GA 303 | Running a Successful Kaizen Event with Adam Lawrence

You know, certainly the people are the ones that care. They want to win, they want to make a difference, they want that opportunity to do so. So the better we engage them, the better we empower them, the better chance they have to win.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Adam Lawrence back to the show. Now, Adam first came onto the show last October 2019 and we talked about the Wheel of Sustain. And I gotta say, it was one of the more popular podcasts we've ever done. Based on the feedback that we got, we had a number of people kind of reach out to us one on one through comments and LinkedIn articles and LinkedIn comments and so forth. And it was really, really, really powerful episode. And so, yeah, I asked Adam to come back on and see if we could see if we could match that success that we had there with that first podcast. And I was glad that Adam agreed to come back on. And today we talked about, really, we spe most of our time talking about Kaizen events and how to be successful with events. Now, many of us in the lean world have done events and continue to do events. Whether it's part of a full scientific thinking kind of process or we're doing some value stream mapping, we're trying to close, you know, the gap between current state and future state, whatever it might be. These events are very, very powerful, but they also are tricky. A lot of things can go wrong. And so what we do is we talk about kind of really every step of of the way, how Adam and his and his and his teams go about team selection, who's on the team, how do you go about selecting the team, how do you charter the problem, how do you make sure you identify what the problem is and what winning will look like if and when the team is successful? And then we kind of walk through some specifics on, okay, you've got this great team and everyone is sitting around in a room. You know, what are some techniques to get everybody engaged, to get everybody sharing evenly? Sometimes you might have a powerful personality who takes over. How do you combat that? And Adam offers some really, really practical advice that I think everyone can use. Even if you're not doing a formal event, some of the things that Adam shares will help you just in your next meeting of anybody brainstorming ideas and whatnot, some really, really cool techniques. So show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 303. 303. And if you do want to learn a little bit more about Kaizen events, we have A really powerful course on Gibba Academy called the Kaizen Way. And in that, we talk about how to go about planning an event, how to go about procuring all supplies, getting that team selected. Then we talk about actually the actual event. What do you do on day one, day two, day three, day four? How do you celebrate after the event? How do you follow up on the event? All these things are covered in that Kaizen Way course. And I gotta say, one of the more popular videos we've ever made is. Has my daughters. Well, now they're much older. They're 17 and 15, but they were much, much younger back then. And I had them emptying a dishwasher. And this is our Kaizen overview video. And it's been one of the more popular videos. And it's obviously when you watch the video, it's very dated, but I don't have the heart to redo that video just because my daughters are so cute in it. So you can check that out over@gembaacademy.com. it's gonna be in our school of lean, the Kaizen Way. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Adam Lawrence, welcome back to the show. How are you?

Hey, I'm doing great, Ron. Thanks for having me back. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, man. Listen, we were talking before we hit record that, you know, you first came on back in October of last year 2019, on episode 287, the Wheel of Sustainability. And I gotta tell you, boy, we got a lot of great feedback on that episode. I mean, we've had. And I know you've. You've heard from some of these folks. There's been people, guests that have come on that have mentioned your podcast. So I don't. I know you're a pretty humble guy at all that, but. But, boy, you really knocked it out of the park with that one. And so thank you for. For coming back on. And for folks that didn't listen to episode 287, we're gonna link to it in the show notes. So listen to this one first. This is gonna be a good one as well. And then. Then go back and circle back to 287, the Wheel of Sustainability. Yeah, great, Great stuff, Adam.

Well, I appreciate that. It's nice to know that I was able to help some folks with something maybe not new, but at least helpful to them.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, listen, I'm excited for today. I know we have a fun topic to get into, but as you know, Adam, we like to kind of kick things off with our guest sharing a quote. So you have one.

Well, I do. So this week, this time, it's going to be something a little less traditional. So from perhaps the greatest movie ever made, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it's just a flesh wound. And so for those of you that have seen it, what you know is there's a black knight in a forest guarding, and he gets into a battle and loses his arms and legs, but he's still fighting. He's never given up. So although it really doesn't end up very well for the black knight, I just love the idea of never give up. There's always a better place. So it's just a flesh wound.

