GA 259 | Using Lean to Facilitate Social Change with Jason Schulist

I've always been very interested in the community and the social sustainability or what I call generativity. Now we're not trying to just sustain things, but we need to generate. We need to create more and not just hold on. So can we do that socially? And how do we really engage the hearts and minds of every person to help meet their unique potential towards their unique purpose?

Today we're going to continue our Katacon 5 interviews by chatting with Jason Shuless. Coming up with an introduction to these podcasts is usually pretty easy for me, but for some reason, reason, I can't seem to find the best words to describe the life changing work Jason is doing for humanity. So without attempting to say any more, I'm just going to stop and let Jason do the heavy lifting. Show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we talk about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 259. You can also check out Gemba Academy's Lean Learning system over at gembacademy. Com with a fully functional trial. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

Jason, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you very much.

All right, all right. So, yeah, we're here at Katakan and just learned some interesting things about you. That you're a hockey announcer, Something like that.

Yes. I DJ my son's high school hockey games, man, to announce the goals every once in a while when they do that.

Yeah, right. And you like lose your mind, like.

To go press the button and get the little horn going.

Cool, cool, cool. Well, thanks for coming onto the show. I'm super excited to talk to you. So, yeah, so as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. Do you have one?

Yeah. I think my favorite quote is, I don't know, let's try it out. And it's something that Mike Rother has said and it's changed my way of thinking about how to approach problems and how to approach that. And then Jeff Leiker or John Shook. It depends on who you talk to. I'm trying to find the initial person who said act to a new way of thinking, but I heard it from Jeff Leiker. So that we take an action, not just think, to a new way of thinking, which is sometimes what people do.

Hey, going back to Mike's quote that, you know those words, I don't know. That's a really, really humbling and hard thing to, to say and to mean, you know?

Absolutely. Yeah. And I spend a lot of time doing Work in community problem solving. Yeah. And so there's so much we don't know. Yeah. Especially if you don't have the lived experience of homelessness. The lived experience of trying to find a place to get food. Yeah. So being part. Being there, learning. I don't know, testing is really important.

Oh, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. So tell us about Jason. Tell us about your background, how you first came to learn about all this continuous improvement stuff and then we're obviously going to dive deep into your current work.

Yeah, I've spent about 28 years in business and so I started out in General Motors. They got me educated in the Leaders for Manufacturing program at mit and then I helped start up a plant in Poland.

I saw that you're MIT guy, man, I always get intimidated when I talk to you smart guys.

Yeah, I got lucky. So I had a chance to go start up a brand new plant in Poland. And we were using Toyota's methods and processes and had people from Toyota who we had kind of poached into General Motors and did that type of work. Later worked in the utility industry in Detroit and so led continuous improvement effort for DTE Energy and their project management group as well. And then worked in the paper industry in Appleton, Wisconsin, where I live today, again running a culture change effort for a paper company.

Okay.

So in that whole thread, I've always been very interested in the community and the social sustainability or what I call generativity. Now we're not trying to just sustain things, but we need to generate. We need to create more and not just hold on. Yeah, so can we do that socially? And how do we really engage the hearts and minds of every person to help meet their unique potential towards their unique purpose?

So let's dive in to what you do like today and just we were talking as far as a topic kind of like value streams of humanity or something like that. What does this mean?

Yeah, well, I was, I was talking to Mike Hoseas and he had done some work for me when I was at the utility and he wrote Toyota Culture with Jeff Leiker. And they talk about this human value stream inside Toyota where they work and develop people through their work. So what happens when you're on the assembly line? You don't add any value to yourself when you're adding value to the car. It's when you can't add value to the car that you have an opportunity to add value to yourself by becoming a better problem solver. So I talked to Mike and said, what about a community being the Factory and people being the product. How would you help people learn and grow in a community? So we started to map out processes on homelessness. We mapped it out related to matching individuals with jobs so we can see the end to end process. I'm homeless on the street, I'm in a homeless shelter, I'm in transitional housing, I'm in permanent housing. You start to see the inventories of people going through a process. And so if we can make the connections better, find our angry clouds in the overall housing system, we can then work to increase the flow and increase the throughput into that housing system to get more people housed sustainably. And so we've looked at value streams of humanity around education, around jobs and financial stability, and around housing. And we're looking at mental health as well as one of those things to map out end to end.

