GA 301 | Navigating Lean Trends with Karen Martin

I think a wise leader in a wise organization will always be preparing for the worst case scenario, hoping for the best. You know, preparing for the worst just so that you have a backup plan. You need to have plan B, C, D, E, F, because you don't know what's going to happen. That's the whole thing about uncertainty.

Today I'm excited to welcome Karen Martin back to the show for our seventh and final AME recorded podcast. Now, on today's show, Karen and I have an interesting discussion. Discussion of some trends Karen has noticed within the lean world and how we might best respond and learn from these situations. Show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we discuss, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode three.

01.

And as always, you can check out Gemba Academy's Lean and Six Sigma Learning Library over@gembaacademy.com okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show.

Karen Martin, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Hi, Ron. Thank you for having me. Good. It's going really well. AME is a wonderful conference.

Yeah, it is, it is. We just got done listening to Richard. It's always inspiring. Gave you a nice little shout out, by the way. I know.

That was really kind of him. And I love that airplane metaphor. The whole aerodynamics organization. That's new to what he's been talking about and it's excellent.

Yeah, yeah. Gonna talk to him later on today, so I'm gonna. Yeah. Make him repeat it.

Good, good, good. Yeah, it's worth repeating.

Yeah. Well. So, hey, thanks for coming on again. Gosh, I. I didn't. Look our past episodes. We'll link to them in the show notes so folks can go back and listen to our past conversations. We've had several, I think, over the years, so it's always fun first. Not the first time face to face. We've done them at other Ames. I think we had. We had a conversation. So, as you know, we like to kind of begin our shows with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share, Karen?

Sure. You know, one of the ones I say probably the most is people aren't the problem. It's processes and work systems and the work environment that's the problem. And this is, you know, in the theme of don't blame people. People don't walk into work going, ha, ha ha, I'm gonna see how much I'm doing. Yeah, let's see how little service I can provide, you know, and it's just these obstacles that you walk through the door and you meet, you know, over and over. Our job is to remove those obstacles so people can soar and do what they're truly gifted and able to do.

Yeah. Awesome. I love it. I love it. So in case folks haven't heard our past conversations, Karen, just give us a quick rundown on your background, how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff, and obviously what you're up to these days.

Sure. So I started doing operations design when I didn't even know what operations were, and I got hired for a job and said, here, build a company. And so I really quickly learned about Deming, W. Edwards Deming, and started studying all of his philosophy and loved it. Found it, you know, just not as practical as maybe it could be. Very conceptual. Loved the concepts, but learning how to apply it was quite tricky. And then in 2000, I got introduced to Lean. Back then, it was called Lean Manufacturing when I was overseeing the department, the Institute for Quality and Productivity at San Diego State University. And it was a joint venture between the extension program and the business school, and it was a cash cow program. And I, you know, at that point had so zero manufacturing experience and said, what is this Lean thing? And I started going through the program, learned how Deming had influenced it, and it was just a much more practical way of getting to operational excellence. And so I just. I loved it. It got into my DNA very, very quickly and started from there and started my consulting firm and then wrote some books. And here we are today.

Yeah, awesome. Awesome. So yesterday we were having a fun conversation, and I actually cut you off. I said, stop talking. I wanted to kind of capture it here a lot. Yeah, no, no, no. But it was not. I wanted. I want you to talk now, but I wanted to capture it on. On. On this podcast. We were talking about, you know, some things that. That I don't be like a Debbie Downer here, but that you're concerned about, you know, within our Lean movement. And I thought it was going to be a really interesting chat, and so I wanted to really explore that. So. So what I thought we could do is maybe we'll frame it as problem, potential countermeasures, or obstacle, if you want to use that terminology. However, whatever you want to. However you want to phrase it. But I don't want to just state the problem without some ideas of what folks could do to counter it. So what do you think? So what's on your mind these days?

