GA 318 | Structuring Your Continuous Improvement Efforts with Calvin Williams

You know, they have these elaborate strategy meetings and they come up with these great plans. Sometimes they even come to blows coming up with that plan. And then they walk out of the room, save the plan in some obscure folder on their hard drive, and never open it again until the following year when it's time to review the plan. And usually the first question is, how come we didn't do anything we said we'd do?

Today I'm excited to welcome Calvin Williams to the show. Now Calvin is the founder of a company called Improver. And we talked a little bit about that product. It's a cool little product that is very applicable for those in the lean movement. So highly recommend folks check that software out. But today, Calvin and I jump into the topic of leadership standard work. And so when we first hear that word leader standard work, we often hear, think about the, you know, maybe like the daily planner of who's going to do what and when you're going to do it and that sort of thing. And we definitely talk about that. But I would say this conference conversation is possibly a little bit wider than that as well. It almost encompasses more of a Hoshin style way of organizing our continuous improvement efforts. And so it was a. We had a lot of fun talking about how different organizations might structure their continuous improvement efforts, starting at senior leadership and cascading down. And then really the second part of the conversation kind of got. We stayed with the whole theme of, of leadership, but we really got into just talking about how continuous improvement principles might be able to help those of us, you know, which is all of us dealing with this coronavirus pandemic and how we might think our way through the situation. Obviously we have no crystal ball and we don't know have all the answers, but it was just an interesting conversation, just kind of brainstorming potential ideas of things and ways that we might, that we might face the uncertainty that we're all dealing with. Show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 318. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 318. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Calvin Williams, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Going great, Ron. Thanks for having me.

All right. All right. So what part of the country are you calling in from, Calvin?

I am in Atlanta, Georgia. Just north of Atlanta, actually a town called Roswell. 400.

Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. Yalls traffic is a little bit out of control. I got to tell you, man.

Yeah, typically, yes, I mean right now.

It'S not, I'm sure, but goodness gracious, during normal times.

Yeah, I guess that's a silver lining in the midst of everything.

Yeah, well, I mean, really. Gosh, you know, here I'm in Dallas, Fort Worth area and I mean we're nothing like Atlanta, but it's, you know, it can get wild, you know, especially going down towards Dallas.

But.

Yeah, yeah, but anyhow. Well, hey, I'm excited to have you on the show, Calvin. We've got a really fun topic and a topic that I feel like is very, very important, especially in these times of uncertainty right now with coronavirus and all this kind of crazy stuff going on right now, our ability to kind of manage ourselves and have good, good leader standard work is super important. But before we dive into the topic of the day, Calvin, we'd like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one want to share?

I do. I regret to say that I don't know who said it. Okay. If I probably search Google long enough I could figure it out. But the quote goes something like this change is inevitable. The only thing we can do is proactively work to ensure things change for the better.

Very appropriate for the times that we're in even, right?

I think so. Yeah. I think so, yeah.

One of the best things that I've, I've seen a lot resonating a lot, especially within a continuous improvement world is, you know, we are all talking about, oh, let's get when things get back to normal or you know, whatever normal is, you know, I was get back to better. Right? Let's, let's get back when we back better than it was, you know, before, before we head into this thing. Right.

So yeah, you know, I've had several conversations on this and you know, I just think, you know, despite what you hear and despite the chaos of it all, there's going to be new opportunities presented. And the folks who, the way I look at it is luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. And the folks who are prepared, the folks who are being proactive, they're going to be first in line to capture on some of those new opportunities of the new economy. New post Covid economy.

Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely. All right, well hey Calvin, tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff and then tell us what you're up to these days with improver.

Yeah, so I, I graduated with the industrial engineering degree with, from University of Nebraska in Lincoln. 20 year professional and continuous improvement operations leadership. Started out with Tyson, worked for Nestle Mars Colgate. Most recently senior manager of global continuous improvement with Clorox. I was leading their TPM program over 36 factories globally. I would. I like to think that I was always in continuous improvement. If you ask my mom, she will probably agree with. But professionally probably 20 years in various roles between CI Ops leadership and also management consultant for some time. Just recently, two years ago now, I've been building a technology product called Improver and I just went full time. I realized to make something like this work, you probably can can attest to this. To make something like this work, you got to go in head first and make it happen, do what it takes. And I just started to just decided to make the plunge and make it happen. So we're on our way. Yeah.

