GA 234 | How to Apply Lean to Transportation with Gary Vansuch, Michelle Malloy, and Geneva Hooten

Part of that means making government efficient, effective, and, of course, elegant. And he went on to say, that's why we initiated the Lean program in almost every state agency where employee teams are actively identifying waste and inefficiency to create savings.

Today, I'm excited to welcome three fantastic lean thinkers from the Colorado Department of Transportation to the show. Geneva Hooten, Michelle Malo, and Gary Van Such were kind enough to share their story of how the CDOT program started, how it's evolved over the years, and how they've been able to overcome some significant challenges. The show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 2, 3, 4. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning System over at gembacademy.com with a fully functional trial and and be sure to check out Gemba Academy's AME page over at gembaacademy.com ame where you can get a 10% coupon for registration and sign up for our cocktail party. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, well, welcome to the show, folks. How's it going?

It's great, Ron.

All right. Good, good, good. So we have three folks on the line, so maybe let's go around and just have you each kind of introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background and maybe how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff. So I'll let you guys choose who wants to go first.

That's great, Ron. I appreciate that. I'm Gary Vansuch. I'm director of process improvement at the Colorado Department of Transportation, which is the state agency running the Colorado transportation system. I've been at CDOT since 2011. I have a few decades under my belt, all in process improvement. I got into process improvement because I'm one of these people that loves the way things are and then I love to make them better. And that's just always been my life. So that's why I'm in the role that I've got and I tell people I've got the best job in the country. So.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, thanks for coming on, Gary.

My name is Geneva Hooten. I lead innovation and improvement here at cdot and my background is in transportation planning, and I worked as a planner for about eight years before coming to the state. And I'm passionate about transportation. I think it's really important that we provide great ways for people to get around without the use of a personal Car. And working at CDOT is one way for me to impact that. And I've gotten into continuous improvement here at CDOT in my role and love the opportunity to work with our staff across the state to improve the way that we serve the public through transportation networks. Great.

And I'm Michelle. I'm our senior program manager of change management and strategy. I've worked at CDOT since 2008, and I think my passion about continuous improvement change management is really based on people. I think people are our most valuable assets. And I love working with everybody throughout the entire department.

Very good. Very good. All right, well, let's jump right in, folks. Maybe we'll just kind of start at the beginning of the journey for CDOT and tell us how did it all begin? Like, what was the reason and how did you go about it?

So, Ron, I'll jump in and encourage Geneva and Michelle to do the same. Ron, this will probably sound strange, but there's kind of three starting points. There's a foundation. CDOT has six values and we have CDOT people that have been here 40 plus years. And I've asked them about the values. These values predate the people that have been here 40 years. And it serves as a basic foundation. Our values are safety, people, integrity, customer service, excellence, and respect. Ron, I particularly believe the excellence value is a primary foundation for our improvement efforts here. I want to read it. It's short. We're committed to quality. We are leaders and problem solvers, continuously improving our products and services in support of our commitment to provide the best transportation system for Colorado. And gosh, that's almost the exact definition of le. So that's a foundation. That's really a good starting point. And we've had people at CDOT wanting to innovate for quite a while based on those values. Another important starting point was with our current governor, Governor Hickenlooper. Governor Hickenlooper was came into office after the 2010 elections and started serving in 2011 and started and came out with great support in the beginning from his State of the State address. He In 2011, he said we need to make state government more effective, efficient and elegant. I think that provides a great basis for lean and has continued that. Ron 2012, he said we continue to need to make government work better. Part of that means making government efficient, effective, and of course, elegant. And he went on to say that's why we initiated the lean program in almost every state agency where employee teams were actively identifying waste and inefficiency to create savings that executive sponsorship is absolutely necessary and by the way, nowhere near sufficient, but absolutely necessary to have great improvement going on. And our executives here at CDOT have provided that great sponsorship also. The third starting point, Ron, is what I when I talk with our folks, I call it the sergeant Pepper's Lonely heart Club Band approach. Okay, Remember that great album by the Beatles? One of the songs in there is I get by with a little help from my friends. My career has been all in process improvement, but mostly in the private sector. One of the things that appealed to me about public service is that there was a reputation that governments talk to each other. So early on I said, gosh, maybe process improvement in government might be a little bit different. I have no background in government. I certainly wanted to chat with people here at cdot, but I wanted to chat with other people across government in North America. And so I did what anybody does. You go to a Google search, you put in lean, you put in state government, and gosh, Ron, up pops Minnesota. So I made a contact in Minnesota, had a great conversation. They have a great continuous improvement effort in Minnesota. And guess what they said? They said, oh, reach out to Iowa and had this great conversation with folks in Iowa, and the folks in Iowa said, gosh, Gary, reach out to folks in Washington state. And it continued on. We have this wonderful community of practice in state government that allows us, I believe, to all learn from each other. And that was an important starting point, too. I did that in late 2011. I came on with CDOT in, like 2011 and having the back and having the foundation of the values, having great sponsorship from, you know, all the way from the governor, lieutenant governor, and then having this support from other state governments that say, yeah, people want to improve and there's difficulties and here's what we've run across and here's how we try to resolve it. That's how we started. And that's part of all of that, is why we continue to have success here at cdot.

