GA 310 | The Role of Motivation in Continuous Improvement with Brad Miller

There's physical things that have to be done when we're changing processes, but mentally, you know, really working hard, thinking about, thinking about the process and how it can improve.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Brad Miller back to the show. Now, Brad and I have known each other for many years. Brad is, as you'll hear, a professor at the University of Houston. Go Cougars. And he teaches people all about continuous improvement. He teaches them about Lean and Six Sigma and all kinds of other great things within their supply chain kind of curriculum. And so today, Brad and I talk a lot about the whole idea of motivation and how that motivation can play into, well, really all phases of our life, obviously, but in particular, continuous improvement. So we spent some time walking through a particular framework that Brad is passionate about and has written about himself. And so we just kind of walk through this framework piece by piece and kind of working in some examples and even showing how folks like Paul Akers in his, in his two second Lean kind of concept that he, that he has popularized within his following of, of Lean, Lean Maniacs, as he call them, kind of, kind of how this whole idea of 2 second lean is really falling in line with this particular framework that's been around for a long time. And so it was really interesting to hear Brad's take on that. So show notes for this particular episode can be found over at Gemba Podcast. Just look for episode 3 10. And we're going to link to several articles and things like that. So might be good to go check out these show notes today. Again, GembaPodcast.com, look for episode 310. And if you want to hear Brad's previous episode, Brad came on four years ago, almost 200 episodes ago, back at episode one 11. So that might be a fun one to go back into the archives and pull out if you've not heard that one. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Brad Miller, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Hey, thanks. It's really great to be here. I'm super excited about chatting with you again today.

Yeah, well, we were kind of reminiscing before we hit record that it's been about 200 episodes since you were on last time. This is episode 310 and you are on in episode 111 back in May of 2016. So we've had a few sleeps since then.

Right. I can't believe it.

Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, it's super fun to catch back up with you. I'm glad we. I guess it was LinkedIn or something like that. We got got to chatting again and yeah, thanks for coming back on.

Well, excited to be here, so thanks for inviting me back.

Yeah. Well, Brad, tell us a little bit about. Well, I'll have you do your quote, but give everybody a little rundown on your background, you know, your affiliation with the University of Houston and all that good stuff.

Sure. So I am a senior professor of practice here at the C T Bauer College of Business in the business college here at the University of Houston. And what that title means is that I'm teaching, teaching students, but I'm practicing what I'm doing. I teach courses related to Lean and Six Sigma and also supply chain management. So I'm in a department where we cover supply chain management. I teach the introduction course, which is really exciting for me. Open students eyes to a career path that maybe they haven't thought of before, which is making businesses better and improving the way we operate businesses, which I've always thought is really exciting. I came from industry, worked for about a decade in industry, working different manufacturing in different manufacturing management roles, really learning what I am teaching now and practicing what I continue to practice now, which is really exciting for me because it's not like I teach solely out of a textbook, but I bring in real life examples of what is actually going on, what's currently being done. And we have a lot of fun with in class demos and being able to do stuff out in industry where my students get to go out into businesses and really improve them. So it's a lot of fun, very active and I enjoy it.

One question just popped in my mind. So obviously you come to academic world with real world experience and I don't think that's always the case with some, you know, with some academics. So like how important do you feel that is to you being able to be truly successful?

Sure. Well, I really think that there's a combination of experiences that's good for a university. So now you're kind of getting.

Yeah, I know it's not our topic for today, but I was just curious to get your thoughts on that.

My philosophy on higher education, but I do think it takes, it takes a blend. You definitely need, I think in a university you need to have a connection with industry and what's actually going on. One way to do that is to have some professors that have that real world experience. But there's also the pushing the envelope side of education where you need professors that are doing leading research and figuring out the newest ways of doing things. And I think students Get a lot out of both. Both of those. And we're really, I guess, blessed here in the business school to have a really good blend of professors in supply chain management that have both. You know, where we've got some that are, you know, really pushing on the. On the research side, we have some that are really ingrained on the experience, business experience side. All of us are involved in connecting with. With outside businesses and connecting our students with them. But so we learn from each other, and we have a good time doing that.

