GA 311 | The Lean Construction Movement with Hal Macomber

It's like trust people and they'll be trustworthy as opposed to we'll wait for somebody to be trustworthy and then I'll trust you. No, it's the other way around. You gotta, you grant that. So grant the respect, grant the trust, and then you get respectful behavior, you get trustworthiness.

Today I'm excited to welcome Hal Maycomber to the show. Now, I've known Hal online and over email for, gosh, better part of 10 years. Super nice guy, super knowledgeable guy, but I had never actually spoken to the man. So I was really excited for today's episode. And Hal is one of the original proponents and activists or whatever the right word is for the Lean construction movement. And so that's really the main emphasis of today's episode, is talking about how lean is being used within the construction world, how it got started, where they're at today, some of the success stories as well as some of the challenges that they're still facing. And Hal is a super knowledgeable guy, as you'll hear. He's got a lot of experience just in Lean in general, even before he got into the construction world. So I think you're going to find a lot of value even if you aren't in the construction world. We've all had things built for us. We've all, you know, you know, if you, if you have own a home, obviously that was built if you work for a company that the building that you're working in is, was built at one time. So I think it's, it's always interesting to see how the things around us are benefiting from Lean. So give this one a listen. It's a little longer than normal, but I think listen to it in chunks if you need to show notes which are going to have links to everything Hal and I talk about. And Hal does give some good links later in the show out for folks who want to learn more. But that's going to be found on this is episode 311. So just go to gembapodcast.com look for episode 311 and everything will be linked in there. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Hal, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Great, Ron. It's a beautiful day in New Hampshire.

Ah, nice, nice. Well, we're here in Texas and It was like 80 degrees a few days ago and it's supposed to be like 30 tomorrow or something, I don't know. So just hurry up and wait. Around here is the weather this time of year. But yeah, New Hampshire is a beautiful part of the country.

I was in Austin last week all week long, and people were in down coats and mittens and hats. It was like, wait a minute, this is not, this is not what I was looking for.

Right, yeah, exactly. Hurry up and wait, they say around here.

So.

All right, well, hey, you know, it's, we were kind of chatting a little bit before we got the recording going there that, you know, I've, I've, I guess we've interacted over the years over LinkedIn and emails and stuff like that, but it's, it's, it's a pleasure to finally talk to you. Not face to face, but voice to voice, I guess. So. It's really exciting.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Okay.

I was looking forward to this.

Yeah. Well, Hal, as you know, we kind of like to begin all of our episodes with our gas sharing a quote. So. Do you have one?

Yeah. So it's a twist on something that Kanban Community has been. Kanban method community. In other words, the approach the software community uses.

Right, right.

Okay. So they say stop starting, start finishing. And what I've been, I mean, I'm quoting myself here, so that when I say my favorite quote, it's, you know, it's like, it's hard not to like what you say. Right, right. But the more you start, the further behind you get. And you say that to people, it's like, hold on. It's like, are you new to the, to this world? It's like the more you start, the further bound you get. But it's a, it's, I mean, it's a direct result of Little's Law. And, and people don't know what Little's Law is, but it explains the relationship between work and process.

Yeah.

Through throughput time and cycle time.

Yeah.

And so if you start work, if you interrupt finishing work to start work, then you get further behind. And so it, I, I like that because it gets people in a conversation. You can be, you can get people into a conversation about operation science of Lean. And so many people, you know, they hear about respect for people and continuous improvement and they think, well, that's, those are the bedrock principles. So everything must stem from that. Well, there is operation Science. And we wouldn't have the, you know, the Toyotas of the world if they weren't great at the operation science of production.

Yeah.

Well, the construction world. People in the construction world, even with advanced education, they don't study production, let alone the design of production. Yeah, it's. The industry is based in a civil engineering education. And there's nothing going on in the civil engineering education that would prepare you for. For designing production systems. Right, right.

Well, you've already let the cat out of the bag a little bit on construction. So let's take one step back and tell us a little bit about yourself, Hal. Tell us about your background, how you first got introduced, all this continuous improvement and lean stuff, and then in the construction world. And then tell us what you're up to these days.