So talk a little bit about what did you do in the beginning? You reached out to folks. Was it, you know, was it. I don't run a Kaizen event somewhere, or did you run some projects or what was your approach early on?

So great question, Ron. We, again, good support from the governor. The various state agencies in Colorado got together in late 2011 for a statewide kickoff. We got some support from some contractors that we brought on board and we started some larger projects and we took some feedback from customers that said, gosh, some of your processes and some of your products coming out of CDOT and other state agencies maybe aren't exactly what they need. So we started picking on some processes that could get folks engaged. We believe very much that at cdot, continuous improvement and respect for people is the right way to approach innovation and improvement. So we started with some permitting processes. Our processes for permitting large, larger, oversized vehicles on our state highways, Our processes for permitting people to tie driveways and other things into our state highway system. We started with some of the areas where customers were saying, gosh, you got some issues, Gary, you've got some issues. Cdot. And we got teams folks together to solve some of those problems, Ron. We tried them, of course, with some training, some good executive sponsorship and started. Started some improvements that way and got some, got some successes under our belt.

Now, with most lean initiatives that I've, or movements, whatever you want to call it, that I've been involved in, early on, there's always. There's some, what we would call early adopters, Some folks who are like, yeah, this is cool, I'll give it a go. And then there's also some folks who are like, what, what are you talking about? This is stupid. Or maybe they don't say stupid, but that's what they're thinking. And. Or maybe they're hoping this will pass. And so maybe there's some resistance. Right. Did you guys face anything like that? I want you to name any names or anything like that, but if so, like, how did you guys approach that?

Oh, Ron, Absolutely, we did get resistance. You know, part of our strategy, people always want to have larger projects. And we actually did start with larger projects. And part of our strategy was to go smaller also. And we have lean everyday ideas and started some efforts for smaller improvements. People improving their own, their own processes and products for the larger projects. We realized that there would be resistance. And I also know that very often lean training will focus on techniques, process flow, charting, statistics, kind of on the technical side of change and not always paying attention to the people side, the resistance. So early on, we brought on the discipline change management help. Pair that with some of the other lean training we had. And change management is what Michelle brings to the table. She leads our change management practice here at CDont. Michelle, it might be useful for you to say a few words about change management.

Sure. And I'd like to say I was one of those early adopters on the lean side. I became a lean leader right away as soon as we had the training available to us. And early on, I believe in 20, 20, 11, 2012, we identified that we did need to have a complementary practice of an enterprise change management program to help people be successful with all the changes that were impacting them and specifically the changes that impacted how they do their work. And so we really focused in on the individual and their change journey, on each and every change.

So what did that look like? You know, like, I don't know, month one, month three into the journey, like, were you meeting with individual people? Was it a. Was it a training class where you're talking about this, getting people excited? Like, I'm just curious to learn more about the details.

