GA 321 | Adapting to the Future with Rodrigo Picoli

When you act as a beginner learning something new, that you don't know the rules, this lack of boundaries can lead to the new ideas and innovation. So definitely you're breaking this standard rules. And I really like to think and apply this.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Rodrigo Piccoli to the show. Now, Rodrigo, as you'll hear, is actually probably better pronounced Rodrigo or something like that. He's originally from Brazil, and I thought he actually still lived in Brazil, but he actually, he lives in South Carolina now, as you'll hear in the opening part of the podcast. But really, really enjoyed this episode. So Rodrigo and I connected over LinkedIn like most of my podcast guests, and I seem to, and he was telling me about how he's so new to lean and he's such a beginner and this and that, and so I didn't know what to expect. You know, I love having everybody with all kinds of experience come onto the podcast. But then here comes Rodrigo and he just, he, honestly, he blew me away with some really interesting ideas. And he's just, he's talking about, you know, we've. How many times we've said scientific thinking on this podcast. It's probably a million. But he brought a whole new. He brought a different lens to the, to the podcast. And I, and I saw things that I've, that I've thought about for many, many years and in a totally different way. And so I was really, really impressed with Rodrigo and really appreciated his humility and also, but just his wisdom. And, you know, he mentions he's a, he's a younger guy, but boy, I think is so, so bright for Mr. Rodrigo. So anyhow, the topic of the day was really adapting to the future. And so we talk about kind of Industry 4.0, automation and all kinds of stuff, but. But really just I think you're going to love this episode. So go ahead and listen to the whole thing. And in the beginning, I kind of screwed up. I got ahead of myself and I didn't even ask him about his background until a little later. But anyhow, it's all in there, and it's, it's real and raw, if you will. But, yeah, I really enjoyed it. So show notes for this epis can be found over@gembellpodcast.com this is gonna be episode 321 again. Gembellpodcast.com and look for episode 3, 2, 1. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Rodrigo, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm pretty good. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me here on the show.

Oh, no, my pleasure, my pleasure. Now, I know I called you Rodrigo, and I know you're from Brazil, so it's probably more accurate to call you what, like Rodrigo? Something like this or. Because you don't say. They are.

Right, yeah, Rodrigo, it's fine. Yeah, everybody here call me Rodrigo. And I'm used to this. And Brazil is a bit different, but that's okay.

Well, I used to go. I used to spend some time in Brazil in one of my past jobs. And I remember I had a. You know, we had an ID badge, you know, and had my name on there. And they put my full name, Ronald, you know, And I remember my friend Sydney Sidney Morgado. I remember him very well. He's a good, good, good, really good guy. One day we were in the factory and he says, all of a sudden I hear something like, honnold, Honnold. And I'm like, looking around, I'm like, honnold. You know, And I'm like, well, you know, I saw he's yelling at me. I'm like, what? What? He goes, honnold. You know, I was like, what are you. Oh, Ronald, he's calling.

That's true. Yeah.

Oh, that's so good. Well, anyhow, so what part of Brazil are you from?

I'm from Sao Paulo. This is the south of Brazil. I'm from the city. My hometown is called Sorocaba.

Okay.

And I'm born and raised there.

Nice, nice, nice. Well, hey, I really appreciate you coming onto the show, Rodrigo. I'm glad we connected over LinkedIn and had a few exchanges that way. And so, as you know, Rodrigo, I know you listen to the show. We like to begin all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quote or two. Do you have one that you like?

Yeah, I have a specific one that I really like. It's saying how much I know today. It's less important than how much I'm learning. This is one of my favorite.

What's that mean to you?

Basically, that means that yesterday's knowledge would not be enough to solve tomorrow's problems. So we are living on all this dynamic world, all the situation that we insert. So my understanding is stop learning is not an option. So we should continue craving for knowledge and prepare ourselves to solve tomorrow's problems. And I understand. As far I'm learning, I'm adapting myself into the new world.