Great. Great.

I love it.

I love it. All right, so Adam, in case folks didn't catch epic episode 287, give us a quick recap on who Adam is, a little bit about your background and then what you're up to these days.

Okay, great. So 30 years with the company all over the country doing continuous improvement work. A Virginia Tech grad. So go Hokies. I can say that now that we're tied for the lead. I know this is recorded earlier, but yeah, yeah, we know that eventually we'll play Clemson and lose, but that's okay. Industrial engineer by trade. So a year and a half ago, I got the opportunity to go out on my own. And since then, I've had the opportunity to help a lot of teams all over the country and a few around the world, solving complex problems using continuous improvement techniques and just trying to help teams win. And the wheel of sustainability was kind of a big breakthrough for me personally as I learned how important it is to once we solve a problem, to sustain the solution. So after many years of trial and error, kind of put a model together to help teams kind of sustain that great work that they did during the Kaizen week or just other problem solving efforts.

Yeah. And so the name of your consulting practice is Process Improvement Partners LLC, right?

That's right.

Yep. And website is PI-partners.com, is that right?

Perfect. All right.

Yes.

Come on out and check this out.

Yeah, for sure. We'll link it all up in the show notes. So this is episode 303. So gembapodcast.com episode 303. So. All right, Adam, guess we got a fun topic today. A lot of folks that been practicing continuous improvement, been practicing lean, have been involved in, you know, various types of events. Some people call them Kaizen events or Blitzes or many different. Different names for rapid improvement events. Whatever we want to call them, I guess we're gonna. I want to kind of hone in on that because I know you've. You've done a lot in this area. And I want to begin with a question about engagement, you know, because it's one of those things to where, you know, we get a group of folks together and, you know, quite honestly, not everybody's totally bought in. You know, on day one. I mean, I. We've all. If we've all been executing a Kaizen event, we probably have walked into a room and there's someone sitting in the back row with their arms crossed, and maybe they're not so happy to be there for whatever reason. And so it's very important for us to be able to engage that individual as well as everyone else. But talk about why your opinion, why it is so critical, this engagement piece of these, of these events.

Okay, so continuous improvement, in my opinion, is about the people, right? So everything we do is through our people. And most people, my opinion only is that most people want to make a difference and most people want to win. So my belief is I need to engage them and we need to empower them so that they can make a difference and win. But as you said, normally, especially if it's early in the journey for some of the companies, there's this underlining, skepticism. Why am I here? What are we doing? What are they going to let me do? Something that's important. So as I thought about that a lot, I think there's a couple underlying themes. One is the skeptics wonder that their voice will be heard. Will my voice actually be heard? That's one. The second is here, but management's just going to do it their way anyway. So for me, it's how do I break through that so that the team can win, so that everybody will have their voice heard and they get to solve the problem in the way that's best. Because why are they in the room to solve a problem or out on Gemba to solve the problem? If management or leadership knew the solution, it would already be done. So the opportunity to help people make a difference, to win, is kind of the key focus for me, and why I think it's so important to how to engage and empower people so that they can win.

So, okay, so let's talk about how to go about making this happen. You talk about winning, so how do we set teams up for the. For the, you know, giving them the best chance? No, there's no guarantees, obviously, that we're going to win. But how do we give them the best chance to win?

