, and was really hearing a lot about this Lean thing and how great it was, and said, oh my gosh, this is a perfect opportunity for us to do this in dec. So he had put in a request of the legislature to get some money to hire some staff and a consultant to help out. And they granted it, saw this as a great pilot program for the state. And so we started a Lean program. And the main model of it, which I tend to call the cookie cutter version of Lean, because I've actually seen the same thing in a lot of different states. It seems to be the government thing was train a bunch of people to be Lean leaders, facilitators, run a bunch of five day Kaizen events. And that's essentially how we started. We had an initial training for maybe 20, 30 people, and then we were running three concurrent five day kaizen events every four months.

Wow, that's a lot.

Yeah, it's a tremendous amount. And we did that for roughly two years at dec. What kind of events were you doing?

I mean, was it. What were you. What kind of problems were you trying to improve?

Well, there's a bunch of stuff on permitting. There were some projects that led to new database builds. We tried to lean the entirety of the wetlands program. It tended to be some really big scope projects because, you know, you're spending five days in a room together, you want the investment to actually pay off.

Yeah.

So, you know, at the outset it seemed like a really great thing, like, oh my gosh, this is a great way to get a lot of people involved. You know, Lean weeks come and we have three projects, here's the schedule, folks are getting involved. But it actually had a lot of downsides as well, which we started to see maybe a year and a half, two years later. So, you know, we ended up with 18 projects in the first two years that were fairly large. A lot of them had IT components to them. So there was this bottleneck in it of actual implementation. So projects that staff were expecting to take maybe six months a year weren't even finished. After two years, people started to think of Lean as not being successful. Right. And I would say the Lean portion was great. You came up with some really great ideas and recommendations, but it was the implementation that fell through. And there were a variety of reasons for that. We also started to see that we were tapping our facilitators a little bit too much. So what do you mean? Well, so, you know, we would. We had trained maybe 30 people, and reality was that maybe 20 of those actually wanted to facilitate. So some people volunteered Some people were kind of voluntold. So what would happen is you keep going to the same people for these events. And after someone does one event at five days and does another event for another five days, it's really hard to get them to do a third event. Yeah, to commit that time. Right. And then the other thing we started to see was that people were really thinking of Lean as a five day Kaizen event. So when we would try to get ideas generated from staff for improvements, they would kind of back away from us a little bit because they were like, well, I don't want to invest five days in a project. Right. And I don't want to do that process mapping thing because that's really the only tool we were using, which I think of like the sledgehammer of Lean is process mapping. So anyway, so at that time I came in as the Lean coordinator maybe about a year and a half into that cycle and started to see some of those issues. And that was verified when I started to talk to other states and they were like, yeah, we're kind of in the same boat. We've been running this five day Kaizen model for roughly five years and it doesn't feel like it's working. So at about that time, the Agency of Transportation in Vermont decided that they also wanted to undertake a Lean program and they had some funding to do it. So I worked with them pretty closely to shift the model a little bit, to actually start thinking about smaller scaled events using a kind of a different tool set. And they use some of their money to bring in another consultant to do a completely different type of training. So the original training we did at DEC was roughly a three day training, mostly around value stream mapping, not a lot in terms of facilitation, stages of group development, any of that stuff. So when the new training program came in, it followed the typical white, yellow and green belt series, which was a massive improvement over the original training. So that provided people with a real context about what is continuous improvement and how would you actually run an event.

Now, were the people trained initially, were they the original facilitators or were they other people or combination of the two?

Yeah. So the new training ended up being a whole new crop of people.

Okay.

And what I liked about that model, and it's a model we've continued to use, although we've adapted it statewide, was that, you know, people could come in and get that white belt and just gain a general awareness, or they could take yellow and learn some of the skills or go all the way to Green. So, you know, different levels that people could choose their own adventure. So that was a great way to actually get a lot more people involved in continuous improvement. Because the original training was just. We're training people to be facilitators now.

What happened to those original facilitators? Are they still practicing or where are they at?

Yeah, so the majority of probably like 60, 70% of them, I would say have done some sort of facilitation, have done an event. You know, there's a. Maybe 10% of them said, I'm actually not interested in facilitating, I'm out, that's fine. Right. People can make that choice.