Yes, yes. I love it. I love it. All right, well, so today, Rodrigo, we're going to kind of focus on the Topic of continuous improvement and adapting to the future, which obviously in these times where we're all getting a lot of practice on adapting to different ways of living and behaving and interacting with one another. But I want to I guess focus in on continuous improvement in the future. So first question I have for you is what are you seeing or what are your opinions as far as how industries are changing today?

I think in two specific topics that how industry is changing. I think first point is all the industry 4.0 and I'd say we are in the middle of all this revolution of this industrial revolution, all this combination of automation and connectivity. And I like to think that we are living on this transition phase. We are in the transformation period if we will. It's not just the companies are changing, but everything around us is changing. Like market, like industry itself, our needs are changing with the time. So that is the point to be more adaptive with this changings. Yeah. One example I'm working on this automotive companies and we are seeing how autonomous driving vehicles, how that will reinvent our auto market. This is a complete new need and it's leading us into new products and also into new processes. So it's really a great thing that's happening in front of us right now.

So I got ahead of myself, Rodrigo, and I apologize but I got so excited about talking about, about our Portuguese and all the rest of it that I realized after the quote I didn't even really get allow you the opportunity to tell us about your background. So how about we back up and before we go forward on the, on the topic of, of the future and adapting to the future, but tell us a little bit about your background. Obviously started in Brazil, but let's talk about how you first came to learn about continuous improvement and, and you know, and then your career progression.

Okay. So as I said, I work in an Automotive Company since 2008. When I, when I started that was the same time I started the university, the University of Mechanical Engineering. And the Lean came into my life in 2010 when I was. And I moved my internship from manufacturing engineer into a lean office inside the same company. And everything was new for me. And I remember back on that time my, my manager, he suggests some, suggest me some, some Lean books to start learning a little bit more about Lean. And I remember the first book that I read was Learn to see from John Chuk and Michael Mutter.

Yes.

Yeah. And start to thinking about all the value streams and was quite nice. And my first big project there in turn was a pool system implementation I remember that on the company with more than 2,000 employees there was really challenge and it was quite nice. And then on my end of my internship I had an opportunity to travel to Germany and I finished my internship there on the headquarter of the company their lean office. And yeah, understanding and comparing all the difference between Brazil link office and Germany link office was a really interesting period for me. And then back in Brazil in 2013 then I officially started as engineer working into the link office till 2017 when I moved here for United States. This is my current position here. I'm also responsible for lean office here in North America and we have some sites on United States, Canada and Mexico.

So I want to go back to something you said. It was interesting to me was when you mentioned comparing the lean office in Brazil with the German lean office. So I wonder if you could maybe tell us a little bit about that. Tell us a little bit about what you saw was, was. Was in. Was different or good or bad or indifferent between the. The two different approaches.

Yeah, I mean for sure the main difference was culture, right. In Brazil we. We had a completely different culture from Germany. However, in Brazil it seems like we, we like to make the things happen maybe a little bit fast or faster than the German guys. So maybe we are not that we jump into conclusions so fast, but we go do it and check and act and again and maybe German guys doing more planning, they like to put playing a lot. And this is I think that was the main difference between Germans and Brazilians. Yeah, Germans, they really put focus if you're thinking on the PDCA cycles, their P cycle or the P phase of the PDCA cycle takes longer than a Brazilian pdca, let's put it that way. And for us we jump maybe into the do more fast. And that is, that is, that is I would point as the main difference.

So what about this, these crazy Americans that you working with now, once you add them into the mix, what would you say is the contrast between German, Brazilian and American?

Yeah, it's. It seems, it seems like here in America we are merge of Brazilian and German and it seems like we are not taking so long to plan as German guys, but not so fast as the Brazilians. But we are in a good pitch.

Just right is what you're trying to say.

Just right.

Just right.

Yeah, I'm still learning, I'd say I'm still learning all this culture differences well.