Okay, so my formal education, I studied economics, statistics and operations research. And this is a long time ago, 40 years ago, more than 40 years ago. And I worked in the manufacturing space for quite a while. I even worked as an industrial engineer for the first couple years out of school. And I wasn't an industrial engineer, but I was working. I couldn't get a job. It was one of those frequent depressions we had back in the 70s and the. So I worked in that and then I got into manufacturing and basically I made my career for 20 years in manufacturing, production, logistics, materials management. Along the way I met this crazy guy named Norman Bodek, the godfather of Lean, and began reading his books on the translations of all these Japanese texts. And so that's how I really first got into it. And then I was happy. I was working for Digital Equipment Corporation and I was happy to be selected to go to Japan and study at the Japan Union of Scientists and Engineers. This is in 1985. And Ken Maguire, do you know that name?

Yeah, I do. Yeah. I don't know him personally, but I've heard the name. Yeah.

Yeah. So he was organizing study missions to Japan at that time. And what we're studying is total quality and time based management. And you know, put the two together and you've got the kind of Toyota way of working, and we call it Lean today, but TQM and, and taking a time approach to your production is what we were learning. I came back, put it to work at Digital Equipment Corporation, and there was a quid pro quo at that time with our Japanese host. We said four groups of 24 people at digital went over there. I was in the second group and they got to bring somebody back. And we all had to submit our kind of summaries of the projects that we had worked on since we'd been studying with over there. And they called me and they said, come back. So I got to go back for another 10 days. It was almost four weeks over there the first time. And I got another 10 days the following year in 86. Eventually I was Introduced to a construction company in Colorado. It's a construction company that has a architectural staff in house. They call it Design Build. And the company's name is the Neenan Company. And I started working with them as an advisor on all things innovation. There's a construction company back in 1995 that was interested in innovation. That's now a hot topic in construction companies today. It's 25 years later. So these guys were way ahead of their time. They were ahead of the time being Design Build. There were other things that were going on that was put them way out in front of other people. And they then put me on the board. They made me the chief operating officer in 1997, thereabouts, 19, maybe 1998. And I was there three years before I left and began consulting to the industry. So that's my background. I'm no longer consulting the industry. I'm now an executive vice president with a software company that provides planning environments. Software planning environments for Lean Construction.

What's the name of the company? I mean, you don't have to say.

Yeah, the company's Touch Plan. Okay, cool, cool. And it's Touch Plan supports the Last Planner system.

Got it, got it. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about, about Lean Construction. It's actually a topic we haven't explored much on the podcast really. And maybe let's just begin with some background on, on how, how Lean found its way into the construction industry.

So it's a, it's a happy accident that occurred. In 1992. A visiting scholar from Finland, his name is Lowry Koskala, was invited to Stanford, the Stanford center for Integrated Facilities Engineering. And right across the bay from Stanford was this thing going on called nummi. Okay. And Lowry, I mean it was all in the papers in 1992. It was kind of crazy. They were upsetting at that point in time. Nummi was, had already proven out, if I got my time right, that they could make cars in the United States comparable in quality to the ones coming from Japan. But the manufacturing, you know, Lean, the book the Machine that Changed the World was out in mid-80s. Lean thinking at the end, like 1990, thereabouts there I've got my dates wrong, but yeah, I'm in the ballpark.

Yeah.