Well, we and Gary probably could talk a little bit more about the selection of our methodology, but we use the PROSCI methodology, adkar, which stands for awareness, desire, and reinforcement. And so early on, what we did is we started with the change agent network. We really initially had about 12 people in the room to be change agents. And the change agent role was to help people throughout the department adopt and adjust to changes quickly. We realized 12 people was not enough. So our theory behind this is that we have approximately 500 managers and supervisors at CDOT, and now we have a little over 100 change agents. Yeah. So we are covering 100% of our managers and supervisors with change agents. So change agents have assigned managers and supervisors about five or six per change agent. And so their role is really to help support our managers and supervisors, who in turn would support their employees through the changes that are happening.

Very good.

So, Ron, that was an important improvement to our own efforts here at CDOT early on, to not just have the technical side of lean. Very important. Focus on your customers and make sure that your processes don't bother your customers, that they're the least bother to customers, that we flow chart, that we get statistics. That was important. But for our larger efforts to bring on the people side of change, change management was important, too. Also early on, it was important for us to listen to our lean project leaders. Michelle was one, and we continue, and we listened to her. We made some adjustments based to our larger projects. Based on that. We also had one of our lean project leaders that we trained that said, you know what? I want to try smaller improvements in my own area. And ron, we've got 3,000 plus people at CDOT. We're scattered over 104,000 square miles of Colorado, literally over 200 different staff locations. And this lean leader said, gosh, I want to take this to my folks and see what they can do on a smaller basis. That turned out to be a regional innovation program that we now call Lean Everyday Ideas getting frontline folks engaged. And Geneva leads that for our statewide effort.

Yeah, thanks, Gary. So the Wean Everyday Ideas program I stepped into roughly five years into it, and we have at cdot, we have a decentralized model for how we run our transportation system. So we do have folks at headquarters, but most of the work, really the bulk of all of the work gets done at the regional level. And we have five different regions. And so within each region, we have committees and we have what we call the lean Everyday Idea leads. And those are folks who are convening meetings. They're helping to vet ideas, they're helping with idea spread. And that is the method that we're using to try to push innovation into the organization and really get frontline staff to feel empowered to make continuous improvements to their own work and to share those ideas with us. One of my main responsibilities is to work on idea spread so that we can help people from recreating the wheel all across the state, because we do have 200 staff locations and we do have 3,000 employees, many of whom who are doing very similar work.

Yeah, I remember back in my kind of corporate world days, you know, I worked at a large, large company and with, you know, facilities all over the world sort of thing, and gosh, just trying to create, you know, homegrown databases of, you know, you could search for keywords and different, you know, projects would pop up and whatnot. It was so hard, you know. So how did you. How do you go about that? Because it's one thing to just, you know, say it on a podcast, but, like, really making it happen is very difficult. Right, right.

Well, I wish. I wish I could say that we do it perfectly and that we have every single employee engaged in improvement and everyone is sharing and borrowing ideas. We're not quite there yet. Yeah, we're doing well. We were recently selected as one of the top 25 programs in American innovation in government.

From the Harvard Ash center on Innovation.

Yeah, I saw that. Congratulations.

Thank you.

And that's a great tribute to the folks that we have at CDOT that are, you know, that are actually rolling up their sleeves and making innovation happen.

Yeah.

You know, I'm so glad that we decided to listen. You know, and it's. You know, as a manager, sometimes it's very tempting to do a lot of talking rather than listening. So I always remind Geneva and Michelle know that I take my inspiration from a lot of places, and I tend to quote things. There's an old quote that says that you've got one Mouth and two ears. So you ought to be listening twice as much as you're talking. I'm so glad that we listen to project managers like Michelle and being able to bring on the people side of change. I'm so glad we listened to this other project manager, too. His name is Mark Eiche, who took what we're teaching, took it locally, and helped us, helped us with our innovation program, which we now call Lean Everyday Ideas. The listening is so important. It's so tempting, again as managers to talk more than you listen. So I resist that urge every day. And in the Internet age, it's so tempting to just start putting stuff out because you can, because the technology allows you, rather than asking people what's going on, your customers, your employees, the people that you're trying to help, what's going on and how can we help you and then listen. So I think listening is a big piece of the success we have here with process improvement.