And I think it's really good and really valuable for really the formation of anyone learning anything is to go to different cultures and see how they go about it. And I remember going to Japan for the first time and thinking that everywhere I was going to go was going to be this lean Mecca. And let me tell you, it's not. I mean there's a lot of very unlean things in Japan now. Of course there's some really, really, really awesome, amazing things also. But it's not that just because you're in Japan you're automatically born lean. You're not. But no, I think just seeing different cultures and different approaches is super valuable.

Nice.

Yeah. So. All right, well let's talk a little bit about back into this whole, the whole idea of adapting to the future. Talk a little bit about your thoughts on the role continuous improvement is going to play in adapting into these new realities. Whether it's industry, 4.0, more automation, different, different age demographics. Right. You know, millennials and all the rest of it coming to will one day run the world. Right. And so yeah, so what do you see? Where do you see continuous improvement playing a role.

Okay, so I like to mention something that I've read not so long ago. This is Oxford paper. It's calling the future of employment. And it was really interesting. It's really kept my attention catch my attention to they just developed algorithm to assess the probability of professions to be automated on the next 30 years. And the results was really interesting. It seems like 47% among 702 professions that they study have shown like 70% of chance to be replaced by a computer. So it seems like half of the professions are put are on check to be replaced for a computer in the future. And another results also coming out from this study. It seems like the professions that deal with people such as teaching healthcare management position have less chance of being replaced. So it seems like for me this is my opinion on the study that machinists cannot yet perform all human beings special skills. Let's put in that way like feeling care touch. So my point of view is the future is dealing with people will be a key for professions. And how continuous improvement will impact on this. It seems like will be continuous improvement will play an essential role inside companies during this transition. More regard adaptiveness. Yeah. And the only, the only real stability in my point of view is learning how to deal with this instability or uncertainty. And this is bring us to scientific thinking from Kata. Yeah, I like to quote Michael Reuter on his book Toyota Kata. There's a question he asked what does it make a company adaptive? And in general words is saying pursuing continuous improvement and adaptiveness and it seems like the companies have a tendency to see continuous improvement as only improving process. And in fact better process are the results of continuous improvements. That's for sure. But more and more it seems it's people are the key. Yeah. They are behind of the process. I like the idea that the process are just the results of what people do. And when we focus developing people and teach them how to adapt in learning, this is continuous improvement. This is the. The real key of the continuous improvement. And the continuous improvement helping into this new world that we are getting into is the companies to achieve adeptness they need to developing creativity. Creativity was always there as one of the. If you need continuous improvement, you need creativity in that point. But I think more and more we need this creativity be part of our jobs. And that would be essential for companies to adapt into the new worlds. Because that my feeling that to find new solutions for new problems we will need creativity. And creativity is one of the humans like special skills that cannot be replaced by computer. Maybe not yet. And I see like the creativity as maybe just a combination of all pre existing solutions into to solve a new problem.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting you mentioned scientific thinking. So I'm wondering as we're experimenting and we're trying to move forward towards some, some goal, some target condition or some long term challenge. You know, it is an interesting way of looking at that is you're creatively designing experiments. Right. And seeing what you learn from that experiment. So in a way to your point, continuous improvement is in fact a way to adapt and to learn and to be creative. So I really like that it's a different way of, of thinking about the whole movement that we're in.

I've. I've been. I've been reading as well about a Japanese term I don't know if already heard about is calling shoshin.

Yeah. What's that mean?

It's. It's a Japanese word. It's basically it's. That means thinking with or thinking as a beginner mind. Yeah. Or with a beginner mind without any preconcept that that's really used on martial arts in the same way that kata is using shoshin. It's also. I did some research about it and it's using also into this martial arts things. And basically there's five steps into this shoshin way of thinking. It's saying the first steps you have to experience wonder, you have to bring back your imagination, bring back all the exploration possibilities that you can have. If you're thinking about solving a new problem or Learning something new. The second step. It's saying about practicing failure, we always try to avoid failures. That is my feeling here. Yeah. But I think we forget that to be successful first we have to fail. And how often and fast we fail close we are from success for sure. We're talking about not some big failures here. But it seems don't want to injure.