And, and so this was a hot topic in manufacturing and he couldn't, he couldn't avoid it here. Well, he ended up writing a 75 page document. It was titled the Application of the New Production Philosophy to Construction. And you can get it if you go. If you just Google that. You can, you can read the paper it'll become from the Lean construction institute there, leanconstruction.org but essentially it was a manifesto. In his short time studying what was going on, he concluded that yes, this is exactly what we have to do that we in particular we need to design for flow in construction. And we neither design for it nor do we manage for it. In fact, at that time people thought that good construction projects were accomplished by managing the contracts as opposed to managing the work. In fact, you could if you attempted to manage the work as in terms of means and methods. If the general contractor did that, then the trade contractors would, they didn't have any responsibility for their performance because it had been taken over by the general. So that was the kind of the birth, so to speak. The following year, a whole bunch of academics from around the world got together for the first international group for Lean Construction. And they're having their 28th annual meeting this year in Peru and next year in Edmonton, Alberta. I mean it's like think, I mean these are crazy different locations in the world. The Lean Construction institute formed in 1998. We're having our 23rd annual meeting this year in Detroit. And there's now software companies that, including Autodesk and Oracle, who are specifically providing tools to support lean construction as we are at Touch Plan. So that's sort of the big, the general background. The specific thing that's happened in construction is something called the Last Planner system, which was created by Glenn Ballard and in association with Greg Howell. And it's essentially the formal name is the Last Planar System of production control. It includes planning, operating and improving the production system or I should say designing, operating and improving the production system of construction. And people know it as a sticky note visual planning system that's kind of, let's just call it old school. Some people will argue with me about that, but in today's world we need, we need data quickly. We need to learn from what's going on. We need quick. We, we want to look across projects and across trades and contracts. So data, I mean there's no data if you're looking at sticky notes and, and paper forms. So. But the Last Planner system has had a remarkable impact on the industry. We're doing a far better job today of delivering on time and on budget and hurting fewer people as a result of using the Last Planner system on projects.

Yeah, I definitely want to get into some, maybe some success stories and even some challenges here in a bit, but I'm curious, maybe for the folks listening who are familiar with Lean in general, some of the lean tenants, you know, going back to lean thinking, you know, identify value and flow and pull and some of these key concepts, respect for people, obviously.

Right.

Talk about how some of those key lean tenants are. Are being being utilized within the construction world.

So, like from the beginning, I mean, the, the sort of alignment with lean thinking principles, it let's. We. We came at the same time, right? Lean thinking, it's the world. And we started 1992. And so we said, oh, well, we got to start with the value that the customer wants. What's the customer want? And for a contractor in the construction side, the value is established in the design process. The people in the design process are the ones talking to the client about why they want something in the built environment, a building or a factory or a school or whatever it is, and in particular, what the business case is for that. So it starts with value for, you know, defined value from the customer's perspective and in the customer's language. So when you go, what we took very seriously, the way that Womack and Jones spoke about that back then, in fact, we invited Jim Womack to work with our community very early on, and he came out and we hosted a conference in Colorado, and he helped us get clear about those concepts. Turns out he's headed to Peru this summer to speak to be the keynote speaker at the International Group for Lean Construction. So, yeah, I mean, this is 28 years. Well, 20 something years after we really got going with Lean Construction. The value stream, you know, organize your work as a value stream. Our particular approach for doing that is called pull planning. P U L L planning. And what we do is we start at the end. We say, well, this milestone we're trying to achieve, let's say we have underground utilities and a foundation ready for going out, going up in the air. So that's our milestone to be ready to start going vertical. Well, you start with what's the last thing you're gonna do before you can start going vertical? And you work all the way backwards to the front. And in a pull fashion, you organize your work. So second step was to do that. The. The third is make the workflow and then pull and then continuously improve. And the interesting thing is we're pretty good about pulling, but you only want to pull if you can't make it flow. I think I'm quoting Ono, right? Yep.

Yeah, best Kanban is No Kanban.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we missed it for way too long. And so as an Industry, the. The attention to flow hasn't been there, but we've been pulling.

Yeah.

And then continuous improvement. The last planar system in particular, gives you the kinds of data that signals where you need to be putting your attention.

Yeah.

So we're designed specifically from, I'll say, the five lean principles. Although the originators of it, they weren't paying attention to the lean principles. They were watching what was happening in the field on some very, very large petrochemical projects and where over 80% of the material is on the ground on the job site, and yet there's no work that could be done that day because of, you know, it wasn't prepared well. Yeah. And so responding to that, they developed independently of the lean thinking principles. But very quickly, around 2020, we rationalized our presentation of our approach with the lean thinking principles. And that happened sort of after meeting Womack.