So the first thing I do, Ron, is I charter. So I know a lot of people do the chartering. It's very simple but it can be extremely powerful. In my prior company, for the first year and a half that I was lean champion for an innovation group, they ran away from me. Chartering was scary to people. But chartering is so critical because what you're really trying to do is let's hone in on the problem we're trying to solve. So I'm always chartering with the sponsor, the leadership team, whatever that group is, not the people that are going to solve the problem, but the people that want it solved. First thing is to truly understand what is the problem you're trying to solve. Let's not call it a 5s event, let's not call it a SMED event. Here's the thing we're trying to solve. What we're trying to do is be more responsive to the customer and reduce time effort, improve safety, whatever that is. So once we assign the problem, that's the first step. The second step is to let's define what winning would look like. So those are typically called objectives. But would there be a way to know if you've won? So in a SMED event, pretty simple. A six hour changeover now takes two hours. That's a team knows it's won. If we've cut four hours out of a six hour changeover, that'd be great. So what are those objectives? Are we going to make safety improvement, Are we going to put in sustainability, are we going to put in managing systems? What are we going to do to assure that we've won? The third step then is if I know how complex the problem is and I know what winning looks like now I have to build the winning team. So if it's that critical to solve, give me the best people to solve it. The people that do the work, the people that support the work, the people that can bring maybe an outside set of eyes to the work. Pretty simple. But oftentimes companies will just assign people kind of haphazardly. And I, and I ran into those issues early on, but I realized, hey, if you want to win, put the best team on the field. And what's the worst thing that could happen? You don't get everybody you want, but if you don't ask, you don't get lastly. And this one, this one came out of a couple of boo boos about eight years ago where we were just randomly assigning Team leaders. And what I realized was I want the leader of the team to be the owner of the output, which means that they're now going to live with and be responsible for what just happened. And one of the things I tell my sponsors is if you put the right person in place as the leader, they're not going to let us go down a bad path. We're not going to do something stupid. They're going to ensure that what we solve stays solved and they're going to make sure they're supporting it all the way. But if it's just random and they don't have the skin in the game to do it, you don't know what you're going to get. Right? So that's the chartering piece. The other thing is that leader is also the tiebreaker. So sometimes the team will be split and I can't facilitate my way out of that. So that's what the leader's for. They're the tiebreaker. So we'll have that conversation before the event so that they understand at some point you're just going to have to take us one direction or another. The next thing to set that team up to win. Once we've got the charter, that's great. Now we've got to create a safe and fun environment for people. We've got leadership, team aligned, they've said go. So other things that I do, try to get them high energy, get them laughing, do some silly stuff, do some very fast team building, get them loosened up. Because the more fun they have, the more likely they are to be creative, to win, to come up with new ideas, be willing to try something different.

Give me an example of something fun that you do in your workshops.

All right, so I'm sure a lot of people do two truths and a lie. This is a very familiar thing to people, but it's how you learn very quickly about the best poker player in the room. So I go around the room, everybody's playing two truths and a lie. The idea is you're going to write three things about yourself. Two are true, one's a lie. Everybody plays. The goal is to fool the most people. So it's about a seven minute activity. It's actually quite nice very early on, and people are writing down silly stuff. I'm, I'm even participating. Hey, they don't know me. But I'm putting in some pretty crazy stuff. Because we were all young once, we've all done some pretty crazy stuff. And what's really interesting about this, you really find out Some amazing stuff about people. We've had plant managers write about some of their adventures that nobody in the room knew about, and they were true. There's a lot of laughter early on. Those conversations continue into the first night when we're having a little team dinner or over lunch. And it just keeps that energy. It starts the energy going. They know they get to know people better than they knew them before. And hey, if you fooled the whole room, we gotta watch out for you. Yeah, right.

Exactly. Okay, Cool. Cool.

Yeah. So that's setting the team up to win for sure.

Got it. Got it. Do you have it like an example.

Where.

You'Ve seen this happen? Where, like, picking the team to me is always. It's always a challenge, right? It's like you want to have, you know, I want to avoid just a bunch of engineers, you know, getting together with all their wise ideas. I want, you know, folks who are actually doing the work involved. Sometimes I'll even pick, like, if it's in a manufacturing environment, pick someone from the HR department to come in for a fresh set of ideas and eyes. But like, how are you going about team selection? And. And like, you know, how do you go about that?