Nice, nice, nice. And Improver is spelled I M P R U V E R. What was. What's the story behind that?

You know, there had to be a.

Story behind the U wasn't available on URL. So spell it this way.

Right. Well that's, that's part actually the U stands for. I guess it's a value of mine. It's Improvement starts with you. Right. It starts with wanting to be better yourself and then you know, propagating, propagating that desire for self improvement onto leading others to improve. And leading an organization down a continuous improvement journey really starts with a journey of yourself and self self betterment.

I like.

And leading by example.

I like it. I like it. All right, well hey, let's jump into the topic of the day kind of leader standard work. Some folks call it leadership standard work. Tell us what that, what that. What leadership or leader standard work means to you.

Yes. So leadership standard work to me and you read, I've heard it called both is a system of. It's a structure or a layered review process that keeps the organization aligned with continuous improvement and what the company is trying to accomplish overall. It helps drive the CI process and it also helps to sustain any gains you make through continuous improvement. Right. So it's a system of meetings and reviews that encompass executive managers, leads and essentially everyone in your organization from top to bottom and just keeps the organization moving in the right direction at the right speed to accomplish its overall goals.

Okay. And so just so folks maybe aren't. So this might be slightly different than like when I would, when I would. When I think of leader standard work, I think of like you know, my daily kind of calend and my plan, you know, kind of like personal Leader, standard work. So maybe this is more organizational. Is that what you're kind of getting at?

I think it encompasses both, both sides. Right, okay. So, yeah, so at the, at the highest level, right. For executives, for example, the leadership, if you think about people as vectors, right, where everybody's moving at a certain speed and in a certain direction, the role of executive leadership is to keep everybody moving in the right direction. Right. Executive leadership decides what direction we should all be moving in. At a layer, you know, the next layer down where you got sort of manager, director, senior manager level folks, they're sort of making sure the resources are being allocated most effectively so that, you know, the organization can move in that, direct that right direction and at the right speed. If you think about a layer from that is, you know, the leads, the folks who are sort of overseeing the value stream, the value added work, they're sort of coordinating, you know, what needs to be done and by when to make sure the right things happen so that we're prepared for the future. And then the folks on the value stream are doing the tactical day to day work. So if you look at the calendar of anybody on that sort of, that chain of, that chain of, chain of authority. Yeah, you'll see, okay, these are the four or five things I need to do today in order to make the future that the company needs to realize happen. So it's, so it's. So I think it touches both, I think it touches the bigger picture, you know, where we going. But it also touches, all right, what's on my plate today in order to make that bigger reality.

How do you see it aligning with something like policy deployment or Hoshin Connery, something like that? How do you see it, if at all, working with that?

So I see Hoshin in two ways. Right. There's the coming up with the strategy. That's, you know, what is it that we want to accomplish, what's most critically important for us to accomplish. And then there's the piece of actually deploying that down through the organization and cascading those priorities down so that you align everyone in the company behind, you know, align everyone's efforts behind that, that critically important set of imperatives. So yeah, I think there's a direct piece of it and in fact, part of the layered review process. At the highest layer, we encourage companies to be having that strategy conversation every 90 days because as you know, there aren't a lot of companies who are terribly good at strategy deployment. In Hoshin Kanri, what you tend to see a lot is they have These elaborate strategy meetings and they come up with these great plans. Sometimes they even come to blows coming up with that plan. And then they walk out of the room, save the plan in some obscure folder on their hard drive and never open it again. Right. Until the following year when it's time to review the plan. And usually the first question is, how come we didn't do anything we said we'd do?

Or there's that sense of panic of looking at it and praying you actually did some of it.

Right, exactly, exactly. It's a fun exercise. It's a great thought exercise. A lot of time. But, you know, I think a lot of companies really struggle to put it into practice and they, they really can't translate that, those great ideas, usually great ideas down into real daily tactical execution.

Yeah, yeah.

So.