Got it. Well, one thing, we've not actually formally announced this as a company, but Gemba Academy, we actually just moved into a new building that we've built here in Keller, Texas.

Gotta go.

Well, it was interesting. I'll tell you, the. The general contractor that we worked with, they did a great job. Now, I wouldn't consider them a lean, lean construction outfit by any means, but. But they kept things moving. They kept things flowing. I'll tell you where our biggest challenge was, and I'd be curious to get your take on this. They. The biggest hurdles for us was a. Was a city that I live in, and my goodness, I mean, it literally. Well, this was a very. Maybe a disaster story or a horror story of all horror stories, but there was 100% turnover in this building department, you know, in our city, since we started the process. And, like, all the engineers left, everybody was gone. And so we just had one problem after another. I mean, I'm talking months and months of delay just getting, you know, approval to put a shovel on the ground. And so I'd be curious, like, if what your. What your approach is to dealing with highly bureaucratic, unorganized cities. And I know not all of them are, but ours is.

Well, the general approach, Ron, is to bring them into the project and invite them to some of the earliest things that you would do, like figure out what you want to do with the building, how big you want it to be, how you want it situated on your lot. So we've done this. I mean, if you. You want to see some complication in building, try to put a hospital in place in California. There's an organization, it's a statewide Group, it's called oshpd, and it is responsible for healthcare facilities permitting and review. And so you just invite them in so that they can understand what you're doing and they can steer you away from things that are going to be challenging or that sort of thing. Yeah. Now, absent you doing something like that, which you sure you didn't do, because nobody thinks of doing something like that.

Well, we could. Didn't matter anyhow, because they all left. Had we done that, it wouldn't have mattered because they all. They all left. So, yeah, we had a whole new crew to work with three months into it, you know, so.

So the building department is protecting the public from, you know, keeping them safe, let's put it that way. And so enforcing the building code is. Is about life, safety. And so they see themselves as. As protectors that they. That there's turnover is more an indication of what's going on right now. There are a lot of towns and cities who have rent a. They've. They've. They've outsourced their building department. Mm. Because they're just. There's. How do you. How do you get one? I live in a town that doesn't have a building inspector. Yeah. In fact, I don't know any building inspectors around.

Ours were contracted as well in this. In the city that I live in. Yep. The inspectors were all contracted.

Yeah. The only thing that was inspected in my house was the septic system. Mm. That was it. Nothing else? There's no occupancy permit. There's nothing. You just move in.

Yeah. Well, let's jump into some. Maybe some. Maybe a success story or two, and then maybe a challenge, in whichever order you want to present them. Uplink construction in action.

Okay. So one of the things that is working today that wasn't working 25 years ago is that there's general respect for people in the industry. And there's been a. I mean, we've gone through a very hard time to get where we are. But respecting people in general, it's just like the general way we would talk about respect for people. Not the more finessed, meaning that we have in lean, but people are treating people more as people, and that's a good thing. 25 years ago, sabotaging each other's work, even damaging each other's work, was pretty routine in a lot of places in the country. And even in 2012 in the city, in a couple of the cities I was working in, you'd routinely find one trade damaging another trade's work. That's for the most part changed. On top of it, the trades themselves, their relationships with the general contractors are vastly improved. So we call the trades on the jobs not subcontractors, but trade partners. And it's hard for some people to get those two words together, get them out of their mouth. But once you start acting like somebody's your partner, they start behaving like they're your partner. It's like trust people. And they'll, they'll, they'll be trustworthy as opposed to, we'll wait for somebody to be trustworthy and then I'll trust you. No, it's the other way around. You gotta, you grant that. So grant the respect, grant the trust. And then you get, you get respectful behavior, you get trustworthiness. And that is happening. So this, this the language that we've used referring to specialty contractors as trade partners. I'm using the language loosely here. But to call them trade partners and behave towards them as their partners is fundamental change for the industry. Now the general contractors are embracing lean construction practices. A majority of the top 100 contract, you know, general contractors in the US are a large majority, are engaging lean practices, some lean construction practices somewhere, if not routinely, everywhere. Now they're doing it to one degree or another. Some places they're real beginners, some places they're coasting, and in other places they're experimenting. Like we would want to be experimenting to learn. But the general contractors have been adopting it, and so much so that at the Lean Construction Congress, this annual event for lean construction in the U.S. we're getting over 1600 delegates at the meeting. And last year, 300 thereabouts, abstracts were put forward to present at the Congress. Year before was around 250. I'm on a review committee for selecting them, and I fully expect to have to read 50 to 100 abstracts. Yeah, exactly. It is great. So these things, this is all good. And I would say a third area we're making progress in is that owners are really getting on board with this. The big owners in the commercial space have a little group they call the Construction Users Roundtable. And there's members like Procter and Gamble and Chevron and General Motors and, and Intel. So you just take three or four of those.