Okay, so first thing is people in the process are the starting point. So I'm working in a processing area. I want some of the people that do the processing, right? Certainly covering all crews, all shifts, if possible. People that, you know, are suppliers to the process, people who are customers to the process, people that manage the process. But with some companies that I'm working with, I'm getting to know their people in a bunch of locations. So I have some folks I call Kaizen rock stars. These are the folks that just give all to the effort, even if it's not in their area. You can just see their energy, their enthusiasm, their opportunity to grow their leadership skills. Recently in Vancouver, Washington, we're setting up for a Kaizen. And I said, you need this guy from York, Pennsylvania. Well, I don't know if I can get this guy from York, Pennsylvania. The plant manager says, and I said, okay, look at your problem statement. What's this worth? We had put it in a financial way. You know, it's not a bad idea to understand what these things could be worth. It's worth quite a lot. I won't give the number out, even though I'm not giving the company out, but they know who they are. I said, besides safety, there's probably nothing more important going on in your company that week that's worth that much. I said, so you've got all the cards here. You've got this charter, you've got the money, you've identified the value of it. You know, it's going to be worth to the customer, to the people in the plan. And financially, I said, you've got a really good argument to get this person. Well, we got this person. The guy was fantastic. So for me, when I'm first entering a company, if I've not met anybody, well, then I just ask questions. Well, talk to me about somebody that's frustrated with the way things are. Talk to me about somebody who just has great ideas, but they just don't get the opportunity to use them, who's got energy. And then I'll always take a Gemba, walk through a factory and just meet as many people as possible. And the people that are really interested in making things better, well, those are our potential rock stars. They don't have to have mechanical skills. They don't have to be engineers. Oftentimes I don't want many engineers on our teams. Sorry, engineers. I am one. But the reality is we put ourselves in this little box of what's possible and we're going to spend money to solve problems. And you find out you don't have to spend money. You just bring people together and their creativity comes up with things that none of us can imagine.

Wits over your wallet, right?

Absolutely.

Okay, so we've got a charter, we've got a great team. What techniques are you using to ensure everyone in the room has an equal voice? You know, because there can be those situations where you have maybe a powerful personality or something like that, and they don't necessarily mean to be, you know, powerful and overtaking the room. But it is. Can't help it. So how do you, how do you maximize that participation of all team members?

Okay, that is a great question. So I'm going to talk to you about post its. So I don't know if I have to pay royalties when I say the word post it or not.

We all love post its.

Yeah, we all have. Now, I'm told when I write about it, I'm supposed to write sticky notes. So you can use whatever term. But anyway, so I facilitate a lot of events. Just like many of those listening. The old days, the facilitators were taught to be up at the flip chart and somebody's speaking and you're writing and somebody else is speaking and you're writing. And I did that for a while until I realized it was just me and the speaker and I'm trying to write what he or she was saying. And the rest of the room was getting kind of bored. They were disengaging. I said, yeah, that's not working for me. Let's try something else. So the concept I now use is. Is for 4 by 6 inch post its, I'm told. I'm quite particular, by the way. Not the little guys, not the monsters. Four by sixes, okay? So what I do is everybody's got a pack of post itself. And what I'm trying to do is create that equal voice, equal participation, and it just doesn't even matter what your title is. So you get to write an idea on a post it, one idea per, post it, one voice at a time. So what I do is I have a room of team members, give them that brainstorming time. We've been to Gemba, they take the post its with them, they write as they see it, they come back with ideas. Then I go around the room and one idea per person at a time. So we go around the room in one direction. I don't want them to get too comfortable. So then we go around the room in another direction. Or I get them out of their seats, surrounding me in the flip charts and I want them to write their idea, say their idea and post their idea. Now what's happening is they've written it, they own it. It's in their context, they understand what they meant. In the past, I was writing it. I don't spell very well. I'm not sure what they meant. I mean, sometimes I. Right, but the point then is that they're fully accountable to the thing that they wrote. And if I mix it up enough, you can't disengage. So I'll do things like let's go by height, years of service, length of hair, who wants to volunteer first? Volunteer the next person. But what happens is not only do they get their own voice, but the only way you can dominate is if you have more ideas with the first round, second round, third round. Everybody's had equal opportunity. If I've got 12 things, I'm not going to let you give me three at a time until the very end when we're just going to run them out. And then I do some things with that so that we're not just standing there listening to somebody do their dissertation. Right, because at some point you're going to have duplicates. It just happens. Now I never make them filter those out. If they believe it builds on something or they just want to say it, that's fine, but they're the ones saying it, they're the one posting it.