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, you know, Brad, we like to begin all of our shows with a guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

Sure. My favorite quote, I don't know if there is an attributed person that said it. I think I heard it first from you, which is if the learner has not learned, then the teacher has not taught. And while that quote, really, it puts a lot of pressure on me, and I really. I think that it embodies a lean mindset. So I guess there's. There's some professors I know that I have had when I was in college that I felt like just sort of put the material out there and then, you know, kind of said, hey, hands off, students. You know, I put it out there. It's up to you to learn it. And I think that there's definitely a role of the student in learning. You know, there's work that the students have to do to learn. But in my classes, when I have a topic that I'm trying to teach and then I have some sort of assessment, and I realize that a lot of students or, you know, even just a couple, haven't learned that topic. It bothers me, you know, and it puts this. This quote kind of puts that pressure back on me where I look at myself and I say, how could I have done that differently? What could I have done in the teaching situation to make that more clear? Some students didn't, some got it, some didn't. So what could I have done differently? I like it because it's analogous to lean. Right? When there's a process that has a defect, traditional management will go in and say, okay, whose fault is this? And what did you do wrong? But from a lean perspective, as managers, we look at a process defect and we say, well, wow, why did I design the process like this? How can we change that problem? What did I do wrong? You know, it's more inward focus, looking at how I can improve and how I can learn, as opposed to it's someone else's fault and passing the buck.

Exactly. Yeah. That's an awesome quote. I think, you know, actually, I don't even know who officially said it. It's definitely part of the TWI movement. In fact, it's on at the bottom of many of our TWI cards. You know, that we, that when we train people heavily using the job instruction part of, of twi. But I don't know who actually said it, so there's probably some TWI gurus out there listening who know exactly. Maybe one of those four horsemen or something like that, but. Right, but as a powerful quote, man. And then it's humbling, right? As well. It's humbling as well when you're trying to teach others. So. Yeah. Great. All right. Well, hey, listen, Brad, we were, I guess we were conversing a little bit about the whole idea of, of, of motivation. And I know you, you, you, You've written a LinkedIn article on the topic. And so many of us are familiar with things like, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and different things like that, and the importance of, of feeling safe and having, you know, some of the basics, you know, of life. And then we move, move beyond that, up the pyramid, if you will. But I wanted to kind of get your thoughts and your take on the whole topic of, of motivation and how that plays in to the continuous improvement world.

Sure, yeah. You know, on your podcast and on others have heard a lot of discussion about motivation. Not every time, but there's certainly been several times people have talked about motivation and different ways to think about it. And you know, in these, these frameworks that are discussed often, and you mentioned Maslow's and there's others, they're definitely useful managers, you know, have been using them for a while. They are, they have been around for a while. I think maslow was like 1943, so we're talking, you know, pushing 80 years ago.

He's OG man. OG.

There's definitely some more, some more recent work that's been done in motivation and frameworks for really understanding how people are motivated that I think take a little more holistic view and actually are kind of. I mean, one of the things I want to talk with you about today is that this expectancy value framework for motivation actually I think has some lean value to it. So in traditional motivation theories, a lot of times it's what can the manager do to manipulate people to do what they want the person to do? And with this framework, it's more around enabling, enabling people to do what's good for them, which is much more of a. To me, it's much more aligned with a lean viewpoint. So do you want to talk through the framework?

Yeah, talk through it.