You know, I think a lot because I write and So I, you know, writers have to think. And so I'm always, and have lots of, you know, clients in different industries and things like that. So I get exposed to lots of different environments to do this thinking about and observation and then thinking, you know, there's a couple things, but one is I'm always intrigued with the question of how do you truly build problem solving capabilities as quickly as possible, but yet have them not be superficial problem solving skills? And you know, if you have a large organization, there's a lot of people that need to be taught something that they don't know how to do, and a lot of people that have to be sold on the need for teaching them when they think that problem solving skills are something we innately have coming out of the womb, when in fact we don't. Well, maybe we do, but we get deprogrammed very quickly in life. So actually we probably do come out.

With great, stop asking why.

Right, exactly, exactly. You know, drum down that innate curiosity.

Right.

And so I'm constantly, you know, when clients bring us in, they don't have unlimited funds to stay there forever and build their capabilities. So we're constantly challenged with how do we do this? How do we build deep problem solving capabilities quickly so that they can start soaring in a different way than they have? What I'm really very anti about is throwing people into a classroom and teaching them pdsa, pdca. It's great to learn the concepts, it's great to learn the terminology. So I'm not gonna discount the value in that. But you, you don't learn how to solve problems unless you're actually solving problems. And there are lots of problems to be solved. So there's a lot, you know, there's a rich living lab out there in all organizations. The question is around coaching. And most organizations, most leaders do not comprehend the absolute essential role of a skilled coach. And so one of the things that I see a lot is, you know, they'll have an improvement team, for example, and maybe full time improvement professionals that haven't actually been coached by a skilled problem solving coach. And so they don't actually have great problem solving skills yet. They may be better than the average person in the organization because they've been exposed to, you know, problem solving workshops and conferences and, you know, things like that. And I've read, but they're not necessarily highly proficient problem solvers. And then suddenly these people are thrust in the role of coaching others and teaching others when they, they themselves don't have deep skills. So what we do is we pick some people, you know, with leadership input and we select some people to be the beginning problem solvers, the owners of problems, no matter where they sit in the organization. If they're full time improvement people, awesome. If they're a manager that's, you know, interested in being one of the first. Awesome. It doesn't matter whether it could be at any level and we prefer higher levels initially than lower because if you get leaders skilled then they can do more coaching, it can spread faster.

Yeah.

But then, you know, they have to be coached. And so I have for example, a team of two. This is one thing we do to get efficiency. Usually it's a one on one relationship between a coach and a problem solver. And what we do is we usually pair up problem solvers at the client site because we want to be able to get more people skilled, more deeply. And we're almost through the first round with two people at a client and now they're going to actually be coaches, but we're going to coach, we're going to coach them as coaches. So kind of that second coach model.

Yeah.

Right. And so we'll be coaching them and then there's going to be another three month cycle and then at the end of that cycle they'll have now five people. But you know, five people out of a 2,000 person organizations, only five people. Yeah. So it's been a bit of a sell to leaders to understand that that is really the way to get people deeply skilled is having them little by little learn how to do this and then pass it on, pay it forward and all those good things. Yeah, but it's a slower, it's a slower journey for sure.

Yeah. Just not as exciting as people want a big bang. Right, right. You know, give me 20 minutes. And these 50 people are expert problem solvers. It just doesn't work like that.

Yeah, it doesn't. Because you know, when in coaching these two individuals it's, you know, I've coached lots of people, but this is current state, I'm coaching these two individuals. And even simple things like what is the significance of this problem, how big is it? And trying to quantify so that people give a hoot and want to help them in solving the problem and that leadership has the appetite to allow the resources to be available to these folks. They were missing very key facts about the problem that through the coaching process they're like, wow, never even thought of that.

Well, obviously you're very instrumental in the whole value stream mapping movement with your books, Karen. And obviously one of the things that comes out of these current state mapping exercises, as people stand back and they're like, no way. Yeah, that's not what we do. Yeah. You know, and. Oh yeah, that's what we do. Yeah. Right. And, and, but I think you're right. Whether you call, whether you're following a scientific thinking kind of kata type approach or just traditional pdsa, whatever it is, deeply understanding the current state. Yeah, that's where we often fail. And I think it's because it's not fun, it's boring, it's kind of not sexy. Everybody wants to go fix, but what are you fixing? Right. And then if you do fix it, how are you gonna know?