Got it, got it. Yeah. I sometimes would call it the nominal group technique. Right. And then just. Yeah, it's a powerful way of just getting everyone on the same level. And you mentioned kind of the speed at which you can do this because I suppose it can be frustrating if you have like a million ideas and you're only allowed to do one at a time. I guess maybe there's a balance, right. Between not inhibiting someone, but so having a nice cadence at which you go, I found works well. Would you agree?

Yeah, I do. And when you're doing the post its and when they get used to going around the room, there's actually less time between ideas than if I was standing at a flip chart. Right. And the other thing that's nice about it is when I am, when I was writing at a flip chart, I'm not facing the person speaking. I can't see body language, I can't see anything. But when they're doing, delivering their post, it's. I can see the body language, I can see who's disengaging. And then what happens is I can. If somebody's disengaging, then I give them a job. Hey, can you start grouping? Can you create themes? Can you grab up this side of the room? So I'm trying to get as many people involved as possible. Yeah, yeah. Now a story that goes with that. I've used that technique all over the world and I was told in Russia and China that their cultures are different and yes, of course they are. So in Russia, I am told the culture is if there's somebody at a higher level speaking, you can't really have a differing opinion. But when everybody's writing on their post it and they say it, well, everybody's allowed to have their opinion. So that was the Russia side. Now in China, what I was told, and I don't mean to be putting things in a box, this is just what I was told. And they said, how are you going to deal with it? I said, I'm pretty sure the post it thing will work. In China, what I was told was most people didn't want to speak unless they had a fully formed idea. Well, if you're writing something, you got to speak what you wrote. Now sometimes I didn't know what they wrote, obviously because it was in the native language, but the interpreters have told me that they hadn't seen people engage as much as they had with the posted approach. And in Russia, the feedback was even stronger. And that the plant manager said to me, we've never had our people speak up in this way. What do you suggest? I said, listen to them. And he looked at me kind of that knowing look. And also kind of the look of, yeah, go back home at some point. But the reality is the opportunity to give people that voice. And then the last piece I would talk to you about is about there's an accountability side. So facilitation is kind of a slippery slope. You're walking that fine line because you can have a vice president of manufacturing in there with an operator. So I always try to put ground rules up early. Now sometimes I don't put them early enough. But it's not unusual for the team leader or the highest up person in the room to break a ground rule early. And what I am very good at is holding accountability regardless of title. So the feedback on that has been, now we see that everybody's got equal voice. You're not one person doesn't have sway over anybody else. Obviously they can listen to the VP and be swayed. But everybody's getting that equal opportunity. And I'm holding anybody accountable regardless. And so they get a kick out of that. And I always know I'm kind of walking that fine line. But luckily it's worked out so far. Now we'll see.

So I'm wondering, Adam, if you can. You've kind of walked us through the steps of. Of these events. Can you maybe. I don't want you to name companies or anything like that, but I'm curious if you could maybe share an example of an event that went. Went well for you, maybe. What was the problem? You know, how did you know it was a problem? What. What was. What did win. What did you hope winning would look like? And then what. What actually happened?

Okay, so I have a number of them. So this is. This is a great question. Now I have to think about which one that I like.

There's no. It's like a favorite kid, you know.