And what about Toyota?

Toyota is a recent. Yeah, so Toyota has recently shown up there. Toyota. So I know some contractors who worked in Georgetown. They were my clients. And the Georgetown construction folks weren't asking for lean construction. I don't know if they knew they could ask for it or didn't know they could ask for it but they basically weren't getting it. On the other hand, what they were asking when people came back to do more work is so what have you learned working elsewhere since you've worked here that you can bring to us? So there is, there was a. You know, it's like if you're continuously improving inside a Toyota you, you're just expecting that that's what people are doing and so they're expecting that their contractors are learning but that specifically that they would build in a. Build in a lean way is has in my experience has been missing. No I haven't been. I was there in. I went with Mike Hosius to Toyota a couple months ago and it's a different place there than I've been there three or three times. That was my third time and boy is it different now. More production lines and Georgetown is that where you went? Georgetown? Yeah, yeah, that's where we went yeah. Much more. Less open space. So they've. It's a fuller environment than it was before actually. More inventory in, in there too.

Yeah there's a. I have some friends in construction industry around here in Texas and and one of them was commenting on the, the Toyota facility here in Plano that just went up oh gosh a year or so ago and it's pretty, pretty well followed here within the the world here. Like I don't again not necessarily folks saying they practice lean construction but. But apparently it was a pretty, pretty efficient operation from what I'm hearing. So I don't know any of the details of it but but, but yeah, I was just curious on on how they approached it or how involved they actually got.

Yeah well the, the owners are driving it generally driving change. Healthcare owners have really helped change the way architecture and engineering is done. I happen to be blessed with given an opportunity to research what lean in design could be for architecture and engineering back in 2004 and 2005. So they've been driving it these Procter and Gamble and Chevron and Intel and others are Merck as an example, another construction user roundtable member. They build a lot every year. When I say a lot a billion dollars they can spend on construction annually. Some of these firms look, I think Chevron has more than that but when they say when they speak their supplier, their general contractor, they jump because you could do 20, 30, 40 projects for one of these companies. So numerous of the construction user roundtable companies are touch plan customers either directly or they insist that their contractors use our software. And so that's a real help and it's helped for us, of course, but it's the indication that the owners want, they want to be able to get lean construction. They don't want the waste, they don't want the delay, they don't want the surprise cost. They're tired of it. And lean design and construction approaches go a long way to minimize all those risks.

Talk about the improvement to safety that you've seen over the years.