Sure.

And we've actually, when we started rolling out our statewide training, which is another iteration of white, yellow and green, we actually grandfathered a lot of those folks in as green belts and provided a refresher course for them so they could get up to speed on all the new tools and techniques.

Mm mm. So now are the, the improvements more. Are they longer term, kind of traditional, you know, project based improvements or what's that look like?

Yeah, so the. Where we talk a lot about. Right. Sizing our lean efforts. So it depends on what problem is coming to us. So, you know, in some cases it's a four hour conversation. It might be a root cause analysis or it might be a four hour, a three. In other cases it's a longer term project following somewhat like the DMAIC model where we have a series of meetings and we're working through specific things to hit milestones, to come up with a really strong hypothesis about what we want to do. So we're really like. That has helped a lot in terms of people coming forward with ideas because now they realize that, oh, I can get a facilitator to help me with maybe a two hour meeting that can really just create a structured agenda for me to get to some outcome that I'm trying to achieve or to solve some problem that we've got. And that really opened the door to a lot more people getting involved in our continuous improvement efforts.

Now how many people do you know? I mean, off the top of your head, approximately how many people have kind of been trained at the various levels?

Yeah, so it's a little over a thousand that have been belted at this point. And we have. Yeah, no, it's, it's great. Yeah. Over the, over the course of, you know, four or five years and there's maybe, I mean, Vermont's pretty small. We've got about 8,000 people in the executive branch. So we're doing pretty good. Wow. In terms of that.

Wow. So is there anything. You know, we've. We've talked to some other folks, like, you know, again, Allison in Connecticut, and, you know, we've been. Done some. Some stuff at the city level. City of Grand Rapids is doing a lot of great work. Is there anything unique about the way you guys are approaching it in Vermont, you think?

Yeah. So one of the unique things is that there's actually an executive order in place that came in roughly a year and a half ago. So there was administration change. Governor Scott had seen what was happening in DEC in Agency of Transportation and Agency of Human Services and said, gosh, there's some really great work happening here, and we want to be able to leverage that and expand that across the state. So every agency and department has an opportunity to do this work, all for the betterment of citizens of Vermont. So he created an executive order that essentially established this program called pivot, which is the program to improve Vermont outcomes together, and tasked the state's Chief Performance Officer, Susan Zeller, with actually creating a program around it. So I got tapped to help with that, Drew Russli from Agency of Human Services and Paul Keegan from Agency of Transportation to help create that. Now, Paul is all. Is Adrian Gill, because Paul ended up leaving. But that's what we've been doing for the past year and a half, is essentially trying to take lessons learned from all these different iterations of continuous improvement and trying to create a framework. So what's really nice about the executive order and this administration is that they provided a strategic focus to our efforts, which I haven't really seen in other states, at least from the, you know, the highest level of government. So when he came in, he said, I've got three things that I'm really interested in. Growing the Vermont economy, making Vermont more affordable, and protecting Vermont's most vulnerable. And I want every agency and department to be thinking about how they're contributing towards those ends. And, you know, when you think about Hoshin Kanri, like, those are the strategic intents or the breakthrough objectives of state government right now. And that's really nice to have that. Like, that's really a gift to. To have everybody working towards those ends.

No, I don't know a lot about Governor Scott, but I understand he kind of has. Doesn't he have, like, an entrepreneurial background? I think?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. He owned his own business, right? Yeah.

So I'm wondering if, like, sometimes I wonder what some of these politicians, when they. When they have come from, you know, Whatever you want to call it, the, you know, I don't want to say the real world, but you know what I mean, they ran businesses or whatever it might be that they maybe they have a different sense of what's required, you know. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I think it was. That's very visionary to just lay down three things.

Yeah.

That we're gonna work on. Like, as I said, I really haven't seen that in other states. And when I talk with other states that are doing this, they're like, oh my gosh, we wish we had that type of direction.

Yeah. And I don't want you to name any states because I don't want to pick on anybody. But if you could, you know, get a, get a gauge. Oh, I don't know, just a barometer. And we'll just. Obviously we're in America, so we'll talk about the United States. As far as a saturation level of any form of continuous improvement. Doesn't have to be a formal lean program or anything like that, but just a general idea of the concept of continuous improvement. How many states would you say are practicing or at least aware that there's a thing out there called continuous improvement?