So let's talk about something that happened on the west coast. This is back to the changeover reduction. Okay. Very typical topic. So the team. So it was a four and a half day event. And we do the typical first day. We're observing a changeover. It was a five and a half hour changeover. Their baseline was four and a half. So as you might suspect, it's kind of a long day. Everything was charted. We had our Kaizen rock stars. Nobody believed we were going to cut the changeover in half, except me. I said, guys, you would be the first team that hasn't, you know, I said you are not going to be the first. We're going to figure it out. So the first day we always have the other team do their changeover and we just observe we're not filming at five and a half hours. I've learned that while it's a good technique, it's very tiring and watching five and a half more hours of film, no one's going to do it. Even if you shorten it, you just don't have time for it. So there's a lot of other ways to do it. Spaghetti diagrams and just some nice observation forms and just some other waste reduction type thoughts. So we got to a point where there was some physical work but there were about 140 ideas on post. Its up and okay, how are we going to solve? So I'm going to talk to you about multi voting with criteria and then I'm going to tell you what it turned into. So I've seen tons of techniques for prioritizing. So you have 140 ideas so you could compare them. You can do impact difficulty, you can do tons of things. I have found the fastest, most effective technique for me is multi voting but with criteria. So what I mean by that is that we're going to give everybody a number of votes. So at 140 ideas we're going to give those 14 team members five votes each. You're going to pick your five favorite. Now we're going to do this with criteria. So there's always three standard criteria that I give. One is the first is it maximizes the benefit to the customer or safety or productivity. But customer first and tied with safety and then productivity. The second point would be I personally want to do this. So if I'm voting this is something I want to do because by the way, if this gets the most votes somebody's going to do it. The third one is and this is how you get rid of capital being spent. We can do this now meaning this is something we could actually try to do now. Sometimes they're skeptical we can do some of these things.

But you mean that week like immediately?

Yeah. Yes, immediately. Immediately. This is. No one's allowed to have homework. Homework is a four letter word.

Okay, got it.

No, we're going to have some. But so we can do this now. So we have this criteria now. Everybody in their head, they use their head and their heart to vote and they pick their five using this criteria. I always give the team, hey, that's my three Is there a fourth? And I think one time somebody had a fourth. Okay, so we're doing this voting. And there was some equipment and there was some visualization, and then there was one that was coordination of effort. Okay, coordination of effort. What do they mean by that? So what they meant by that was they built. There were six people doing the changeover. It was a fairly large area. A lot of processing equipment and valves and tanks and pressing equipment, all sorts of things that had to be tended to. And in the past, everybody was kind of doing their own thing, not really paying attention to each other or the others. So they came up with this coordination of effort. And if you can imagine a 4x8 whiteboard with swim lanes, what the team came up with was, you know, every activity in your swim lane is a red magnet until you finish it, and then it's green. So there was no coordination of effort. Now they decide to coordinate it using this visual whiteboard. And they had mapped out from two hours before the changeover to change over zero till. And they brought it out to three hours, none of them thinking they could get to three hours. So they built this thing. And the idea being that red means I'm not done or I need help, green means I'm done, and I could go help somebody. And you can watch it like a horse race, you know, as it's going from left to right across the board. So on day four, we were as a team down to 3 hours and 45 minutes. So we had implemented a bunch of ideas, but that's not the goal was 2 hours and 15 minutes. So I'm like, okay, I've got line of sight in my head to two and a half hours. I wonder if they're going to make it. So they start the change over. You know, it's two hours before and I'm noticing my guys coordinating. I had a team member from our Kaizen team and then the crew that was going to do it. Because on day four, we always have the crew that hasn't seen any of it do it. You're allowed to coach them, but you can't do their work. Yeah, that's the real test. If somebody else can do. So I'm watching this and I'm seeing a bunch of red and I'm seeing one. One lane is getting green all over the place. So I go to my coordinators and I said, hey, this looks pretty good. I see you're getting some green over here. Looks like red could use some help. What do you think? They look at me and they Go. Yeah, probably. I walk away for a couple of minutes, notice nothing's happened, come back, I said, hey, looks like green's getting a little further. Looks like red could really use some help. What do you guys think? You want to go get them some help? Yeah, we should probably do that. They're still not moving. So being who I am, wanting to win, I go, let's go see if that green person can help that red person. So I take them with me and we walk upstairs to this little mezzanine area and there's green just rocking and rolling. And I, I said, you know, just to make it safe enough for these guys. Hey, you know, Red over there, she could really use some help. Would you be willing to help her? It looks like you're kind of ahead. Oh, yeah, that'd be great. I'd love to. And now the light went on with that. You know, they, they had never asked each other for help. They never did that. And you think it's so simple. We've been talking about help the whole time, but they didn't see it. They couldn't feel it. They didn't see how it would help. You know, just me yakking about it wasn't working.