Ron?

Yeah, no, absolutely. Two years, one mouth. That's very hard to do sometimes though, right?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, one question I want to dig in a little bit more about maybe how CDOT's possibly, you know, different than some other government programs. But before that, something that I like to discuss with folks who, you know, are working in the government and practicing lean. You know, you mentioned early on that you have this obviously support from up top, which is critical. Right. And I think it's a testament to the success that you guys have had. But as we know, one thing that's certain in the government is eventually there's going to be a change in leadership. Right. No matter what. And there's no guarantee that the new leader is going to be, you know, on fire for Lean or whatever it might be. So how do you guys prepare for that perhaps happening one day? You know, the elephant in the room. Right. I mean, but you have to. You have to talk about it, I think, don't you?

Absolutely. And Ron, we've experienced some of that. And again, it's actually from my time in the private sector, there's actually been less leadership change here at CDOT and in the state government than what I've seen in the private sector. Well, that's good. And here at CDOT, I was hired on in 2011 by an executive director who had been hired directly by Governor Hickensburg, Don Hunt. And Don stayed four years. Don was actually well past retirement age and decided to retire. And there was a good handoff to the executive director coming in. Shaelyn Bant. Wonderful. You know, wonderful. Support there. Shaylen left our current executive director, Michael Lewis. A good handoff from our prior executive director to our new executive director. I can't guarantee that that'll happen. However, it seemed like we've got that willingness to want to have continuity and maybe that's just inherent in a transportation system. We have these assets that help people across Colorado. Our transportation system isn't just asphalt and concrete and steel. It's a means to help people have better lives, frankly. So there's been good handoff there. You know, in Colorado, we're having an election this fall and there's already transition planning from our community of practice we have with other states. We're finding. Ron, and perhaps, you know, you've got broader reach than we do, but we're finding that there are states that are led by Republican governors that have wonderful successes. We find states that are led by Democratic governors that have wonderful successes. We believe that process improvement is good government.

Yeah, well, yeah, Politics aside, everyone wants things better. Right. And we can agree that, you know, spending less money is good. You know, you know, these are, you know, not wasting things, you know, that's good. Right. So.

Exactly. It's pretty hard to argue with the excellence value. And it's pretty to say that we shouldn't be. That we shouldn't have better customer service and improve transportation networks. I don't think anyone would argue that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. So talk a little bit. Gary, we've known each other for a while and I know you guys have been doing some great work for many, many years. So why don't you. I don't want turn this into a brag session for cdot, but maybe talk a little bit about what you guys feel might be a little bit different as it relates to your approach to process improvement versus some other approaches.

Sure. And I'll certainly invite Geneva and Michelle in here too. Ron, again, I'm an old private sector guy and glad to be a public servant. We have a terrific mission, terrific vision for the organization. And CDOT's a little bit different. The situation we've got is different, and so you have to have a different program. I've never worked in a place with so much where people are spread so far across the state. It's 3,000 people, 200 different staff locations. And your program has to evolve based on that. I've worked in places where most everybody is in one or two or a small handful of locations, so our program's a little bit different. We use multiple media, for instance, working to reach out to. To get information back and forth from frontline folks. I mean, that's where the improvement really happens. Right. Ron is at the front line and folks believing in the mission and then having the right empowerment and the right tools and the right time to work on things. So we're using various media to do that. Michelle's already talked about our change agent network. Wow, that is terrific. Those are 100 plus people who have other jobs, by the way, Rahm, but have a passion to help other people be successful with change. So we think that and we similar on our innovation side. We have folks that are out there that are innovators that want to help other innovators improve. So I believe that those networks we've got really internal communities of practice are a necessity for anybody that's got a situation like we do. We've got a lot of people scattered a lot of different places. An absolute necessity. And it may be something that's a little bit different from our own program or from other programs that other folks might have because they may face different situations.