Okay. So let's start with the end in mind. Okay. Where we want to end up. So I think most managers would agree, I want a motivated workforce. I want my people to be motivated. So let's first define what that means. And within this framework. Within this framework, we definitely define what motivation means. And it's called. In the literature, it's called achievement behaviors. But let's think through it in terms of, like, a lean improvement. So when we have a. Let's say we have a worker that's working in a process, and they're sort of working independently, and they encounter a problem, ideally, what we would like in lean is we would like them to see that problem and then dive in and. And try to find some sort of a countermeasure. You know, what improvement can we make? Let's gather people around. Let's figure out how we can make the process better. We've encountered this problem. Let's put a countermeasure to it. So that is the very first achievement behavior, which is choice, is choosing to engage in an activity. So if someone's not motivated, they're not going to be likely to jump in and really start that work. So that's the first thing after they get started working. You know how process improvement is, right. Most of the time it's not very easy. So you get started working at it, and you encounter resistance, you encounter, you know, problems, and things don't work right. And it's difficult to figure out, well, what do we do to make this better? And you really have to work kind of hard at it. So the other achievement parts of achievement behaviors are persistence. So when there's difficulty, we persist at the task. You don't want people giving up. And the other one is mental and physical effort, which is really being engaged in that problem solving, exerting both physically, there's physical things that have to be done when we're changing processes, but mentally really working hard, thinking about the process and how it can improve. And when all of these things happen, one of the other achievement behaviors is performance that, you know, people that are motivated, they actually perform. They're actually able to do the stuff that they're. That they're working on. So these are the achievement behaviors. So when we talk about motivation within this framework, I'm going to talk about two different groups of beliefs that people have that managers can influence and that managers have some control over and how those lead to achievement behaviors. So the whole goal is we want to improve achievement behaviors. We want people to choose to participate in these activities to improve processes. We want them to persist when there's difficulties, exert mental and physical effort and perform and actually make a difference. So there's achievement behaviors. When I think about these, just I don't know if this is going to be helpful to you or to your listeners. I think about my hobbies because my hobbies are definitely something that I'm motivated to do. There's no one that is incentivizing me to do this. It's something I'm doing clearly on my own. So I don't know what your hobbies are. For me, on the side, it's golf. I really enjoy golf. Golf. Not easy, but it's something I choose to do. I definitely encounter all kinds of resistance and all kinds of problems. Persist at that. Think about it. A hard at it. Physical effort, practice and performance. Okay, I'm not a great golfer, but getting better. So all those things are there. So that's achievement behaviors.

Got it.

All right. So that's our goal. That's where we're headed. That's what we really want people to have for themselves. So how do we get there? And this is hard to talk about. Easier to kind of visualize. So I'll try to create a visual for you as you're listening. Achievement behaviors is what we're trying to get to. There are two pieces that fit into creating those achievement behaviors. So you can imagine kind of one on the left and one on the right, and both of these are beliefs that people have. So let's look on the left. These are going to be things that people believe about themselves. So these are called expectancy beliefs. But we don't really have to know that. It's just things people believe about themselves. So one is that they believe that if. If they engage in this activity that they have the ability to do it. So it's me thinking I can do this. This is something that I'm capable of doing. And the second belief they have about themselves is if I do it, then I have the chance or I have a probability of being successful. You can imagine when if you don't think that you have the skill to be able to do something, or you think if I engage in this, I'm just going to be a big failure, then you're not going to be very motivated to pursue that particular activity.

So where do you think the whole idea kind of like the things that we're practicing with, like within scientific so called scientific thinking or Toyota Kata, when we're about to take a next step or run an experiment, if you will, and we honestly aren't sure what's going to happen, but we know we're going to learn something. So how does that play into one of those two buckets that you. That's described?

Sure. Well, I think that part of the culture that we try to build in, in an organization when we're pursuing lean is that we are running experiments. And part of having a successful experiment is not necessarily that you get the result that you're looking for.

Yeah.

But that you get a result and you learn from it.

Yeah.

And that's part of building that culture and that's part of something that a manager can absolutely do. Understanding that. Understanding that someone's expectation that they're going to be successful or expectation that they have the ability to do a particular task or improve a particular process. Setting the expectation that the important thing is that you learn, we're going to try something out, it may not work the first time, but you learn from it. And that's one step closer to having that ultimate success, which honestly. And lean and you know this, Ron. It's an ongoing, it's an ongoing task. We're always trying to improve processes. So it's not like we ever hit perfect, you know, so we're always, it's always stumbling a little bit forward and making those things. But setting that as part of the culture of the organization, I think is definitely part of that.

I like it. I like it. Now then, the first one that you mentioned, like they have the ability, if you will, or they believe they have the ability to be successful. I guess that is where training comes in. Like, I don't have the ability, Brad, I am very sorry to say, to do surgery on your brain. Right. I don't. And so I wouldn't ever attempt that. So if I did want to do that, well, then I got to go back to school. Right. And I gotta, I gotta practice brain surgery, if you will. But so that maybe is an important part of that, of what you do. And what we do is train people to teach people, give them the skills and, and the knowledge to have a chance, if you will.