I'm really curious, I don't know why, but why just this one topic, but curious of all of it. But this, the homelessness, I mean, you know, that's such a devastating situation, you know, in this country of ours. Talk about that, talk about that work.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, in Appleton this week, so I think it's on Thursday, we're getting group from Green Bay, Oshkosh and Appleton together to really look at this entire housing system and to go back and do a second map of the three different communities. Because what we find is in our Appleton area we have shelters that are year round available and in some of the other towns they are available in the winter because we live in Wisconsin. And then they shut down. And so we start to see the flow of people between the communities. So we know we have to solve this problem and issue as a community level, there's episodic homelessness that occurs, but then there's pervasive homelessness that occurs. So when we start to map out people, you start seeing people coming to through the cycle over and over and over again versus some people who have an event and you're able to work on that event and get them into stable housing relatively quickly. When we start getting into root cause, we start seeing mental health is actually one of those key things. Opioid addiction, alcoholism. And those three things are really the root cause of the problem. So when we think of problem solving, we think of it in an adaptive way. One, I can help a, a homeless shelter be more effective at their wait list by getting flow, by getting capacity, by helping. Second of all, we can look at the system level. It's kind of a complicated problem. So we say how do we match people and flow them through the system? But then when we get to the third level, it's that root cause which is really in the complex adaptive system space. So people are not robots. They make choices, good or bad. You can't control that environment. But what you can do is probe and test ideas and use those probes and tests to help scale things that can work effectively. And so we're working on all three of those levels. And in the, in the mental health area, we have a hypothesis twofold. When we go down, we started with life skills. So some people just don't get up in the morning to go to work, or they can't change the diaper of their child. We say, is that a problem of skill or a problem of will? And we find more. It's easy to skill somebody up to create those habits. It's harder to want to do them. When we get down to the threat of wanting to get up out of bed to go to work, it's really around hopelessness. And so we've been looking at ways to both validate people in the relationships that they have. If you have a lot of problems, you go and get all these services. You're treated in some ways like a robot through the system. You're not treated as a human being. So if we can validate people and their relationship when, you know, they're already vulnerable, coming to get food stamps or coming to get housing, how do you respect their humanity in the moment to validate them, and then how do you help them dream? So we're working on helping people dream in a way that allows them to feel hope, that allows them then to get out of the cycle.

How?

Well, one experiment we're running, so we do PDSA cycles with groups. We use actually Toyota Kata in the community. So we apply ourselves a target condition. We look for obstacles, and then we give us.

Give me an example of a target condition and some obstacles to get to that target condition.

So in this case, in this life skill thing, we had this hypothesis of our own hopelessness. And so in our target condition, we wanted to give people access to dreaming. And so we picked a number of how many people we wanted to have this access to dreaming, thinking that this would help them tackle this issue around hopelessness. And so a PDSA cycle that occurred is in a.

What was one obstacle to that?

The obstacle was there was no space. And really part of the obstacle on that was that group hadn't really thought about how they could run an experiment in that problem. And so what they did is this was in a teen women's shelter.

Teen women.

Teen women's shelter. So basically, women who had kids or were expecting and were abandoned by families or didn't have a place to stay would be in the shelter and all their kids would be playing with the toys and fighting and not happy with each other. And so the parents obviously feel a little bit of consternation because their kids are competing with the toys. We put up a dream board and said, put your dreams up on here. What you aspire to, what are your dreams for yourself, for your family, for your children. And so they made this board and they put up these dreams. And what the unintended consequence, we thought if they dreamt, if they had these dreams stated, that would give them hope. But what we also found is it created validation for each other. So two women would say, you know, I just dream that I can have a good, stable job and my kid can go to school. And this other teen would say, you know what? I have that same dream. And so they validated each other and they're now on the same team and their kids aren't fighting for toys, but they're sharing a common vision, a common true north could say that allows them to then take a step. Yeah. And make a difference.