Well, and you know what's interesting about this particular problem was there was a lot. So what I love about lean management in general is how healing it can be to an organization. I talk about this a lot. You know, there's this interpersonal and interdepartmental strife, tension and everything that is never about the people. I have never yet seen it really be about a personality. Whereas everyone thinks that's exactly what it is. It's always about misunderstandings about process or process is not working well and being frustrated by that and all of those things.

Yeah.

Anyway, this particular problem, they were blaming this one department for a lot of errors that were being created. And you know, I quickly said it's not about the department, it's about the lack of standard work and process problems you got here and everything. But let's figure out what really needs to be done so that you can get those things in place. And it turned out that they thought 100% of the errors were this department's doing. And it was 20% of the errors. It was, you know, 80% of the errors were actually occurring somewhere else. And every, the whole leadership team was mad at this department and just the relief that these people now feel because they were under such pressure to fix it, stop it, stop making those errors. And you know, that doesn't do any good. Tell people, stop making errors. So. So that part of it has been really great. And then the other thing that these two people that are full time improvement professionals learning problem solving this new way for the first time, they completely missed the data set. They got to quantify some part of the problem. They missed that there were two data sets mixed together and so there were tons of duplicates and there were tons of problems or line items that didn't belong in the report. So they were going forward with false data. You have to have a skilled coach that has been down this road many, many times to understand that and see it and then ask the questions why, how, you know, and the Socratic questions to get them to see what they then saw. And now they know to never trust a data set until you really scrub it and make sure it's okay. And so you know, you have to have a good coach to catch yourself in these habitual ways of being that I mean problem solving is way more about changing your thinking and breaking habits and forming new habits than it is about the technical aspect of problem solving. A lot, a lot of psychology to it.

Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah.

So what else?

Strategy deployment AKA policy deployment AKA Hoshin Kanri Cochin planning. You know, I think, I mean the power of this when it's done well is huge. And I just see organizations stumbling a bit. You know a lot of organizations on how they are going about doing it. And I'm going to talk about mainly top down where it's the senior leadership team putting together a plan and then there's cascading performance goals and things like that that help align the organization. I just see people misunderstanding some of the key concepts of what makes it successful. Like what Catchball is one of the things that I think the average explain.

What catch ball is in case folks aren't familiar with it.

So catch ball is when leaders have an idea of what the priorities should be and why and all of those and then they toss out their ideas to the next level in the organization, assuming a hierarchical organization and get and truly listen. They're not just cascading the goals and saying here what are you going to do to support this like we did back in the 80s and then Cascade them down here. What are you going to do to support this?

It's not catch ball. That's not catch ball throwing the ball.

It's dart throwing, downhill dart throwing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The catch ball is truly having a conversation and truly listening and seeing, seeing the world of the organization through a different levels lens. And the lower you go in the organization, the closer you're getting to where value is actually being added to and value is being delivered to customers. So helping leaders give us an example.

Of where of a situation where it might be done.

Well, you mean a company name?

No, no, no. Like just a scenario just so people can put it together. Like you be the manager, I'll be your subordinate, you know, and, or something like that, you know, like that Kind.

Of we do things kind of we do mainly team based. So the senior leadership team will meet with, with us present we'll meet with the next level down and they'll say, hey, here's what we think are the priorities for the coming year. This is why they, you know, kind of like, you know, lobby for, for their ideas in a way, and then they listen to what the other, the next level down says. And they may say, well, you know, well, here was a great example. This was a manufacturer and they wanted to go into China and they weren't going to just move offshore. They want. Wanted to actually have another company, another place in China to be able to start selling more effectively to the Chinese market. And half of the senior leadership team said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other half said, no, no, no, this is at the next level down. And the senior leaders were baffled by that because they had been so aligned on China being the next big place to go that they had no idea that people below them didn't agree with that. And they weren't having those conversations. But through the facilitated conversations of, you know, and watching body language, like even just watching a VP kind of fold his or her arms and cross their legs, and, you know, you can just start seeing that people aren't aligned with what leaders are trying to sell and then having a dialogue around that and working through it. And, you know, it works out all different ways. In this case, they are going to China, but it took a sales process to get the next level down behind it and understanding what leaders knew and saw and what data they had been working with at the other level didn't even know that they were.