Right. Well, when you think about things that you've been through in training, I know Gemba Academy does a lot of this. The same with me. In my experience in industry, when trying to train people in something new with Lean, we always start small. We'll Say, well, let's do this little desktop experiment where we're moving Legos around or moving paper around or drawing things on a piece of paper. The real work. But it's. We're trying to give people that experience to say, okay, I've never done this before, but I've just had the experience that I. That I am successful or that I have been successful with this. And we're building. We're building that belief. Yeah. And it's something that I do in my classes, too, especially when I'm teaching something that may be perceived as being difficult. A lot of times, you know, I teach some things with six sigma, so we talk about some statistical concepts. And a lot of times people come in with the perception that statistics is really hard. And so one thing that's important for me in teaching that is starting small, starting with things that. Where people can gain that experience of being successful and labeling it as this is statistics. You just did it. And now let's build on that. Let's take one little piece and build on it. So really caring for the people that you're working with, their beliefs about their ability and their beliefs that they can be successful.

I like it. Okay, keep going. Sorry.

All right. No, this is great. I love it. So now the other side. So that was what we call, in the framework, it's called expectancy beliefs, but things people believe about themselves. On the other side is things people believe about the activity, what they believe about the activity. So there's several things here. One is the importance of the activity now, and these things are all going to be related to the person themselves. If we're talking about an organization, an organization might have goals or might have a mission statement. If people don't embrace that for themselves, then it doesn't make a whole lot of difference in terms of their own motivation. It's got to be something that's important to them. Is the task important to me? Is it useful to me? Those are two different things. And we can see this in Lean. This is one reason why I think lean works so well, is that when people are improving their own processes, oftentimes what they're doing is making the work easier for themselves, making it easier for them to be successful. So that's important. They own that process. It's important for them. It's useful for them. So that's very motivating. The next one is interest and enjoyment. It's something that's fun, making it fun. And a lot of times in lean and lean training, we turn things into games. And practice and try to keep things fun even on the shop floor as we improve processes. And that helps to boost motivation as well. Then there is called perceived cost. There's some sort of value proposition there that says, well, if this is going to be too hard for me or if it's going to take too much effort, I'm not going to do that. There's that negative side too. Now, one of the neat things about this framework that's different maybe from others is like Lean, it's a systems viewpoint. It's not like a manager can tweak a button in here, tweak one of these variables and get motivated people. So it's got to be the whole system.

Got it.

You have to touch all of these pieces simultaneously. And when you do, that's really where you get the big, the big payoff at the end in terms of a group of people that are motivated to improve processes, to persist when there's difficulty to exert mental and physical effort and actually perform well. That's the, I mean, that's the major framework. There are, you know, there's certainly things that managers can do to influence those things. But, but I'm willing to, we can just have a conversation about it. However, you, Whatever seems natural to you.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think it all sounds very logical and makes a lot of sense. One thing that I've been thinking a lot about, I've mentioned it on a few podcasts recently, reading Amy Edmondson, she's a, I guess she's a professor at Stanford, I believe. And so she, she writes a lot about the whole idea of, of psychological safety and some really, the book is called A Fearless Organization. Really, really good book. I'm trying to, try to organize a podcast with her actually. Okay. But you, you know, go. Goes through a lot of, a lot of real world case studies of how, you know, really bad stuff has happened within companies that, and a lot of it had to do with employees having, you know, being scared to speak up and, you know, are scared to, you know, share ideas or, or scared, you know, when they know something's wrong. I mean, there's been, well, you know, not to put them out there, but there's some, some discussion within the, the, the world of industry out there of a certain airplane manufacturer who has had some, had a very, very bad problem recently. And yeah, I'm not going to, I don't want to poke holes at anybody, but who knows who I'm probably talking about. And there was some question on whether or not there was, you Know, fear within the workplace that, that, that probably if it hadn't been there, could have prevented, you know, people dying. And so I'd be curious to get your thoughts on. On what you think of that. Like what you think of, of. Of something like what we call psychological safety and how that might play into the motivation world.