I think based on numbers that I've seen, it's at least over 30.

That's pretty good.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty impressive. I mean, everybody's kind of doing, doing their own thing, which is interesting. And in New England, you know, we have this regional roundtable that we've brought together, you know, Alice and myself and a couple other folks to actually talk about how we're all doing this because we're all in the same boat.

Yeah.

You know, government is kind of a unique beast. It's very different than the for profit world. Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, turnover at the top, administration changes, and it's very hard to embellish a culture of continuous improvement in an environment like that. So, you know, we bounce a lot of ideas off each other in terms of training, projects, implementation, how to get leadership buy in all that stuff. And that, that networking is amazing and I've learned so much from that.

Well, and obviously the elephant in the room is that, you know, every so many years there's going to be new leadership. It's just the way that our government works. Right. And so that's has to be a challenge. Right. You're not sure what the next person's going to want to do, right?

Well, yeah. And I Think Vermont's super unique in that we have a two year gubernatorial term. So every two years there's an opportunity for there to be a new administration.

Yeah.

On average, governors are in office for at least four to six years. And I think there's only one state that's aside from us that has that two year term. But that is a challenge. You never know whether or not they're going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Right, right, right, right. Well, you just have to make it so good that no matter why would.

They want to throw that out?

Right.

Well, yeah. And one of the things we've been doing is that is also unique is a tie in with results based accountability. So when, as I mentioned, Suzello, the Chief Performance Officer, pulled in Agency of Human Services, you know, they've been using results based accountability for a number of years, at least a decade. And we actually have Act 186, which is a statutory reference for RBA that requires everybody to do it. So we saw Pivot as an opportunity to link those two things together, which has actually been really fantastic. And it allows us to approach problem solving really from an ends to means thinking model. So RBA is really fantastic in that it just provides a different lens to look at continuous improvement. So we can really start to think about programs and how programs are functioning and what they're trying to achieve and who are their customers and who are the partners that have a role to play. So we can, you know, when we're, when we're in the weeds on a process improvement activity, we actually can see that there's a contribution towards some greater end that we're trying to achieve. And, and so that provides such a great context for the improvement. So it doesn't feel like it's a random act of improvement, that it actually has a benefit, that there's a need for that improvement. What I also like is that RBA comes with this performance measure framework of three key questions, which is how much did we do, how well did we do it? And is anyone better off? And often when we're talking about rba, those performance measures are at a program level or higher. Sometimes we're talking about indicators, but that same framework can be applied to key performance indicators that we use at the tactical level. So it's what are the things that we're measuring, how are we actually showing results and what are the measures that matter the most either at the process level or at the program level? So that's the other unique thing in Vermont. And I know a Lot of other states do RBA and do Lean, but I haven't seen anyone really tie those two things together. And our training is really a blended curriculum, so we provide the RBA tools as well as the lean tools, which is. Which is great, in my opinion, because it just broadens the skill set of facilitators.

Yeah, that's great. Hey, can you. I want to talk about, eventually get to maybe some challenges that you guys face. But before that, can you give us. And obviously don't share anything confidential, you know, but can you. Can you share maybe just an example of a. An improvement that you're pretty proud of?

Yeah, let's see. We just started working on one last week, actually. So we had a one and a half day event on something called VT Shares. So VT Shares is. It's a charitable giving program that allows employees to give to charities through payroll deduction. So, you know, an employee can give to any charity they want at any time on their own. But this provides kind of a quick and easy way to do that. And what's nice about VT Shares, it's, you know, a collective across state government. So it's a bunch of employees contributing in the same time frame. So it's a really great way for Vermont as a state government to give back to charities. So that process has really not changed that much since the program was created in 1978. And just given that time frame, you can probably imagine how the process runs. There's a bunch of manual cards that are given out. So 8,000 of them are printed every year with employee information and addresses, and they get put on each individual person's desk. Yeah, it's kind of a distribution nightmare. And there's personally identifiable information on those cards. So our Department of Human Resources was like, at a minimum, we got to get rid of that. So. And then this. The program actually cycles every four years through a different agency. So the group that runs it, like, changes. So there's very little standard work aside from historically what people know. So Hope Smith, who's the acting as the chair of that, came to me and said, you know, we want to make some improvements to this. We're thinking about going automated. Can, you know, can we sit down and discuss it? I was like, great. You know, so we went through the chartering process, thought about the team of folks to bring together, and there was this recognition that, yeah, we can go automated, but what does automated actually mean? Right. We should really understand what the requirements are of this process and everybody that's involved.