So do you have maybe an example of, of how you've seen this work? Maybe like a case study or something like that?

So, you know, actually I actually first was exposed to Leadership Standard work at Clorox. I was working as a senior manager of Global Continuous Improvement, right? We had a plant in Costa Rica who had been experimenting with Leadership Standard work to drive autonomous maintenance, right? This is Things like operator PMs and tracking microstops and, you know, addressing abnormalities and things like that, 5s. And they had a sort of a go out once a quarter and review and make sure everybody's doing what they're supposed to do to maintain autonomous maintenance. And then I sort of took Benchmark that, added some things to it, and then kind of spread that around to about 16 or 17 other plants. But just recently, so I left Clorox in October of I think 18. Just recently, I was working with the client. We were doing an improver implementation. It was a 90 day implementation. It was our first beta project with a real manufacturer, right? Company called world Technology ingredients WTI. It was a 90 day engagement. And we went in and essentially what we ran through was a weekly continuous improvement meeting. So the way the structure Leadership Standard works, structure as it stands, is you have a 90 day strategy review, you have a 30 day steering committee meeting, you have a weekly CI team meeting. And the CI team is really a sort of an innovation team. They're coming up with the ideas and experiments and then you have a daily Gemba review, right? So during the 90 day implementation, what we did was sort of forced in the weekly CI team, this is the innovation team, it's almost like a Kaizen team where we met weekly and we said, hey, what did we try last week? What do we learn from it and what are we going to try next week? And we had the data and everything to support that conversation. And over the course of that 90 days we saw a, a nearly doubling of their production capacity, right? Yeah, this is about a 97%. It was, it was incredible in a space where they, they didn't see any further room for improvement. We were just experimenting to see how people would take the software, right? So they were trying to grow, they could sell everything they make. They were in a great position on the top side, but on, they had production constraints. So this is, this is what we decided to focus on. So yeah, they saw a doubling of throughput. The thing had what, what happened though, and this was a great learning for me is after that 90 days we kind of packed up and left them, left them be because you know, we figured, you know, they got it, they can keep going. And after that 90 days we packed up, we left. We would do weekly check ins and see kind of where they are in their progress, right? We just expected they would just keep, keep killing it, right? Keep, keep skyrocketing up. And what we learned was that they kind of flatlined, right? They had all this great growth and they just kind of flatlined. So after a few of those 30 day check ins, they asked us to come back and implement in a different area. But what we proposed is, hey man, why don't we, me and my professional services team, why don't we, we go back and figure out, you know, kind of diagnose what, what, what the challenges were to continue the progress that we had started on. It turns out that they kind of sort of let the weekly innovation meetings, those weekly CIA meetings languish a little bit and it just led to them flatlining and no longer driving further improvement in that space. So then we said, you know, without the monthly steering committee meeting of managers and senior managers, the CI meetings, the weekly CI meetings probably don't have the energy and focus to sustain, right? And the directions to sustain and keep going. And without the, the, the 90 day strategy conversations, the steering committee meeting will, will eventually start to lose focus and probably fail to sustain, right? And then without that whole infrastructure in place, then your daily gimbal walks kind of go their own way also. So then it kind of led to us really putting our heads together and saying, all right, if we were to do a enterprise wide, really engaged leadership, really kind of rope everybody into continuous improvement into the process and even make it cross functional where other functions can apply the same concepts of continuous improvement in Their spaces too. What would that look like? We sort of filled it out and we came up with the leadership standard work process that we're describing here.