Anyone or harm the society.

Yeah, exactly. But it seems like our society it's. If you're reading a book about failure, everybody will judge you. What are you thinking about? You should read a book of success. Right.

Go read Tony Robbins, you know. Yeah, yeah.

I think we forget sometimes that failure is important. It's part of the process. Yeah. And if you think about the greatest mind of this century past century, everybody has a really good histories about failures, how they fail in the past. If you take Steve Jobs history or Thomas Edison, Bill Gates. Yeah, Thomas Edison is a really good one.

Right.

And that's going for third topic. That's saying start from empty. When you have assumptions, when you have rules and we have beliefs, we tied to what we know. So the beauty of learning something new is that we are. We are not limited by any such pre concepts. And then we have this free mind to thinking about maybe a better or a different way to do things. And as a fourth thing, fourth step, it's saying about lower risk or taking on something new. No one expecting you to get it right in the first time. So it seems like you're free of pression and you can simply experiment. Yeah. So taking the lower risk go there, do it, learn and do it again. And the fifth one that I really like about this, it's break the rules. Yeah. I'm not. When I say rules, it's not ethical rules, moral or law. But when you act as a beginner learning something new that you don't know the rules. This lack of boundaries can lead to the new ideas and innovation. So definitely you're breaking this standard rules. Yeah, this and I really like to think and apply this is not easy as like a kata. It require practice. But I think when you combine practicing kata with a shoshi mind, you can do better.

Oh, I like that. You know the last one you know about breaking the rules or maybe another way of thinking is don't overthink it. When you, you have you ever done the marshmallow challenge? You know where you're building the tower out of spaghetti? Have you ever seen that?

Not really.

Oh yeah. So you need to google it and you would love doing it. It's a fun exercise. Basically, we do it at the beginning of all of our workshops where you give people some pieces of spaghetti, uncooked spaghetti, so it's, you know, hard and. And some. Some tape, masking tape, some string. And they have a one marshmallow. And so the goal is you have to build this tower out of. Out of spaghetti. And then whoever gets the marshmallow on top, whoever has the tallest tower at the end with the marshmallow on the top, they're the winners. Right. And, well, what they found. There's a lot of research has gone into this over the years, and they've studied children, like, young children. Like, I'm talking like, you know, kindergarteners, you know, like, really, really young kids. They actually perform extremely well. Like, literally the only people that beat them, like, across all the different domains that they are professional engineers, which is good. Right? A professional engineer who understands, you know, you know, structures and pyramids and whatnot. You know, they're the ones, they do the best. But kindergartners are like, right there. And like CEOs, and they say, they joke like MBA students. They're like the worst, you know, because they're like. All they think about is, you know, they argue and they debate. Earlier you were talking about over planning and stuff. So these people will plan and plan and plan. And there's 18 minutes, I think it is, to do the exercise. And so they'll plan for 15 minutes, and then I have three minutes left to just frantically try to build something and pray it doesn't fall over. Whereas kids, they pick up the marshmallow immediately and they just start building, you know, and then they start seeing what works. And it's because their mind is, if you will. I don't know. I don't say empty. But, you know, they're not biased. Right. And then they're not worried about who's in charge at the table. They just all just jump in and start trying things. And so I think it perfectly aligns with really what you're saying there.

Right. Yeah, I've read something about it. Like the children's. They born creative.

Yeah.

And then once we are growing, they put ourselves inside a box.

Quit asking why so many times. You know, like, our kids ask why and we beat it out of them. Don't. Don't ask why so much. Just because I say so, you know?

Exactly. Exactly. So they are all the time maybe breaking these rules. Right? So.

That's right.

That's awesome.

That's right. So, okay, well, what about as we think about you know, the future as well. Like what are you.