Yeah. Don't want to automate waste. Right?

Yeah, Right. We don't want to like, yeah, we probably have an idea that we need to automate based on the age of this process and what we're seeing. But you know, we don't want to jump to a solution without actually understanding what's needed. So, yeah, so we, so we got the folks that were involved, you know, people that are on the committee, people that are key people who distribute the cards for a day and a half. And we hammered it out. We did an IPO map to understand kind of the highest level of the process. We did a modified swim lane map that looked at kind of key roles and functions with IPO kind of right above the process map. And we talked about, you know, what were the needs in the future state, like what's the bearing, the barest bones information that's needed by Department of Human Resources to deduct payments from payroll to give to charities. Right. So we boiled that process down into really the basic things and talked about what type of system would be needed to do that. So not even like, is it going to be SharePoint or is it Adobe Fillable PDF, but what are requirements of that system? And then the system will kind of choose itself. And that event ended and I felt really good about it. I think at the end of the day, you know, there's an opportunity there to reallocate between 60 and $70,000 of staff time to higher value work because it's a, you know, it's an administrative burden to distribute all those cards and collect the data manually and enter it into a system, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm excited about that.

What are the next steps for that project?

Well, yeah, so then there's implementation, which is the tricky part is actually getting the resources to implement. And that's one of the challenges I would talk about is how do we actually have the right resources to implement a project. So we do have to just get buy in from the Secretary of the Agency of Administration who's the sponsor of it. And I don't see any concerns with that. And then we just actually have to talk with our Agency of Digital Services to see how we might build this. And, and based on initial conversations with them, it's not really complicated. There's not a ton of data that's needed. It's a pretty simple thing. It could potentially just be a web form at this stage, if we're just going to do an interim and a way to collect the data and make sure that it's secure. It's interesting that. And I asked Hope about it, I said, what has kept this project from moving forward in the past? Why has this process not changed? It's not like any of the issues brought up were new. They've been around for a long time. And we came down to this rotation of the committee every four years and there's a policy that dictates that. Right. So yeah, I think someone comes in to run the process and it's their first year and they're learning what to do and then it's their second year and maybe they got their feet under them and then they got two more years and then they're handing it off. So there's no really impetus to own it. Like no one really owns the process. And I've seen many examples of that in government. Wherever there's a process or a value stream that has no owner, no one takes accountability for making sure that that process is improved over time. So one of the things we'll do is change the policy to actually create some sort of formal structure to keep that committee in place so that it doesn't rotate every four years.

Yeah, well, it's back to the same thing of governors coming in and out and all the rest of it, I feel like. And it's not just government, this is, this is the world, is that we have our challenge as continuous improvement, folks, is to make the stuff that we do the same as breathing. Right. Like you have to breathe right when you wake up. I mean it's natural. I feel like we've got to get to the point and we're not even anywhere close. Right. But let's keep going. Maybe our kids, kids will live in a world where it's just the way that you do your work. It's no longer a thing thing. Right. Like Lean's a thing. People talk about the Lean program or whatever you want. We got to get to a point to where it's no longer a program, it's just, it's this how everyone works, you know, And I don't know. So I think you're doing the right thing. And what I really liked about that project that you're doing is, you know, he even here at Gemba Academy, we've got all these great ideas for oh, let's do this on our website or change this thing or whatever it is. And then we go to Tony, our IT director and he's like, uh huh, that's going to be this much money, this much time, you know, and we haven't even really thought out you know, that's why I said don't automate waste, because that's one of his famous sayings is, you know, figure out how you want to do this process to, you know, in a manual way with your cards or whatever it is. But once we've perfected that, then we can automate it. But when we. But. And it sounds like that's what you guys did, right? You figured out, you know, the process and now you're bringing that to your. To your IT folks. So I'm sure they appreciate that.