Yeah.

So I had to take. So they do it. And all of a sudden now reds are turning green. And every time they're putting a green magnet in place of red, they're high fiving each other.

It's almost like you gamified it. Right.

And remember, teams want to win, so they're doing. Now in the middle of this, the ops manager who was kind of helping but watching, he goes to an office, gets this big computer monitor, puts it in a window, and it's got a clock. And we're watching the time go from zero to whatever because he starts the clock. He had the idea to do it right in the middle of the prep for changeover, and he brings it out before the actual changeover started, and he starts the clock. Well, you notice people are actually starting to look at it now. We told them and we advised them you're not supposed to go any faster than you normally would. This is not. Yeah, something. This is not a race. We want to do it safe because it's not worth it. But all of a sudden it's looking like this is possible. We're starting to see red now. People are self, you know, moving to help rather than the coordinator. The coordinator is doing a lot of it, but people are realizing, hey, I'm green. They could see the board. It was big enough I see. Who's red? Let me go help. So at 2 hours and 5 minutes, they think they're done and there's cheering and high fiving and then somebody says, now wait a minute, QA did not qualify it. And they're like, oh, well, let's make sure we've got that at 2 minutes. 2:09:53. Something like that. It's in my head. They call it the lines running again now in this factory for the first time for high fives. CHEERING and HUGS. Wow. Never. These guys said that's never happened. Yeah, like, oh, yeah, that was cool.

Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's about teamwork. It's about, you know, helping people understand are you winning or are you losing?

Right.

And this is a key tenet to lean, you know, continuous improvement. If you walk out onto any shop floor, any office, any hospital ward and talk to any employee, are you winning or are you losing? If they can't quickly tell they're not going to be as engaged as they would be if they knew, hey, I'm winning or I'm losing or I'm tied.

Right.

And it sounds like that's what you facilitated there.

So we're always trying to create ways to win.

Yeah, I love it. So good.

Yeah. I mean, it's so much fun. It's almost unfair that I get to float through the whole process and watch and kind of redirect because they can't see all of it. And it's kind of selfish. I get to do that and they get to just be part of that. But in the end they get the benefit, some really nice feedback. You know, they actually told me that month and we did this in the middle of October, actually. So October was like their best month in two years. So that's pretty cool.

Well, one thing I want to, I want to circle back on that one just to confirm. Trust, but confirm. Right. So someone might be listening, say, yeah, well, there was a lot of excitement, a lot of momentum, a lot of passion involved in that two hour and nine minute changeover. Was it to your idea of sustainability? Was it sustainable? Did they make it even better than that or, you know, did they develop standard work so it was consistent and safe and talk a little bit about that, how they wrapped that one up.