So it's more of a cascading kind of concept. Starts at the very top and then subsequently rolls down throughout the organization. And it sounds like if any one of those kind of breaks down, everything below it, wherever it broke down, is going to be in trouble.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So the workflow is like this. At the executive level, you got the 90 day meetings. What they're really asking is for each of our imperatives, hopefully it's around three. I've seen places that have 10, 15, 20. That's not very strategic at all. Strategy is, let's decide what we are going to do. Most critical, important, let's not try to do everything. Are we on track, behind or ahead on those imperatives? For the ones that we're behind, they'll get red flagged as these are high risk areas. Those will get essentially those will get carried down into the steering committee meeting where resources get allocated, right? Let's move cash, let's move capital, let's move equipment, space, whatever we have, people. And let's start addressing those challenges. Right? Let's shift our focus here. They may also assign a CI team to address, you know, those red flag items. Right. Next thing that will happen is they may launch a weekly CI team. Basically, they get together, they become the innovation team to address that red flag item. And then the gimbal walk sort of supports the CI team. Right? The CI team sort of commandeers the gimbal board and the gimbal conversation. For that initiative and for each of those layers, you're essentially going through the kata process, right? You're asking the coaching questions. So for example, at the executive level, the conversation might go, hey, Johnny, you own this initiative. You know, what's your target condition? What's your actual condition? Can you validate that with data and facts? What are your challenges in that space? What are you gonna try to do next? When can we go see? So if you think of the kata coaching framework or thought process, or even scientific thinking in general as fractal, meaning it looks the same at the highest level as it looks at the lowest level. Essentially, they're just kind of going through those cadences at essentially all levels within the framework.

You know what's interesting? Given our current situation with the world and COVID 19 and all the rest of it, what do you think? And I'm just thinking out loud Right now, I have no idea where this conversation is about to go, so we can cut it out of it and go, well, This is not your first rodeo, Calvin, as far as, you know, leading organizations and dealing with, dealing with problems and all the rest of it. But, you know, we were talking before we hit record that, you know, one of the things that is constant is that, you know, one group of people, you know, if you even just think politics, you know, one side is sure that they know the right way and the other side is sure that they're wrong and that they, they have their own way. When in essence, my personal belief, this is my opinion. Not even gimbal academies. My opinion is that nobody knows nothing. I don't care if you're conservative, liberal, in the middle. Nobody knows nothing. We have all these models and all the rest of it. At the end of the day, if we really do buy into this idea of scientific thinking and continuous improvement, you know, I guess we do. You. Are you of the opinion that we need to, you know, obviously, carefully and cautiously experiment, but if we don't experiment, how will we ever move forward?

Right, Great point.

So, so, so on one side, we're all about experiment, you know, charge forward, be brave, be. But then again, I was like, ah, man, I don't know, man. This is, this is kind of, you know, this is kind of scary.

Do I want to be the guinea pig in that experiment?

It's a question for real. So how do we balance that? I mean, if we really are scientific thinkers, what's the right way? Because never trying ever isn't obviously going to probably move us in the right direction. If we just sit at home for the next five years, what do you think?

I would imagine the smartest way to do this. And you're right. I mean, if you're a politician, it's not so much about what, you know, is what you can get others to believe.

Yeah, right.

Speaking to what people will want to hear. Sort of.

Yeah.

In the media, you know, is a big player in it, and they're speaking to what people might fear and what, what can get clicks. But as a scientist, you know, I guess we are scientists in a sense. Yeah. You want to form a hypothesis, you want to test it out, you want to see what happens, and then you can say with some degree of confidence that you know something. Right. And even then, there's still a degree of confidence and you could be wrong still. But, yeah, in a perfect world, I think we would all be, you know, with our lab coats on here, all Curious and working together on the same page and saying, okay, here's what we got going in this situation. This would be a good lab for us to test. Maybe that's in New York or maybe there's some other place, you know, depending on what we're testing. And we'd all be moving, you know, learning together under one set of controlled experiments. Yeah, I'm not sure that. Yeah, it's a little bit of chaos in the sense that. Yeah. I don't know if we're all working together on this, you know.

No, no, we're not. We're not, obviously, you know. Yeah. And so. Yeah, maybe it, you know, and it's almost like the problem with this experiment is the ultimate lagging indicator here is death. Right, Right. Nobody wants to come close to that. Right. So it's like we've got to find earlier indicators. Right. Early leading, more leading indicators of whether or not we're doing the right things. I don't. I don't pretend to have the answers, obviously, you know, but. But I just find it interesting, you know, the, the parallels between, you know, running an experiment, making a prediction, seeing what we learn and then. And then adapting and evolving from that. But, but, boy, it sure is difficult when people's lives are on the line. Right.

Yeah. I almost wish that. That we had leadership standard work at a national level. Right. Because what we might be doing is, is having those weekly innovation meetings and saying, all right, what do we try last week?