About.

What about when we do make improvements? You know, how about sustaining these changes? You know, it's going to be interesting as things like automation and artificial intelligence and all these things kind of become more the norm. You know, will we sustain changes the same way? Or is it going to be that the machine is always trying to find a better way?

Right, that's an interesting question. Yeah, I mean, I like to think that even with what is coming, we are not changing the way that we have to sustain things. Yeah. I like the idea of entropy. Yes. I don't know if you. Yeah. Related with the second thermodynamic law. Yeah. So any organized process naturally tends to decline to chaotic states if you leave it alone. So I think that won't be different in the new companies, the new world that we are seeing in the future. So I think the answer for that we need actual. Yeah, I like to think the PDCA cycle like this, the plan and check phase. It sounds like static verbs. It sounds like something that you don't need an action, but do and act. It sounds like movement verbs for me. And then sustain is go through acting, go through. What is next? What is the next problem to solve. And I like to think also problem in different meanings. Yeah. Like problems as maybe always seems as a bad thing, a bad thing. And we have to eliminate problems. But however, there's some meanings that I like it for. Problems as challenge or problems as opportunities, as needs. And anything that demands a solution is a problem. So not necessarily a bad thing. So we keep moving, keep thinking about what is next. Yeah, I like this idea to training creativity. Finding a different way for the same problems for the same solutions or different solutions for same problems. Do not jump into conclusions so fast. This is what is saying scientific think. So try different solutions. I like the idea to play what if technique. This technique is calling what if, what if? That process steps could be combined with that one. What if we can do different here. Yeah. Asking what if, what if? And then maybe new ideas, new problems we can solve and move towards these innovations.

Yeah, I like that. So it's almost like you could say what if? And then someone says, I don't know. Let's see, let's try, let's see. Yeah, that's beautiful. I like it. Wow. Well, Rodrigo, I know you said you were nervous about coming on and not an expert or anything like that, but I got to tell you, I've been really, really enjoyed this. I really, I've learned a lot from you really, you know, as far as a lot of your ideas, and I've thought of things differently than I. Than I ever have, so thank you for coming on like that and for sharing your story.

I'm really glad to hear that, to be honest. Yeah. Thank you to inviting me to have this opportunity to share. Not too much knowledge yet, but this is. I like the idea that I'm learning, and as I said on my quote, I'm keep learning. Yeah. I think keep learning is the key for future. Yeah, for life. Yeah, for life. For sure. Yeah. We have to keep going, keep moving.

Yeah, Great, Great. Well, Rodrigo, if someone wants to connect with you, maybe social media or something like that, what's the best way?

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn is Rodrigo Piccoli, and I'm on Twitter as well.

P I, C O, L, I.

Right, Exactly. Exactly. And Rodrigo's R O, D, R, I, G O. Yeah.

And so what we'll do is we'll also. I'll get you to send me all of your links and we'll put them in. Now, you're a young guy, so you're on the Snapchat and Instagram and all that, too, aren't you? Tell the truth. No, it's okay.

That's true. Yeah.

Okay, well, if you want to share all of your links, we'll put them in the show notes. I can't use Snapchat. I'm too old. My daughter let me. But, you know, I probably should, you know, but.

Understood. Yeah. Yeah.

So. But anyhow, no, I really, really enjoyed talking with you, Rodrigo. Thank you again for coming on. So, show notes for this episode, and we'll link to everything that Rodrigo is talking about is going to be on Gemba Podcast dot com. This is episode 321. 321. So just go there and. And everybody go and connect with Rodrigo and we'll. We'll all keep learning together. How's that?

Perfect.

Great.

Thank you. Thank you again, Ron, to have me here.

Oh, you're welcome. All right, well, hey, stay safe out there in South Carolina. And my very, very best to. To all of your family and friends.

And loved ones in Brazil, thank you very much.

Okay. All right, take care. Bye.

Bye. Bye, bye.

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