Okay, perfect. So we use the wheel of sustainability. So those that listen to 287 and you're gonna, you know, make a link to that or whatever. But so the team knew that. Can we make this happen again? So how are we Going to train. So early in that session, I was told, it takes six to nine months to train our people. How are you going to do this in a week? I said, we're not going to do it in a week. We're going to do it in an hour. Our standard work has to be so easy to understand that all we're going to have is an hour before we start the preparation. And what we did was we paired up one team member with one crew member, and we basically walked them through their task. We didn't teach them how to clean out a vessel or, you know, physically move this. What we taught them was how to change over this process. Right? So we did the training and review on the wheel, but we did it in one hour. What I was trying to show them was this is how you can train all the other crews. You don't need to invest weeks and weeks. You invest person to person time. And, okay, you want to give it two hours, Give it two hours, that's fine. We had the visible evidence, so we had the tools and the toolboard. We have. We had every tool that they said they needed right where they wanted. People all remarked. We actually brought the crew back into the room and said, okay, what'd you like? What'd you hate? And everybody said to a person, this made my job so much easier, and I wasn't tripping over anything. So they saw the safety and productivity benefit. We put an audit in place, a very visual, simple audit. It's got three things to check. You know, accountability was there, and then we're telling. They're telling the stories because they actually called me a couple weeks later to tell me that although they haven't hit 209, they're consistently hitting two and a half to three, with a few, you know, a little worse. But they hadn't trained everybody at that point. So my belief and my hope certainly is that they're. They're getting that. So the board still is out there. Honestly, I haven't been out there since. You've got to wind down and get back to the normal business. We actually forced these changeovers. That's very challenging. That's a lot of leadership, commitment. Talk about that on the wheel, sustainability. Before we started this event, I said to the leadership team, you got to understand, we can't wait for the next scheduled changeover. We have to create one. They looked at me with that quizzical look that I often get. You want us to do what? Well, if we don't, you're not going to get this Benefit, you have to commit. We have to, we got to do it safely. Obviously we don't want to dump $10,000 worth of product. You know, if it's a 30 minute issue, fine. But we can't wait four hours for a five hour changeover. You just can't do it. We can't work 24 hours a day. Some people can do that. I'm getting a little too old for that. So, you know, and the teams obviously don't want to do it. This was actually their first Kaizen, this type in their facility. They've had other kaizen events with, I would say, differing success. So, you know, my goal is for them to win during the week. I think their prior work had a lot of homework and I said, that's a four letter word. We don't want homework, we want to win. So is it sustainable? Are they hitting 209? No. Are they hitting numbers they weren't hitting before? Sure. And they're learning about the training and the auditing and all those things because this is truly new to them. So as a first kaizen, I think they've done quite well. You know, I'm sure they could do better.

Yeah, perfect. Perfect. Well, my goodness. I mean, I know you have a million stories, Adam, and we probably need to come, have you come back on a third time here down the road to share some more. But I think this has been, this has been a lot of fun and I love your passion, I love your energy and it's obvious why you're successful with your clients. So thanks again for coming back onto the show. Why don't we wrap things up, Adam, with maybe share some final words of wisdom for folks out there who are, who are on this journey. You know, this episode's coming out in the latter part of January. We're quite a several weeks ahead here at the end of 2019. But so people have just got started on their year and you know, everyone's excited about their New Year's resolutions and well, you know, this is the second or third week in January now and you know, maybe some of the, some of the shininess is wearing off those resolutions. Like what are some words that you can offer folks right now to kind of, kind of sustain them, if you will, through this journey, this long journey of continuous improvement?

Well, I go back to your people. Certainly the people are the ones that care. They want to win, they want to make a difference. They want that opportunity to do so. So the better we engage them, the better we empower them, the better chance they have to win. And so we have to create ways to win for them. We have to give them that support. The nice piece about this is it's not real complicated. You just have to be focused. You have to be aligned. You have to be committed to allow your people to win. Don't be afraid to charter. Call it what you will, but make sure that the problem that you're trying to solve is truly important enough so that somebody feels like that's something to work on and they want to help you win. And then make sure that you. You seed your team with those that not only want to win, but can win.

Yeah. Beautiful. Adam, what's the best way for folks to connect with you? Social media website, Something else.

Sure. So you can find me on LinkedIn. You know, after the last episode, I got Quite a few LinkedIn requests, so thank you for that. So just find me at Adamlock. Lawrence PI-partners.com is the website. You can find my contact information on the website and on my LinkedIn. And always happy to chat with other practitioners or just folks that want to learn more. You know, a call is always free. I do a free site assessment where I just visit and just let people see what's possible and just get to know the. Get to know the folks there and just give them a little hope that there's a chance to win.

Yeah, I love it. Adam, thanks again. Keep up the great work, and, yeah, I'm sure we'll have you back on the show down the road, and we'll catch up with some more stories.

Well, thanks again, Ron. Thanks for the opportunity. Great to be back for a second time.

All right, take care. Adam, 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.