Sure. Well, I mean, I think it definitely hits in the perceived cost. So, you know, if I do this, then there's going to be this backlash from the organization. So that would be a perceived cost. So any way that we can protect people from that would lower the perceived cost. And the other part of it is the interest is the enjoyment. Right. Of the activity. So if I feel like I'm going to be emotionally threatened or politically threatened in the organization, I mean, that's just gonna, that's gonna suck the joy out of any activity and be something that I'm not gonna be interested in doing.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. We talked about Maslow Right. Early on. And you know, physiological safety is super important. Right. Like, am I going to get eaten by a bear? You know, I mean, that's, that's, that's very important. Right, but sure, yeah. So within an organization, there's not, hopefully not bears eating people, but there could be like a bear of a boss or something like that. Right. Who is.

Right.

Driving fear. And throughout the organization, another thing, you know, a popular motivation framework or model, if you will, that was popularized a few years ago. Well, it's probably more than a few years ago. Time flies. Dan Pink, right. And his book Drive. What motivates people, talking about, you know, mastery, autonomy and purpose and stuff like that as being really important tenants of motivation. Where do you see all those fitting into your framework?

Yeah, I think that anytime you have a framework, if it's useful for you to be able to make work better and improve things for people and really build that lean culture, then I think that those can be helpful. I will tell you one of the things that makes this particular framework unique, and I think that this will connect with you as someone that practices Lean and Six Sigma. One of the things that we value is experimentation, statistics, and actually having data that demonstrates that there are relations between different variables. This is one of the reasons that this particular framework has been so successful over the past 15, 18 years in a variety of different business contexts is because it's been highly researched and there's no need for us to get into the statistics and the research. But all of these different variables, there are actual statistical numbers attached to them, meaning that when you raise one variable in a certain way, it's going to have effects on the other variables in very predictable ways that have. There's a standard deviation associated with it to where there's a demonstrated empirical research evidence that improving these beliefs that people have improves their, their achievement behaviors, improves the way that they perform in the organization.

Yeah. What you said about, you know, the various models and whatnot, I think, I think about George Box. Right. All models are wrong. Some are useful. Right. And, and I think it's important to, to understand that there's lots to learn from all models. Right. And, and experiment.

Right.

Because in certain scenarios, certain situations, you know, one model might be extra effective and not so effective and the next situation. So I think understanding the various models out there is super important. So, so, you know, earlier you kind of hinting at, you know, your golf and all the rest of it. I'd be curious, maybe tell us a little bit more about, about this framework and in your, in your golfing.

Oh, well, in my golfing, I don't know, maybe something. I don't know if my golfing is going to connect with, with all your listeners as much as talking about some different lean contexts.

That'll work. Yeah.

So when I was first introduced to this framework, it was one of my professors several years back. And I'll just do a quick shout out to her, Shirley Yu, and she was here at the University of Houston. And just because I know that you have some affinity for the Buckeyes, she's now up at Ohio State. But she introduced me to this and when she did, immediately what came to mind was my experience in industry with Kaizen events. And I know there's different perspectives on using Kaizen events and whether you do or not, but I think that there's a lot of things within Kaizen events that definitely play on this way of building motivation. So we talked earlier about training. So in a Kaizen event, typically you'll have a day one training or early training on early on where you're training concepts that people are going to need to help solve processes. But you're doing it in small, fun ways. You kind of keep it fun. You're in sort of a room and you play games and you do demos and you give people some success. You show them you can be successful at this. On top of that, another thing that we do when we're practicing Kaizen is we share those ideas. So we're saying, hey, here's Joe. And Joe just figured out how to improve this process. Let's share that with everyone and celebrate that. So it's demonstrating that here's someone that's just like me, that's having the success. I can do this too. There's people that have done this before. Whenever we put these teams together, a lot of times we bring together people that are experienced and people that aren't so that the people that aren't experienced can learn from the people that are a little bit more experienced. So they're getting that model. There's a mental model or there's someone there that they've seen that that person's like me, they're successful, I can do this too. So that's building on what they believe about themselves, but also things that they believe about the activ. So a lot of times people, they're improving their own processes. You know, if I do this, if I participate in this, it's going to make my work better, it's going to make my outcomes better. It's going to be easier for me to perform well. We always, I know all the events that I participated in when I was in industry, they were always a lot of work, but they were a lot of fun. Like, you know, we had fun. They were always high energy, different activities, going out and seeing what was going on in, in the Gemba, in the different processes and improving them. People were always celebrating, you know, celebrating our wins. And it just, it made it, it made it fun. It was, it was honestly a, an enjoyable experience. So those task value beliefs of important, of enjoy, importance or enjoyment, usefulness are all there. And when you have all that, then you've got a team that is persisting at improving mental and physical effort, choosing to participate and actually performing, actually winning at it, being able to do it.