Yeah.

What do we learn from it? What will we try next week? That would be so fantastic to be in the room for those conversations. Yeah.

And being vulnerable. And being, and being vulnerable and saying, the fact of the matter is we don't know, you know.

Right.

This is the experiment we want to run. You know, caution that we're going to build into the experiment. So we don't, you know, have a devastating, you know, if it doesn't work out, that we don't have a devastating result. But. But, yeah, I mean. Yeah, you know, I guess, unfortunately, that's not a reality. But, you know, to some extent, I mean, some of the, you know, some of the. I got a lot of friends that are in health care and, you know, got nurses. Nurses and doctors and all the rest of it, you know, and it does sound like at some level there is a lot of collaboration. We don't always hear about that on the news and, you know, the media doesn't always share those positive stories. But. But I do. I do take heart that there's a lot of good People out there, a lot of smart people out there who are, who are trying to experiment and learn and work together.

Yeah. You know, I'm confident we'll come out on the other side of this smarter and more capable and, you know, hopefully we, we can, we can become as healthy as we once were. Yeah, for sure, you know, collectively. Yep. But, you know, like I said, I think this, you know, for those who are watching this with their eyes open and see what's going on, what's really going on, this is going to create a lot of new opportunities. And, you know, the best thing we can do for us who are in quarantine, on lockdown, you know, cutting our own hair.

I told you, I cut my hair the other day by myself, man. Turned out okay, man. I'm not gonna lie. See, I ran the experiment, man, you know.

Yeah, you're doing good. You're doing good. Yeah. For those of us who are, you know, just watching and preparing, the best thing we can do is just be prepared for the, for the new opportunities that this creates for us.

Yeah.

And as continuous improvement professionals, you know, the best thing we can do is make sure we are ready and that the organization who depend on us, organizations who depend on us are also ready. Ready to hit the ground running.

I was talking to my colleague, Steve Cain, earlier today. He and I did a little virtual workshop with a client of ours. And one of the things that we are, we're kind of talking about is, you know, how to, you know, how to deal with uncertainty, because that's what we've got, right? I mean, and uncertainty is like one of the worst feelings ever, Right. You know, like just people value certainty so much, right. From a psychological perspective, and when we don't have certainty, we can, we can be wrecked. And so as continuous improvement practitioners, you know, you know, one could say, oh, yeah, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta be ready for the next pandemic or whatever. But, you know, Steve shared the story of 911 during 9 11. And I may wish Steve was here to tell the story. He could do it better than I do because he's a pilot as well. But, but, but apparently, you know, when, when, when it was all going down and they had all these airplanes in the air and they had to land them as fast as possible, Right. I mean, had to get every airplane out of the sky. And so wherever you were, you find the closest airport that will accommodate your size plane and get, get on the ground. Right. And, and it worked every, you know, all the other, you know, that weren't involved in a tragedy, obviously all the ones other ones were able to. To safely land. And so after, after it was all said and done and they were reflecting and trying to figure out, you know, what, what to, what to take from it. The kind of air traffic control organizations we're talking about, like, well, how do we, you know, what do we do, you know, how do we come up with the, the exact plan or, you know, what to do next time something bad like this happens. And essentially what Steve was saying, they concluded was that, you know, we don't need to come up with an exact plan because it's never going to come out exactly how we think it might.

Exactly. Right.

But the thing to really practice, if you will, is how to think quickly, safely, scientifically. Right. And in the moment. And so if there's any preparation that we should all be doing, it's how can you deal with uncertainty, how can you experiment? How can you learn quickly when faced with uncertainty? And so figuring that out, I think is probably a better use of our time than trying to create the ultimate efficacy mea or whatever it might be where, you know, you try to predict every potential failure mode that could ever strike the earth, you know. Cause it's just, that's.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know. So I thought it was interesting.

You know, it's almost like you're practicing an uncertainty. Right.

Yeah.

You're injecting chaos to some extent just to, just to stay, stay sharp. Yeah. So when, when it's a real chaotic situation, it's not so unfamiliar.