I don't think it always has to be like, we're going to China or not. It might be, well, yeah, we want to go to China, but here's some things that we need to consider, right? So the folks that were saying no, they may not really been meaning no, they may be like caution, warning, let's do this, let's consider this. And. Oh, I never thought about that. Right? And so the true spirit, right, of this, this collaboration back and forth is that we learn from each other, right? Yeah. And so.

Well, and the other thing was the senior leadership team was wise to quickly pivot their language into let's do an experiment. Now, it was expensive and risky experiment, but nevertheless, and they really, truly believed that it was going to be an experiment. It wasn't just smoke and mirrors, let's do an experiment and know that it's cement, you know, and so there's, there's, it's just the dialogue between leaders and the alignment around a singular or, you know, a multi pronged approach to the future that is missing in so many organizations.

So that's what you're seeing. You're seeing that people say we do Hoesh and Conrad or policy deployment, but really they don't because like you said, they're throwing darts down instead of playing catch ball back and forth.

Yeah. And I think also, you know, the more your leadership team is at the Gemba and talking with customers and not relying just on customer surveys and really getting to know the truth about the current reality, the better their ideas are. And so the less, you know, back and forth you really have to do, because everyone's been talking all year long about the priorities and the problems. So it's just you're. You're much more aware of what's going on.

Yeah, yeah.

That awareness is critical for moving forward.

Yeah. So I got one that I want to talk about, and it's just popped in my mind. We haven't even talked about it yet. There's no warning. So. So even yesterday I was talking to a AME representative, senior AME representative, and they were mentioning that, you know, they were. They were happy that, you know, I think the, the initial signups here for the conference weren't exactly gangbusters, but it really came through in the end. And they're actually pretty pleased with where. Where they ended up.

Right.

As far as number of people coming to this thing, because obviously there's a certain number of people that need to come to make some money or break even or whatever it is. And so it sounded pleased. But they were also mentioning that, you know, oh, people are worried about the economy, a potential recession coming, or whatever that might mean. So I'm curious to hear. I mean, none of us can predict if a recession is coming and, well, it's coming.

It's just a matter of when, when.

It is going to come.

Right.

I mean, recessions always come. Right. So we still win.

Right?

Right. I guess my question then is how do you. What are you. What are you. How are you helping folks kind of prepare for that? Or is there things that, you know, should you be tightening your belt or should you be using Richard's language, you know, really trying to accelerate and really take off and not worry about things that you have no control over?

Well, I think a wise leader in a wise organization will always be preparing for the worst case scenario, hoping for the best, you know, preparing for the worst just so that you have a backup plan. You need to have plan B, C, D, E, F, because you don't know what's going to happen. That's the whole thing about uncertainty. But what. So, you know, if you look back at a lot of the teachings of Drucker and certainly Toyota operates very much with a cash's king mentality. And so anything an organization can do at a high level to preserve cash will help them weather any recession far more effectively and healthfully than anybody else and hopefully avoid layoffs and all those things. So at that level, cash is king. You know, don't debt yourselves out and all those things. At a mid level, I think, you know, a lot of, a lot of organizations seem to lack a sense of urgency and using the possibility of a very deep recession that could be prolonged isn't necessarily a bad way to start instilling a little bit of a sense of urgency. You know, I have a client right now where they're just, they're the top 10% of the industry in terms of financials and how they're viewed reputationally and everything. And they have a lot of gaps, a lot, there are a lot of problems to be solved there and getting their director level to have any oomph in wanting to solve those. You know, the senior leadership team's pretty sold on, on the need and, and they're doing a pretty good job of lobbying the next level down. But that next level down is still very apprehensive and kind of a little reticent to see that there's really any need because they're after all, they just got a bunch of awards and they just got awarded a bunch of grants and things like that. And it's, you know, I think anytime that you're thinking about how you weather the bad times, you have to just get really well oiled operations. And so getting everyone, you know, focused on getting great processes that get all the waste out of them that you can and you know, that's going to reduce the cost of an organization a lot, a ton.