Oh my gosh.

And so. So that was a. It was a. That was an experiment that worked. Yeah, we tried it at a job center. Didn't work so much. But I think it's because there isn't that same emotional connection. You're in the same space. So when we tried it there, we didn't get the same.

Or maybe that. I don't know, is it appropriate to say like the level of desperation perhaps, or something like that, you know, I'm just out of work, you know, versus maybe these young ladies are truly, you know, in a. Yeah.

Some of our learning, I think, is that it's just. It's back to that validation, back to that one on one relationship that enables people to connect with each other, that helps them create this hope, that then helps them to get past whatever barriers and obstacles they have in their lives to then keep moving forward, to become sustainable.

Yeah, you know, we were talking before we hit the record button that, you know, I have a little five minute pitch here to do later today here at Katacon and just about an Gemba Academy, updates and all that kind of stuff. But the way that I'm gonna kind of ruin it for you won't be a surprise for you. Don't tell anybody.

This podcast won't come out.

Yeah, yeah. But the way I want to open it is, you know, I was telling you, I just interviewed Bill Krause and, and he was talking about how Mike Rather, you know, was, was throwing the question out, you know, is Toyota Kata scientific thinking, kind of this perhaps the next evolution of lean and throwing it as a question. And Bill responded that in an affirmative, that he believed truly is the next evolution of Lean. And I was thinking about as Bill was talking and I was like, should I, I don't know if I'd be like a heretic if I say I disagree. And I said, well, I don't disagree with it. I do think it is, you know, a very powerful way to move this lean movement forward. But I think that it's actually so much more, I think that scientific thinking, Toyota Kata, what you're going to call it, is the next evolution of humanity. And this is before you and I started talking, you know, and it's just, you know, timing is interesting. Right, right. You know, and you're almost validating my, my thoughts and that.

Yeah, sure.

It's important for all these companies, you know, for profit companies trying to do better and it's great, you know, but this is like next level, man.

Yeah, well, we, every year we hold up an event called Skills Fest. And what Skills Fest started with, the premise was there are all these different methods of solving problems. So you can do a PDSA cycle, we can use a system dynamics map, we can do complex adaptive system problem solving and they all have different methods and approaches. And then there's all these problems. Right. So we have homelessness, we have mental.

Health, we have food security and interactions between those problems.

Absolutely, yeah. So we bring people together and talk about the first year we brought people with skills and said, give me the steps of how you learned your skill. So surgeon, how did you learn your skill? Apprentice, how did you learn your skill? Toyota came, TSSC came and explained how do they do problem solving and what is their skill? We had a person who was working in South Africa with a school and helping create community. How did you build that skill? And we found there were five things in every skill that you need to build. You need to have some type of a goal or true north, some type of a challenge. You needed some type of a method, you needed a practice, you need a coach. Sounds just like that. I wonder where I put it out. Right? So this, so it's very interesting that we notice that at a meta level that kind of is the way that you build a skill effectively.

Well, One thing I've learned from, like Mark Rosenthal in particular, you know, he's very passionate in saying and stating that, you know, this, this whole KATA thing, we got to humble ourselves a little bit. It's not new, you know, the scientific thinking idea. The Wright brothers as he's fond of using as an example, you know, we're perfect examples of this type of thinking. I think what this movement of ours is doing perhaps is making it a little bit more visible for everyone, hopefully to grasp on to and to go with. And it's a, it's a, it's an easy to, to follow process. Right. That anyone can start with.