Yeah, we, we had Sam McPherson do a webinar a week or so ago. And you know, Sam's background is green beret. And you know, he's done a lot of special forces training and, and you know, they had this red teaming and blue teaming where the, you know, the red team is, is, you know, war gaming, if you will, against the blue team and trying to find all their weaknesses. And I feel like that's a great exercise to figure out, you know, how we can do that. So the same organization kind of, okay, you're on Team A and you're on Team B, you know, trying to, trying to poke holes in everything that Team B is trying to do. And Team B, you know, you know, reacts and adjusts accordingly, that sort of thing.

So, so, so maybe there's some, some more practical value to having those team building, you know, retreats and things like that where you can.

Yeah.

Get away from the, get away from the office and, and play games.

Yeah.

And see how People handle it.

Yep, Yep, exactly. Because knowing how to. I mean, that's what we are talking about. Learn how to think, think, think.

Right.

You know, it's not, it's not like you're going to have the perfect playbook the next time the next pandemic hits our, Hits our, you know, the country or the world, you know, there's going to be some differences, but can you think through it? Can you practice pdca, Right. Real time with, with, with when bullets are flying, can you stay calm?

Right. And you know, this, there's, there's value in saying, hey, this is the thing that, that did the trick for us last time around. Let's start with that one first.

Yep.

And be prepared to experiment on top of that. Yeah.

Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, you know, I obviously don't want, ever want to dismiss what you've learned. Right. I mean, of course. But if we're, we're thinking it's going to happen the exact same way, that's when we could. It's like when our playbook doesn't work anymore because there's a new variable. Can you adapt? Can you, can you, can you be agile? Right. To steal.

I think that, I think that's the, that's the word of this for me to take. The big takeaway is adaptiveness.

Yeah.

Can you adapt? Because I think the companies that are doing the best at adapting are winning, and the companies that haven't been able to adapt. For example, if you're a small business, like a restaurant or a bar or something, if after. How many weeks has it been? I don't know, six weeks, let's call it. You still haven't figured out how to sell your stuff online. There's no way you're gonna make it through this unless you just had a boatload of cash to sit on.

Yeah.

Which most businesses don't. If you haven't adapt to an online world by now, then there's a good chance you're not going to make it out on the other side. Right. As a business, I mean, you know, the people will make it a majority of us. But yeah, as a business, you got to be adaptive, you know?

Yeah.

You got to be ready. You got to be willing to try things and change. And you know what I like about, I think, continuous improvement. If you're really practicing CI and your company and you're, you're serious about it and to your point, you're preparing for the unexpected. You're. You're keeping your ed. Your organization on edge for the Unpredictable. You're, you're inherently going to be more adaptive. You're inherently going to be, you're going to have the strength to change, to create the company that you need to be to fit the market, to fit the world outside the company.

Yep, yep.

I think that's critical.

Exactly. Ah, well, good stuff. Yeah, I wasn't sure where that, that was going to go, but I think it was okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was good. No, it's good. Good conversation.

All right, well, hey, Calvin, what, what is the, what's the best way for folks to, to can connect with you on social media, your website, whatever it might be?

Yeah, I think the easiest way is on LinkedIn. You can find me Calvin L. Williams or find Improver. Our business page is out there as well. Improver Technologies. Or if you go to improver.com I m p r u v e r dot com, I'm there. My team is there. Anything we offer is out there as well? Well, we've got a lot of great stuff, most of it free. We really advocate for the continuous improvement as an industry and continuous improvement professionals just trying to help folks accelerate their journey on CI using, you know, information, using technology, using whatever we can offer services, professional services, etc. So.

Yeah, great. Yeah, great, great, great. I was telling you before we hit record that you got that radio DJ voice. So, man, you know, worst case, you always fall back and go on the radio or something. Calvin.

Hey man, whenever, whenever we get through social distancing, maybe we'll throw some bugs, some big parties and I can DJ or something.

That's it. That'll work. I like it, I like it. All right, Calvin. Well, hey man, you guys be safe out there in Georgia. Thanks for coming on to the show and hopefully we can connect face to face, you know, sometime in the near future.

Oh, it's a pleasure, Ron. I appreciate it. Look forward to doing it again sometime.

All right. All right, take care.

All right, you too. Bye.

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