Yeah, we talk about that a lot in training, that we want to innovate before we automate, and we don't want to automate waste. And we're doing as much as we can to work with our agency of Digital Services to kind of embed that philosophy in the way that they do their work, because there have been both in Vermont, but also other states, some pretty large IT failures, projects that essentially just tried to automate the process that wasn't in place. And at the end of the day, they don't work. One of the things I've been talking about a lot in training is I'm starting to see. It's unfortunate, but I'm starting to see technology as somewhat of a crutch to innovation and continuous improvement, especially for big IT systems, because you make this really massive investment, sometimes in millions of dollars in a system, and you expect the system to solve a bunch of problems for you. And, you know, the speed at which we change processes is actually faster than the speed at which technology can move. And it's amazing to think about that. But, you know, once you have a technology that you might have spent $10 million on, you're kind of wedded to that thing for at least 10 or more years. Right? And it ends up defining your process. It really does. So even if you wanted to make a change to your process because there's a new best practice out a month later, you really can't. Because the amount of resources to change technology, it's just really difficult to get, especially after a massive investment like that. So I like to think about technology as a way to enable better process and a way to leverage good process. And if we build systems that allow that modularity, that agility, that flexibility, then, yeah, there's a greater likelihood that we'll be able to change them and meet our needs. But if we're not thinking about technology in that way and we're thinking about it as a solution, it's only going to be a solution for a Small period in time. And then those conditions change and it no longer meets the need.

Yeah. Hey, so I have to ask, you know, anytime we talk to the government, I mean, it's. I don't know how it is in Vermont, you know, and I can, I can tell you it's hit and miss here in Texas with our, with our friends at the dmv. Right. As far as, you know, you gotta go in and get your license renewed or whatever it might be. And, you know, it could be a frustrating experience in some cases. I'm not saying it is in Vermont, and I'm not saying it always is. And I don't want to. It's easy to pick on them. Right. But they got a tough job. There's a lot of people that pile into those places at one time. But, you know, have you guys done any work in that area or, or if not, what ideas do you have?

Yeah. So Adrian Gill, who is the lean coordinator at the Agency of Transportation, is doing a bunch of work with the Department of Motor Vehicles. And Yeah, I think DMVs are just hard in general. Like, they're very customer service oriented. They're pumping out very large volumes of work every single day. There's timeframes that they need to meet. And I think they don't necessarily always get the resources that they need to keep up with the times. Yeah, but we've, you know, we've trained a bunch of staff at dmv, which is great. So we're starting, starting to get saturation there. Adrienne has been doing a lot of work with them. She, she recently did an organizational assessment to try to get a sense of, you know, where staff were at. DMVs are hard. It's. I mean, you go to any state and, and you'll hear that. Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, something unique about DMVs.

My, my daughter just turned 15, so we got her permit, you know, here in Texas, and, And went onto the website and the DMV website here and, and the particular place we were going allowed you to do this web, web check in kind of thing, you know. So, yeah, we hit this thing in the morning and said, show up at 10:40 or whatever it was, and. But 10 minutes early, you know, be there 10 minutes before the time. Right. Just to make sure. So we showed up and actually we were. We got there even earlier than that just to be safe, and we got in even earlier than that. But it was interesting because I was watching and says on the text message, be there 10 minutes before. Well, some poor lady got there, like, you know, 10 minutes before, and they had called her time slot before that 10 minutes was, you know, so. And so she got there and the guy, he hadn't been trained properly, obviously, and he was like, oh, you're supposed to have been here already. And she's like, it says 10 minutes. And he was, like, all flustered. And so I felt bad, you know, because clearly in that case, it was a lack of trading for this individual. You know, they were going early, which maybe is okay. But, gosh, if someone turns up, you know, at the right time, they can't be turned away. Right. And so. Yeah, it's just. It's just interesting. Right. So.

Well, I also. I also have to remind myself that, you know, there's probably only two departments or agencies that deal with every single. Well, close to every single person in the state.

Yeah.

And that would be, you know, the Department of Taxes and dmv.

Yeah.