Yeah, it reminds me the Barry Webmiller I One of the most powerful stories in the book was on how they were going through the 2008 recession and instead of laying people off, they, they all took voluntary time off and you know, didn't get paid. But it's how they kept everybody. And there were even folks who, who said, you know, I really just can't. Some, some folks really just needed the work. And some other folks were like, hey, I can, I can take more. And, and to me it was like, you talk a lot about healing and growth right in the organization. So seeing something like that, that's a Beaut of, you know, taking a terrible situation and actually strengthening your company. Right.

Yeah. I can tell you our clients are not fixated on a recession at all. And I don't know that that's a bad thing. I'm not. I'm not suggesting that they're, you know, have blinders on or anything. They're. They're just not operating in a scared way.

Yeah.

You know, they're just plowing ahead and fighting the good fight and, you know, making progress where they can.

Yeah. And I don't mean to freaking anybody out. I. I also. I'm not terribly worried myself, you know, I mean, like you said, I mean, things happen in cycles, and we've gone a while here, but, you know, things are rolling around. Okay.

Well, yeah.

Stock market.

Stock market did great. Yesterday is crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I. I don't know. It's. And I think things are so tied to environmental and weather events now and also political events.

Sure.

That it's just. So It's a complex world.

Yeah, for sure it is. Well, one thing that's. That. That. That always remains is we can control what we can control. Right, Right. And coming back to, are you developing your people? Do you care about your people? Are you helping them learn how to problem solve, how to do ocean country, how. Whatever it is, we can control those things. Right. That's. There's a lot of. A lot of power and a lot of peace in that. Right.

Yeah. So on that note, that triggers something in my mind is this whole notion of Gallup Q12 is one of the standards in evaluating employee engagement. And I've long said that the two most important questions are never asked in any of these employee engagement surveys. And it just. It's just. It kind of baffles my mind that they're not asking them. They are. Number one, to what degree am I, if I'm an employee, to what degree am I actively engaged with, in improving the processes that I'm responsible for executing? And are my ideas actively sought out to make those improvements? Much more elegantly worded, but that's the essence of it. And two, to what degree do the processes that I am, you know, working within, even if they're not written, able to allow me to be highly successful at doing my job? And to me, those are so important for employee engagement, and they're also the most fundamental acts of respect. You know, if someone comes in and like we talked about earlier about coming in through the door and bam, you know, obstacle, obstacle, obstacle. That's not respectful. That is, you Know, basically taking a full tank of gas, maybe not quite full in the morning and draining it, you know, as soon as someone walks through a door, instead of they come in, maybe they're only 3/4 full because they had a screaming kid in the middle of the night or a sick kid or whatever. And having them have a full tank at the end of the day because they've been so deeply engaged and because they've been able to be creative and have control over their own little microcosm of their destiny and things like that, that. I mean, that's what. That's what work should be, and that's what it is in some organizations. Not enough, but, you know, and Richard's theme today about joy and how you build that joy among the workforce so that you can achieve great things and fly that plane, as he was using that metaphor. It's. It's just. It's fundamental. It's so critical, and I hope that we see more of it.

Yeah, exactly. Karen, it's always a pleasure. Thank you for coming back on. I know we'll do some more interviews down the road, down the years. How can people best connect with you?

Our new company name is tkmg, which stands for the old Karen Martin group. So it's tkmg.com that's our website and I'm on LinkedIn. Karen Martinopex. Twitter, Karen Martinopex and love to. Love to connect with people.

Yeah. We'll link to everything in the show notes. So, yeah, thanks again.

Thank you so much. It's always great to talk with you. You have good questions and you, you know, you talk with so many people in the improvement world, far more than I do, that you get a really good sense of what's going on and what are. What are people excited about or what are things they're worried about?

Yeah, we're all learning. You know, it's like a learning. That's why I.

Can you believe we get paid for this?

I know, right? You get paid to learn.

I love it. I love it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much. Ron. Great to see you. Thanks.

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