So when I started In, I was COO in 98. There was about 1035 deaths in construction that year. And it had been around that number for a number of years. And it stayed there. It only slowly came down into the early part of the 21st century. As there's been numerous studies, we, we don't fully understand what's going on, but we know what the outcomes are that projects using a lean construction approach are at least 50% safer. And we have a couple of explanations for it. The first is that there is less exposure to the risks. So if you're an electrician and you have to work on a ladder, it means you need to climb and descend the ladder. If you're the usual, the usual electrician, the study was done over 10 years ago, makes over 3 round trips on a ladder to complete a task. And a good deal of reason is they don't have everything they need. They're not ready to do the work once they get up there. Well, you put a making work ready process in place and now they make one round trip on the ladder. So they reduced their exposure to the hazard by two thirds. So hazard exposure has gone down. The other thing that we've noticed is that people are working where they're, they can work where they're planning on working, where they've prepared themselves from a job hazard analysis perspective to work, they've got the appropriate ppe, the tools, et cetera. And as opposed to in the past, people will come to work and then they'll look for someplace where they can do something. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that, that, that projects if, if you're in front of me, I'm your customer, I'm the next, the next trade to work in a particular area. And you're taking longer. But here I am with, with my crew. Well, I'm not going to go home. I'm going to need to find someplace else to work. And that someplace else to work was probably not planned. And consequently. So people have been showing up in places where they never planned to work. Well, that's gone down so far More of the time we have, the work is ready for the people and the people are ready for the work. And in the cases where that's not the case, we have what's called workable backlog. So we know things happen. And so yeah, you got maybe two of your guys went home with the flu, that's why you didn't finish. Okay. We've already established a plan B for where I'm going to work if I can't get into your space. So we now have a planful way that reduces exposure to hazard and has people prepared for where they're going to work. And it's over 50% that when you look at the incident rates, it's over 50% less.

No, that's great. What about challenges? I'm sure it's not all roses and sunshine. So talk about some of the challenges that you guys are facing.

The number one challenge is that the people who do the value added work, those that are using tools and handling material are not, for the most part are not directly involved in lean initiatives from their companies. They've been getting involved through the general contractor. So a general contractor like I'll use Turner Construction, they've been at this a long time. So they say we're going to do a lean project. And they go and I hire the trades and the trades, the tradespeople, their supervision, the foreman and the tradespeople are brought into it because of the general contractor, not based on what's going on in their own company. As a consequence, things like improvement is happening at the general contractor level, not at the plumber's level or the carpenter's level. Now there's exceptions to this in the mechanical space. There are some large firms, H VAC and plumbing, fire protection. That's what I mean by mechanical. Softland Industries on the west coast, TD Industries in Texas, JC Canistrow in Boston area and Hill Mechanical in Chicago are four really good examples. And my friends that are going to listen to this will wonder why didn't I mention them? But the mechanical contractors have been doing a really good job both in what's called off site construction, prefabricating. So they're not using torches and they're not measuring and cutting and all that sort of stuff. When they go to the job, they just install, install, install, as opposed to fabricate, fabricate and then install. Right. So they have been, those companies have been doing a good job. That, that part of the industry is doing a good job. And there's other, you know, there's good examples of all the trades that are doing something here. But for the most part, lean is not happening for the trades.

Yeah. Now is a large GC that's practicing lean. Are they more prone to have a, or are they prone to just put out, forbid the electrical work in the building and see who's the lowest price and go with that of three acceptable suppliers, or are they taking other things into consideration outside of price?

So in work that's done for the public, so like all the schools in Texas as an example, that's all. I mean, essentially it can be what's called best value, but it's usually low bid. And so best value means you've got a trade that has got a higher safety record, a better safety record and, and a faster delivery time. And you might be willing to pay 2% more to put them on your project because overall the cost is going to be less. But for the most part, in the public space, you're getting a lot of low bid work. You also get that in other parts of the industry, the developer space, where a real estate developer is hiring a contractor and you don't know whether the developer is going to hold the project for very long. They might sell it before they finish it. And so they're thinking about first value, they're not thinking about total cost of ownership. And so getting a low price is a first value consideration. On the other hand, in healthcare, academic like higher ed, and in the bios, the life sciences, we have a lot of sophisticated clients who are driving very different behavior. And in many of those cases, the trade, the trade contractors come on very early. So before you know what this whole, what the building, for instance, is going to be in a design assist mode. So the H Vac contractor helps an engineer figure out how they're going to want to, you know, what they're going to put in place and how they're going to install it. And it's turning out that the design assist approach, the overall projects have more cost certainty and more time certainty, schedule certainty. When you use design assist, you have about the same price, but you spend money at a different point in time. So you're spending money from an owner's perspective earlier in the project because the trades are involved earlier, but you avoid waste later in the project. And so it's at least, at least washes itself out. It may, we see a number of anecdotal situations where it's a better product and it's a lower cost.