I love it.

Yeah, we can talk through another example if you want one. Recently that got me excited, I guess, thinking about this podcast is Paul Akers 2 Second Lean. And the reason that I bring it up is he's put sort of his methodology or his spin on Lean out there for people to see. So it's easy for all of us to kind of see what he's doing in his company. And I don't know how much he knows about this particular motivation framework, but I feel like he's hitting it on all cylinders for sure. One of the things he does is he sets the expectation at the beginning when he hires people, he says, everyone that works for me, I've heard him say is a process engineer. And he's setting that image, that self image of people. Well, what are you, what do you do at this company. And he's got videos of his people answering that question. They say, I'm a process engineer, I improve processes. So it's building in that belief that people have about themselves that this is what I do for a job, I have the ability to do this and I can be successful at it. So building in that expertise, expectancy for success with 2 second lean, it's all about really small changes. So he makes it easy to make improvements which lowers that perceived cost. It's not like you have to make some earth shattering change. It's a real easy, easy change. And then he videos them and shares them with everyone. So then again he's building in the idea that there are people here that are just like me, that are doing this, I can do it too. And making it fun. I mean, a lot of these videos embed into it the personalities of the people that are, that are improving the particular process. And you can tell that they're having fun with having fun with the video, having fun with putting their own spin on things. He actually demonstrates the stuff himself. He just, he doesn't say, okay everybody, all you need to do it. He practices what he is asking others to do. And that translates into this is important for our company, it's something that we do. It's part of having the identity of working here. So he's building that into the culture which builds into the importance and the usefulness of the activities.

Yeah. So one other thing that Paul is famous for saying is fix what bugs you. Right? Right, yeah. Which kind of leads into that whole why am I doing this? Right. And how's it going to benefit me? So fix what bugs you and that's.

The importance and that usefulness, you're doing it for yourself. So this is what I was kind of saying at the beginning is that this framework, a lot of times motivation frameworks are we'll just say manipulated by managers to where a manager says, okay, how can I get people to do what I want them to do? So I'm going to manipulate things in someone's environment to force them to do something that they don't want to do. And with this framework, it really embodies to me, it embodies the whole idea from lean of respect for people that says that we aren't trying to manipulate people to do something that they don't want to do. We're trying to expose people to a world where things can be better for them, where they would want to choose to do something like this, they would want to improve A process want to participate in these activities and collaborate with their coworkers and make life better for the people in their company and for their customers.

Got it. Got it. Wow. So good. This has been really fun. Brad. To hear more about the model. So if someone wants to read some. Just some more information or just get a deeper dive into the whole framework, where can they go?

Probably I guess they can search for Eccles and Wakefield Expectancy Value Theory or Expectancy Value Model and I can.

Well send me a link. Send me some links and we'll put them in the show notes so folks can go there.

Yep. And I have a link to a little short article. I don't know how exciting it'll be for people to read, but it does relate expect this Expectancy value framework.

Yeah.

To Lean and to specifically to Kaizen events which is where I did. I looked at the model and how it fits in.

Perfect. Yes. And that all. We'll put it in the show notes so folks can go to gembellpodcast.com so this is episode 310. So we'll link it all up there and yeah. Brad, thanks for. For coming back on to the show. Are you. Best way to connect with you personally is LinkedIn or Snapchat. What are you doing these days, Brad?

Yeah. LinkedIn, Twitter, kaizen.

Okay.

And I have a YouTube I'll. I'll send you the link to that I love. That's where I put my own Kaizens.

And I know you always add videos of your students. Students and whatnot on LinkedIn. Whatnot. Doing different improvements.

Absolutely.

Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. Great stuff, man. All right. Well hey, keep up the great work. Let's. Let's try to catch up again before another 200 episodes goes by. But it's always fun to reconnect and maybe we'll see at a conference or two down the road or something like that.

All right. Sounds good.

All right. You're welcome. Take care, Brad.

All right.

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