Yeah. And I'll build off of that. I think we are unique in that. Not only do we want to have all of our frontline staff and really all of our staff engaged in improvement and having lots of Kaizens, but that we are focused on taking that one step further. So when Gary comes up with a really great idea and implements it, that I'm borrowing that and applying it to my own work. And that next step is a hard one to take and it's challenging. It's a lot of change management about the reasons why and awareness and desire to get people to want to be able to borrow an idea from elsewhere. But I think that's something that we are unique in. And the other is that. And Gary's touched on this in the conversation about how we partner with other organizations and provide opportunities for communities of practice and learning. One of them is the Transportation Lean Forum. So it's other people who work in transportation departments and cities who are engaged in continuous improvement and how they are using it in the transportation field. That's provided a ton of learning opportunities for us and we've been able to find, borrow and learn from, as well as giving a platform for others to learn from each other. So I think that's something that we do very well and I think we're proud of that work and being the leaders, some of the leaders across the country in that forum.

And Michelle, you lead another community of practice. Could you chat a little bit about that?

Yeah. So we have started Our public sector change practitioners, community of practice and it's worldwide. And we've actually had two webinars under our belt so far, the third coming up next month. But we really have had great input, great learning experiences. I think it really is a wonderful network and I think it really, you know, change management itself. And I wanted to build off what Geneva and Gary both said, you know, why are we different or what? What's different about us? And I think, you know, adding in that change management component, we have role based training throughout the department and you know, we, we've got training for our sponsors, we have training for our managers and supervisors, we have training for our employees and we have training for our change agents. And so everybody is, you know, talking the same language, the same vocabulary. They all understand that we all have to be involved in change for it to be successful.

Yeah, very good. So let's talk a little bit about. You've had a lot of success, but I'm sure there's been a lot of challenges and obstacles along the way. Talk about some of those, the biggest challenges that you faced, particularly that made it difficult to create more of a culture.

And I'm sure all three of us will have different thoughts. Let me kick it off, Ron. I've lived off and on in Colorado for, oh, gosh, I don't know if I'll even say how many years for decades.

Well, you're only 32, right? So it can't be that long.

Ron, I appreciate your kindness. Maybe if I'm 32. Anyways. When I was growing up in Colorado, I remember in the Denver Post there was a headline that said, Colorado's population passes 2 million people. And I remember that headline well. Right now, ron, we're at 5.5 million people. By the year 2050, at least 9 million people, maybe as many as 10 million people. So if I live to the year 2050, I could actually be, I could say I've seen a five fold increase in the population of Colorado and it's great. We have a terrific state, Ron. I'll tell you, I'll put it up against any state, any place. It's a wonderful place to live. That level of growth is great and is to be expected and it actually is challenging also from all of our programmatic areas in Colorado, there's so much volume of just a need to put out more product. We have more people driving our roads, so it means we have more of a need to maintain. We have more people driving our roads. Therefore we need to expand our roads or find Alternate ways of transportation. We promote transit, bus systems, rail systems, and because of that volume, sometimes it's difficult to find time to improve. People have the desire and sometimes have difficulty finding time. So that is definitely a challenge. And it's a challenge where we roll up our sleeves, work with our executives to say, how can we help our folks find time to improve? And then when we have improved, how can we actually then spread that across the state? Ron, Our basic business at CDOT is we plan, build, operate, and maintain Cairo's transportation system. It's really that straightforward. And we have different groups across CDOT that are actually doing the same thing, just in different parts of our state. For instance, we've got 220 maintenance patrols. When we get an improvement in one maintenance patrol, boy, oh, boy. I'm certain that other groups across the state that do similar maintenance could benefit from that. And because we have the spread, that's difficult. That's part of what Geneva's working on with our community practice that we have inside the state on lean, everyday ideas to find ways to get those great improvements out to folks that then can provide more capacity for just the growth that we've got in Colorado, all the additional products that we have to provide, as well as additional time to make the next improvement. So I see those as major challenges. Again, some of that comes from great stuff. Colorado is a great place. People are moving here. They're utilizing the transportation system more. And, boy, it creates a lot of work, and it has its own challenges.