Like direct customer relationships. Yeah. So. Yeah. And, you know, at the dmv, we were talking the other day about the number of forms that they have and the number of processes they're responsible for. And it was, you know, they had like, 400 forms. Yeah. Like, there's. There's a lot that they're responsible for. And to. To manage all of that is extremely difficult. Really hard.

Well, it's probably like we gotta, you know, if we really wanted to fix the problems and help those folks at the DMV and then help all the citizens of the. Of the country, we gotta look at, do we really need 400 forms? Right.

I know, right.

You know, and start there. Don't, don't. Again, quit trying to automate waste. Right. You know, do you need 400? Maybe you do. I don't know. But if you do, then how do we facilitate that in the most stream we got? We need flow. Right. So.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Good stuff. Hey, any. What other challenges are you guys facing? I mean, we've talked about, you know, the. The challenge of folks kind of coming and going and. And how it's tough to have standard work and whatnot across different groups who don't really own the process, so to speak. But is anything else?

Well, I mean, one of the things that we've been talking a lot about is what we call the frozen middle, which is that, like, you know, middle management tier, division directors, program managers. So we often. And I think it's the same with a lot of state governments do a lot of work at the very top commissioners, secretaries, you know, the administration that's running Everything. And we do a lot of work at the very bottom. So the boots on the grounds that are coming to our training, but we often fail to hit the people in the middle that are actually the ones that can make or break continuous improvement. And so we've been thinking a lot about that and, like, how we might get to those folks. Part of it is the whole what's in it for me? And showing success and value of the programs, etc. And, you know, when I have a facilitator work on a project, I email their supervisor afterwards and just thank them for providing that opportunity and talk about the great work that the facilitator did. Because I think that's just one way to make sure people are involved and engaged and know what's going on. But we've also been talking about, you know, actually running a management training for those folks, which is not, here's how to do process mapping, here's how to create a Pareto chart, but it's more about, you know, Gemba. What is it? Like, how do you go to the Gemba, how do you find the truth of a situation leader Standard work, like, what should you be doing every single day? You know, the coaching and mentoring kata, problem solving kata. We've been thinking a lot about, like, how do we actually get middle managers to actually utilize those behaviors and utilize some of those principles. So that's probably going to be a big focus for us in the next year. Is starting to work on that. And, you know, we hear it from staff because staff, you know, thousand people have gone through training, staff come back and they say, oh, my gosh, I can't get my supervisor to approve me or allow me to work on this project, or I'm hitting some resistance with this idea. And another interesting thing about government is there's this break between the leadership of state government and the actual employees that do the work. So there's a number of employees that kind of ride out these initiatives. Yeah, because they know that they'll be cheering at the top. Right. So they'll say, yeah, in two years.

This too shall pass.

Yeah, this, this will pass. It's another fad. We don't have to do it. And I can just get back to the work that I have to do. And so, you know, they'll do some, they'll do some of the work if they're required to, but it'll be the bare minimum and you'll know that they don't have the buy in. So we're gonna, we're gonna start to do a lot of that work. And it's something that I just realized, like, gosh, if we had done that at the start, maybe we would be in a different place.

Yeah.

But, you know, you can't go back in time. You can only move forward.

Yeah. Well, along those. Along those kind of lessons learned kind of topics. You know, let's say someone's listening to this right now, this podcast, and, you know, they're in another state who. Maybe they aren't practicing continuous improvement, or maybe they're just beginning or thinking about it. If you could give them some specific advice or words of wisdom, if you will, what would it be? Well, I would.

Man, if they're starting, let's say they're starting a continuous improvement or lean journey, I would encourage them to reach out to a bunch of the other states around them or just throughout the country. There's so many lessons that have been learned in state government, and there's not that many books about it out there. I mean, there's some that are really great. Ken Miller's got some great books. But I would reach out directly to the folks that are doing the work in government so that they can understand some of the particular challenges that we face. I think anyone starting a lean program in government should not try to emulate Toyota, which I think a lot of people try to do. And it's like, you know, as reality Toyota, it's taken them 80 years to get where they are today, so can't just take what they're doing and kind of plop it down and expect that it's going to work in our environment or our culture. So I would tell people to, like, really start at the basics, understand what PDSA is, understand what continuous improvement is, understand some of the basic tools and start out fairly small and then expand upon successes that you gain so that you're actually building a very strong foundation for a program that you can actually build on top of.