Yeah, got it, got it. All right, well, what do you, where do you think the lean Construction movement is headed over this next, I don't know, maybe five, ten, ten years. What's next?

Well, I think kaizen is going to be a big thing going forward. What they're paying attention to now is developing practitioners. Developing, particularly coaching. Coaching people to make change. But what we're missing is kaizen. We don't have continuous improvement. We have discontinuous improvement, we have episodic improvement. So, like, oh, it's time to do a kaizen event. Well, we're not even doing kaizen events in most situations. Mm. So it's seren. Improvement is more of a serendipitous thing. And so kaizen is going to be big. Now, I say. I think it's the general area of attention, but when I say kaizen, I mean Kaizen, not kyrio. So. So for people who don't understand the difference, kyrio is. Is changing things. And maybe we can call the change we make an improvement. But you don't use the word Zen when you're talking about, you know, a change in how you put a bottle cap on or something like that. That's not a Zen kind of thing. Zen has to do with. With people. And so kaizen is improvements that you make to your work that result in the person doing the improvement. Growing in capabilities and creative thinking, critical thinking, learning how to get things done, making change. The kaizen is about growing the people. And that's. I mean, Toyota says it very well. They. I mean, they say it in their mission statement. They exist to. To. To. How do they put it? The mission is to develop, well, people.

First kind of thing, and then cars, you know. Yeah, right.

But, yeah, so it's developing people.

Well, and just the whole idea of we say respect for people, which is as we, as you know, is a poor translation of the original Japanese. It's better translated respect for humanity. Right. The humanness of a person. Not because people is just so vague, like, what does that mean, people, but the humanness of a person. So, yeah, it goes to the heart of it.

Yeah. And in some industries, starting out with respect for people is a great first step. Yeah, right. But, yeah, I mean, it's actually respect for the nature of humans, and that is the closer translation. So when you begin to think about respecting for the nature of humans, it was like, well, humans are playful, humans are social, humans are curious, unless we've stopped being curious. But when you look at children, children are curious.

And until it's beaten out of them in the school system, until it's beaten.

Out of them Exactly. Yeah. And for those that didn't get it beaten out of them, they just spent a lot of time getting in trouble. Yeah, but, but there's another aspect of humans is like, humans are. We're biased, cognitively biased, we're cognitively blind. We can't see the impact of what we're doing. We act like, like we've got control over the world and we don't. I mean there's so we're really complicated or complex and yet we, we act like we can act like that. A person is just another cog in a system.

Yeah.

And yeah. Another pair of hands. You know, it's the idea that TPS stands for the Thinking Production System blows people's minds. It's like, so why is there a group of five people doing four jobs? And you explain, well, because they're always improving things and they need a hand. And if only for biological reasons, people might need to leave the line and they're not going to stop the line because someone needs to leave the line. But really the person's there to continue to help grow, grow capability, to learn as a group and to learn as a company. And that looks like waste. It's like, well, why would we have five people if we only need four? It's funny, Toyota has more people working on their production line because of this fifth person, but their costs are lower.

Yeah. Are you familiar with Rich Sheridan and Menlo Innovations at all?

I know the name, but I don't. Yeah.

So there's a software development house and they work two people to one computer that really blow people's minds.

It's called Eric Programming.

Extreme programming. Yeah. Extreme programming. Yeah.

One keyboard, two.

Yep.

Sets of hands and they just take.

Turns, you know, they alternate and yeah, that really blows people's minds. But they don't ever have. They never. They say they've. I don't know, I quote Rich, but their phone doesn't ever ring because there's a fundamental problem with their software ever, you know, and that's really unheard of. But yeah, it just goes back to the point of counter intuitive ideas can be very effective.