Yeah.

Oh, I would just echo what Gary said. Having people that are, you know, two, 300 miles away from you and interacting with them, you know, on a consistent basis is difficult. You know, having that consistency across the state is difficult. So just the spread, I think, is the biggest challenge that I see specifically in change management. And plus, change management, when you say that, it's kind of a softer, squishy, you know, type discipline. And I think, you know, that in itself creates resistance. And so we apply change management to our change management.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The other thing I'll say is we. I don't think anyone goes to a new job and says, okay, great, I get to sit and be a bureaucrat for the next 30 years, or I'm going to make this worse for people or I'm going to hate my job. And all of those things. I think we are, each of us at work is trying to make it better for, selfishly, for ourselves. How do I cut out things that I dislike doing and yet still produce a really good product? And serve the customer. So one of the challenges we have is not necessarily that people aren't innovating and aren't improving, but it's helping them to identify that what they've done is an improvement and that there is something better about that, that it's reduced waste or made it safer. All the other ways that we can, we can categorize it and so identifying that and helping people see that there's a benefit in sharing that out. And I think we have, maybe because we are state government, but we have a lot of pretty humble people who don't want to be recognized and who don't, who think, oh that's just my job. And yes it is your job, but it's also a great thing that you've done. So it's challenging to kind of make the case that it's worth it to share it and to submit it as an idea in our system.

Yeah, good stuff. So the last question I have, you know, there's a lot, lots of folks listening right now from other states and perhaps lots of different governments represented, perhaps even outside of the, of the, of the United States. What advice do you have for those folks who are maybe haven't started, maybe they're just beginning their journey with continuous improvement.

So I'll jump in here. I think the answer is to start small with frontline ideas. Maybe I'm saying that because I run an idea system, but I think it's so valuable. The book ideas are free. The other book, idea driven organization, those are kind of fundamental to what we do. And it's easier to start small because then you can kind of get the capacity and the language for it within the organization before making an argument that we need to make this huge cross functional change. And at that small level, I want to caution people against creating a suggestion box kind of system. And we've definitely gone down that path and are now working to rectify that by having a separate submittal. So it's an implemented solution or it's a suggestion, but those are very different. An idea box has some value, but it creates a ton of administrative work and it doesn't, it doesn't really get to what we're trying to do, which is empowering people to make changes to what they see. So other governments and other people who are interested in starting these systems, we recommend focusing on implemented solutions and on the things that are really working and not so much on those kinds of suggestions.

Ron, if other government agencies are looking to get started. Gosh, Beatles first. I get by with a Little help from my friends. We're so grateful to the agencies that are out there across the United States and we've reached into Canada and Europe, too. There are wonderful folks out there who are making some good progress and who also run into issues and who are so willing to help. So reach out. Reach out to us. We're always glad to chat with folks, folks that want to make progress and they're just starting. Gosh, maybe our experience can be some help. There are terrific communities of practice for transportation. We've got a Transportation Lean forum, Departments of transportation here in North America as well as in Europe. At a state level, our statewide group that reports to the lieutenant governor's office is part of what's called the Lean Journey. States and provinces, North American, statewide leaders in lean that are always willing to talk with folks for the change management, the people side of change, the change practitioners group in the public sector that Michelle was talking about. Be sure to reach out to folks. They're just such a wonderful community out there. And we all have this great mission to provide great services to our citizens. It's not always easy to start process improvement. So lean on your friends some. And then the second thing is just this quote that I had before. We have two ears, one mouth. Be sure to listen to folks a lot of times, communication. When people talk about communication, it ends up being one way. I recommend two way. Start talking with folks in your organization, but then listen twice as much. Start talking with your customers and listen twice as much to your customers. Start talking to your partners. By the way, your suppliers, they often have problems that can be solved jointly. And then listen twice as much.