And at the utility, we applied KATA into our project management process. And so we went from average to world class in our project management processes. And we're a PMO finalist from the Project Management Institute. Once we've done all this work and what I've learned about KATA over time is if you start taking the brain study work, you find that your first experience of something is really important and it kind of grounds you in. Is this great? Every thought is tied to an emotion. So when you put a thought in, there's emotion of thought. So if the, if the emotion is great, it enables you to want to do something more. So how do you take the method approach, philosophy of KATA thinking, and how do you tie that into joy? So now can you create a way that this problem solving isn't. It's a struggle because you have to learn it, but it's not, it's not arduous. Arduous, unhappy, or a way that I don't like to do it. So making it joyous and fun, gamifying kata so that as we do kata, we can also do it in a way that people reinforce it in their brain that this is what I want to do all the time. And I think, the way I think about it is when a little kid is like, you know, one or two years old and they get up and the first time they stand and they take a step and they fall, what do parents do? They don't go, oh my God, you suck. Yeah, get up, get up, get up. I can't believe you did that. We give them this like love and encouragement. And then you go into a business.

Yeah.

And the first time someone does something. Right, what do we normally do?

Right.

We like, you suck.

Yeah, get up. Yeah.

And so we have to kind of create that same empathy in the way that we work the work so that we can help everybody kind of move along that path of curiosity, encouragement, wow, that's beautiful.

So what's next for your work and you and your colleagues? Like, what's next?

Yeah. So we're kind of building this model of generativity. So we think of, if you think of every person as like, an acorn, and the goal is to become a flourishing oak tree. And, you know, I've seen you and you've seen me, and where you're a little bit taller than me, so your flourishing oak tree is higher than mine, and that's okay. We both can flourish in our uniqueness.

Okay.

Towards our unique calling.

Yeah.

Then we need to kind of create the soil or the structure. Can we create the soil and structure that allows me and you to flourish? How do we flourish? So what's that culture look like? What are the relationships that we have to build, which is like the water bringing the nutrients to the little plant that's growing? And then how do we take the air, the intangible? The air is carbon dioxide, and it turns into the carbon of the tree. How do we take the learning that we have, which is the key part of the Toyota kata process, the learning? How do we take that learning, take it inside and then act on it and embody that learning? And so if we can take. That's like, our carbon, how do we grow ourselves into these full trees? And so how do we create generative business? How does business enable people to grow in their uniqueness? How do we take governments? How do we take communities? How do we take neighborhoods? And so we've been doing some experiments in that space. Wow.

And that's cool, man. We need to catch up again, you know, maybe six months or something, just to hear what's next and what you guys are up to.

Yeah. We've seen progress and poverty reduction in our area, so we've been doing this for a couple years. So we're seeing correlation at least.

Yeah.

And we don't know we're gonna try it. So we keep doing that and building that capacity in our community so that we can help other communities and we can all learn?

Yeah.

So.

So I guess that's a. That's a good question. You know, someone in another part of the country, or the world for that matter, you know, is listening and what advice do you have for them, like, how could someone else get involved in this type of work?

Yeah. What I would do is connect them to www.genlocal. g e n local.org generative local. And that's where we're starting to build space. Opportunities for people to leave articles and do things so that we can continue to work. You know, we're working on generative education right now. How do you really teach people how to read using their uniqueness, not using a standard that was done in the Industrial revolution. How do we continue to have those dialogues? So connecting that way? And then we also, in our area, create a group called CI Squared, or Continuous Improvement Times Community Impact. So we have a bunch of volunteers, about 40 people who have volunteered in our region with nonprofits. So if they have other people that want to volunteer with nonprofits, we built back end processes and all this type of stuff that we could replicate, and we just do that as volunteers.

Yeah.

Beautiful. So ways that we can do that would be great. Wow.

So inspiring. So inspiring. So how can folks connect with you directly?

Jasonlocal.org would be the easiest way to connect with me.

Okay, we'll put that on the show. Are you on LinkedIn?

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Okay.

Spell your last name in case people are just listening.

S C H U List. Shoelist. Like a list of shoes.

Got it, Got it.

All right, so Jasonlocal.org is the best way. And then from there we can do whatever we need to do to make the world a better place.

Super inspiring.

Yeah. Thank you very much. All right. I appreciate the time. Take care. Take care.

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