Yeah, well. And if folks are wondering who to reach out to, obviously I'm sure you're open for a phone call or email. And I know Allison Fisher is. There's. Have you ever come in contact with the folks out in Washington, State of Washington?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Holly Jensen, Daryl Dameron, all those folks out there, they're working hard and doing so, you know, you got both coasts covered at least, you know.

Well, yeah, the other. The other state that's doing a lot is Colorado. And, you know, particularly I would call out Gary Van Such, who runs this transportation for him.

Yes.

I mean, I know Gary. Yep. Yeah, he's doing amazing work. He's got a whole bunch of states involved. He's got like six or seven interns. I'm like, I am super jealous of him.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I tell him that all the time.

Yeah.

But, yeah, there's some great work happening out there.

Yeah. No, exactly, exactly. So good. So good. All right. Well, golly, we've been talking for almost over 40 minutes. Time flies, you know, when you're having fun. So, yeah, what I want to do now is just. I won't go for the whole litany of reflection question, but there's. There's a couple that I definitely want to ask you and really the kind of. The work off of each other from opposite angles. And the first one is if you could look back over what you've done and over the last 10 years, or however long it's been that you've been at this, is there anything that you wish you could do over again, do differently?

Yeah. If I was back at DEC in the original days, I would have not chosen to move ahead with the training 5 day kaizen model. I would have done a more broad brush training. I probably would have focused on middle management a little bit more to make sure people really understand what it means to continuously improve and what it takes to. And I would have selected maybe some specific principles, like maybe it's 5s that folks could have just implemented, could have done some success, got some success from that and then moved on to some of the other tools. I just. There were so many. There's a lot of bad blood with a lot of people about Kaizen and Lean and perception that people got because of the way that we implemented it.

And.

And I think there's still people there in DEC that don't see Lean as a way to manage their processes better, as a way to improve. They see it as. As we talked about an extra thing or this process mapping event or this five day thing, and that's. And I've done. It's been a lot of work to get those people to see that it's just a tool that they can utilize and it's a way of thinking. So I would have started differently there if we could have.

Yeah, exactly. All right, last question. What are you most proud of on the flip side of what you guys have accomplished?

Man, I'm most proud of the people that have supported this effort, especially our facilitators. So I'm in a pretty cool role being able to support all the statewide efforts. So in Vermont, I'm One of the ones that actually trains all the folks that come through training. So I get to build these relationships with folks that go through white, yellow, and Greenbelt. And we have maybe, I think it's 147 active greenbelt facilitators. And, you know, I know every single one of them. And I get to play a role in actually coaching and supporting them on a project. So to the extent that I can, if they get deployed on a new project, like, I'm there with them, providing them support. And so I get to see them, like, really at their best. I get to see them utilizing the skills and actually taking what they learned in training and applying them, and I'm able to provide that support. And I love that aspect of my job. It is so great to have those connections with people. And it feels really, really good when someone gets done with a facilitation and they're like, that was great. I learned a lot about. About that, and I think that I've grown professionally as a result. Like, that's awesome. Love it.

So good. So good. All right, well, golly, Justin, it's been great chatting with you. I'll tell you what, man, I would love to. To bring our video cameras up there to Vermont. And, and you know, we've. We featured Allison and the whole Connecticut government's Lean journey. Love to do the same thing with Vermont. So if there's, you know, Governor Scott, if you're listening, love to loving coming and chat with you and everyone there in Vermont because it sounds like you're doing some incredible work.

Yeah, that would be great. Let's see if we can make that happen.

All right, well, I know, I know you got some other things going on in August, so you're not going to be able to make it up to the Lean Summit there. I'm going to be speaking in Maine at this Lean Summit with Darlene and the good folks over there. So we won't meet up there, but hopefully we can meet up face to face in some other. Some other time and place, Justin. So keep up the good work. Thanks for everything that you're doing for Vermont and really obviously impacts the entire country. So keep up the good work.

Well, yeah, right back at you. Thanks for running a fantastic podcast. This is great.

Thank you.

You bet.

All right, well, you take care.

All right.

All right. Bye.

Bye.

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