So in terms of going forward, Kaizen has got to be a big deal because we're not doing it. And so it. You can find pockets in companies in the construction industry where you can say, yeah, that's a group that's leaning. But for the most part there isn't a company that can really say, yeah, we are continuously improving. Nobody. I mean, we can do it. I've worked with a swimming pool company that had 27 adopted improvements per person per year for three and a half years. I worked with a mechanical contractor, it was JC Canastraro in Boston. They had almost 30 adopted improvements per person per year for two to three years. So this is not hard to get there. But people aren't trying and, and it's not challenge based. So it's like you get. What's the expression? Popcorn Kaizen. It's like, oh, I had an idea. Like what, what's it, it's inspirational. The inspiration based Kaizen.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, and it's a lot of it's a difference. Like when the manufacturing world has evolved with Lean of over the years from Point Kaizen to System Kaizen. Right. It's like Point Kaizen, there's nothing wrong with it, but just because you're walking around and thinking you should make it better, like why is it helping the whole system?

Right.

And, and I think manufacturing world or the traditional Lean world has learned from that. But, but it's hard, you know, it's hard.

Well, and it's hard to learn if organizationally we, we stand alone, like we're measured independently, etc. So four people on our production line with a fifth person, then every two hours at Toyota they switch jobs. They check, they do. So they do all four jobs every day. And they don't just do those four jobs, but they know the four jobs that preceded them and they know the four jobs that follow them. So now when they're making point change kind of Point Kaizen, the context is system.

Yeah.

Whereas what organization would have that much cross training going on? Right, right, right. So it's a. Organizationally they've, they've created a situation where they wouldn't do anything, but yeah, System Kaizen, very good. We're not doing that stuff.

Yeah. Hey, how. If someone is interested in learning more about lean Construction, what advice do you have for them? I mean, obviously Lean Construction Institute, I'm sure would be a great place to get networked in with, but what other advice. Are there some key books and resources that you, you recommend?

Sure. So the Lean Construction Institute has over two dozen local communities of practice. And there's one in Dallas, there's one in San Antonio, There was one in Houston, if I remember right. And so that's Texas, but they're all over the country. That's a great place to go where you're going to be with people who are learning like you're learning. They happen to work for a different company. But the Lean construction community is A very giving and sharing community. The top builders like Turner and DPR teach each other what they're doing. This is unheard of. You know, it's like, why would they do that? But we've got it. I mean, the industry needs to change, and so many companies recognize it needs to change. So I would say find a community practice that you can participate in. If there's not one around, you start one. Because that's how everyone. That's how all of them got started. Someone just said, hey, I'm gonna start one.

Yeah.

From a book point of view, there's a Lean Construction Institute, has a bunch of books that describe what the last planar system is, what target value design is. They've collaborated with UC Berkeley at the Project Production Systems Lab and created some texts. We tell people to read the book. This is Lean by Nicholas Modig and Per Ahlstrom. And it's not about our industry, but we can all relate to that situation of being, you know, going through a medical process, either ourselves or someone we know. And you learn about. You learn about the laws, the law bottlenecks, the law, variation law, Little's Law that nobody learns about. So it's a great way to learn something different about the business that we're in. And it applies to architecture and engineering, just as it applies to construction. And the other thing we say, people, is find somebody who's taking a lean approach and go shadow them for a while.

Yeah.

Make a. Make a friend. And there's just. There's a lot going on, so that's not a hard thing to do. Yeah. Very good.

If folks want to connect with you directly, how.

What's the best way you reach me at touchplan, it's halouchplan.IO.

Okay. And you're on and on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah.

And spell your last name.

Hal. M a c o m ber.

Got it, got it. Yeah. We'll put this. We'll link to everything in the show notes. So this will be, let's see, episode 311. So Gemba podcast dot com. Look for episode 311. We'll link to everything and how it's been a pleasure to finally connect with you. Maybe we can do it again and we'll get even more targeted on some. Some topic or whatever down the road. But I really enjoyed chatting with you.

Yeah, I did, too. Thanks, Ron Fair, for inviting me. Okay.

All right. You take care and keep up the great work.

Thanks. Bye.

Bye. 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 ousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge@gembacademy.com.