Yeah. My good buddy, Brandon Brown, I don't know if you guys are familiar with Brandon. He does a lot in the kind of Toyota Kata world, but he has this famous thing and he's been on the podcast a few times. And initially it kind of started freaking me out when he would do this. But I would ask him a question and he would just sit there and just pause and then he would answer. And it was like this almost awkward silence. But he said he's learned over the years that it's okay to be silent. You know, it's okay to not know or to reflect before you open the mouth, right? And boy, that's hard. But when you have that discipline and when you really stop and just like you said, just really listen to understand before thinking about what am I going to say? Right? It's much easier to say and much harder to do, but a good goal. Any final thoughts Folks, just for as far as advice, and then if not, I definitely want you guys to tell everyone how they can connect with you each individually and perhaps CDOT as an organization. What's the best way to do all that?

So I'll jump in. Part of government should be to be transparent. We are, of course, we try to do that here at cdot. We try to do that in Colorado state government. And in the Internet world, a lot of that happens, at least initially, through the Internet. So we have at CDOT, our Internet page is codot.gov and that will take you to our general Colorado Department of Transportation webpage. It has a wonderful search feature. And if you put in keywords, like if you put in lean and search, typically, the first up is our improvement and innovation portal that we have on codot.gov you can also put in the words process improvement, other kinds of things that will take you to our hub, our portal. And our contact information is right there. If you go down the left side, it'll say contact us. Geneva's contact information, Michelle's contact information. My contact information is right there. And we also have lots of wonderful examples about how people are working in cdot, sometimes individually, sometimes together, to make Colorado state government and transportation more effective, efficient and elegant. I think that's the best way.

Yeah, absolutely. And if anyone is interested about a particular improvement that's been made, we have idea cards about them. And in each of those, we have a hyperlink to the innovator's email. If you click to the folder with additional information, we have a How to borrow this guide, and it gives direct instructions on how to borrow those and different people that folks can reach out to if they have further questions. So not only can you find out more about our program and from the three of us, but if you're interested in directly talking to innovators, please go for it. We encourage it.

And Ron, a lot of times people are saying, yeah, I see the innovation, but people actually approach this or how people approach change. So we have some success stories out there. We have, for instance, on our change management page, we have success stories that are where we interview people that have been using our approach at Change Management, our Adkar approach that Michelle talked about and how they actually did it, not just, oh, I did it, and if that's not enough, then they can reach out to us and we can put them in touch with other terrific people here on Team CDOT that are always willing to help other folks.

Right. And give out the URL one last time. And we'll put it in the show notes as well.

That's great. If you go to codot.gov g o v so c o d o t.gov it'll take you to our general Colorado Department of Transportation webpage. Wonderful stuff there on all the things we're doing. Go to the search feature on that page, put in a link or put in process improvement or any of a number of other terms that might come to mind. It'll typically take you right to our innovation and improvement portal.

Yep, got it. Got it. And we're going to link to everything up in the show notes. So this will be go to gembapodcast.com and this is going to be episode 234. So Gary, Geneva, Michelle, thank you so much. I like to say this to folks that work in the government that are practicing lean. You know, it's always easy for people to be really critical of the government and, you know, and it's a very, very challenging, you know, work that you do. But I have a lot of hope, you know, for this country. Again, politics aside, I think people like you and your teams that are, that are doing this work can. Can really change our country for the better and honestly change the world for the better. And I think that's your mission. Obviously, it's our mission and really proud to know you guys and really, really thankful there's folks like you out there.

Ron, thank you for your very kind thoughts.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, well, good stuff, folks, and hopefully we'll meet up face to face. I know. Maybe we even come out there with some video cameras one day and do a gimbal academy live. I think that would be fantastic. We can run down the Colorado highways or something like that. That'd be fun.

Ron, come out to Colorado. We'd love to have you.

Great. Great. All right, well, thanks again, folks, and take care and keep up the good work.

Thank you so much.

All right, bye. Bye.

Bye.

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