GA 335 | Leveraging Creative Thinking with Erlin Kakkanad

We know that to sustain the competitive landscape, for an organization to sustain and remain relevant, we need to come up with new ways to meet customer expectation, to exceed customer expectation. And we can only do that through invention and innovation. And both of those require great problem solving techniques and skill and exceptional amount of creative thinking skills.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Erlynne Kakanaugh to the show. Now, Earl and I connected over LinkedIn, kind of started talking about creativity and how that the relationship between creativity and continuous improvement. And it's a really fun conversation. So I asked if she'd come onto the podcast to dive a little bit deeper. And that's exactly what we did. So, as you'll hear, Earl and has a really, really diverse background working for many, many large companies and a lot of experience in kind of a call center environment, more recently in kind of the banking industry and service industries. And one of our passions is teaching people how to think creatively as we address problems. So really that the interconnection between critical thinking and creative thinking and how those two can work together. And so what we did is we just really just started at the beginning of the difference between critical thinking and creative thinking, and then we dove deeper into creative thinking itself and how to do it. What does it mean? What are some of the challenges and how to overcome those barriers? Because it's not easy, obviously, to think creatively, we actually talked about some surveys and whatnot. So on the show notes, we're gonna be linking to several things. So definitely encourage you to go check out the show notes to, you know, to read a little bit more, to learn a little bit more about what Erlin is talking about. And those show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 335, so just look for those over@gembapodcast.Com okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Erlen, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm good, thank you, Ron.

All right. Yeah, thanks for persevering. I know we tried this before and we had a few technical hiccups, but you know what, good continuous improvement practitioners, we persevere. We fight through these obstacles. Right. So we'll give it a go again. So thanks for coming on. Where are you calling in from? Erlin?

Yeah, I am from. I'm based out of Des Moines, Iowa. West Des Moines, Iowa.

Okay. Very nice. Hawkeyes fan or anything like that.

I am, yes, I am a 100% Hawkeye fan.

Okay, okay, okay. I grew up in Ohio, so you can probably guess where my allegiance goes. But that's okay. We don't hate Iowa. It's fine. In fact, everybody always confuses Iowa and Ohio anyhow. Right?

Yes. Yeah. The Hawkeye or the Buckeye and all the eyes. Right?

Right. Exactly. Exact. All right, well, so, Erlynne, I know you listen to the show, and we do like to have all of our guests share a quote at the beginning. So do you have one that you want to share?

Yes, I came prepared with one and one that I. It closely resonates with everything that I do, and that is Edward Deming's. Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the result it gets. Hmm.

What's that mean to you?

I think so. For me, it's in the continuous improvement role. And as a process improvement facilitator, it's what processes, what we design and how much we go about designing. Within the scope of design and process problem solving. The measures and the processes that we put in place is what's going to deliver the results. And the measures and processes we put in place is very dependent on the people we involve for problem solving. So if we get people with mediocre skills or people who we have not worked well with to develop the skill in problem solving, we are going to just end up having a solution which is just good enough for today's environment and is not fit to sustain in the competitive landscape or the future of the organization. So I think that's very critical in understanding the design and the people we engage in problem solving, their skill set and capabilities is what truly builds that system and helps us be competitive.

Got it, Got it. All right, so Earl, and tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us how you first got exposed to all this continuous improvement stuff and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Yeah, one fine morning, Ron. Yeah, so my lean. So my background is really, it started in, in India. I was a contact center consultant or a contact center advisor for, for a technology company, hp, Hewitt Packard. And I was straight out of college in Mumbai, where I grew up, call center industry was booming. It was the first time. And this was like back in 2003, 2002, and I went straight into HP. I could speak English, I had a technical engineering school degree. And I was just the right fit from all angles. I just went in and I started my journey on in talking to people who called and wanted help with computers and out of the box technology support. My background started in the contact center industry. I worked in hp, then I moved to Dell, then I moved to different other shared service organizations that had contact centers, but primarily my clients or like hp, the customers were primarily American or US customers. But then I started working with clients in UK and then moving forward to Canada and from there I moved to Canada, started building total quality management systems in newer transitioning transition contact center for the organizations that I worked for. So in 2004, somewhere along the line, one of the quality managers decided, she made the decision for me that I should go take a lean Six Sigma course.

Okay, how'd you feel about that?

And it was, you know, I always cringe when I think about the moment when she called me to her office to talk to me. So she was a senior quality manager. And I knew that my quality scores are very, very poor. Like they were pathetic. I was, I don't think anybody, any of the team leaders wanted me in their teams to take calls because I dinged their KPIs totally. But on the other end I did have exceptional customer satisfaction survey results. Now that's telling, right?

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.

One of the key metric both in hp, in my experience with HP and prior to that in Dell, was first contact resolution. A first call resolution was a metric that was most important and my bonuses and everything was sort of tied to that. But the internal quality is about following the procedures, following the scripts, making sure you ask all the right questions, making sure you ask all the questions.

So that's what you were getting dinged on.

I was getting dinged on because I was not following the book.

Got it.

But I had all the ideas and I would go to the team leader and say, oh, how about this? How about that? My QA supervisor, I don't think she liked me very much.

Okay.

One day the quality manager called me and she asked my team leader to just bring me. So I got summoned, right? So I go in and she talks to me. She has to, brief conversation. She's so way up in the organization, you know, five minutes, brief conversation. And she says, okay, there's a lean Six Sigma course coming up. Why don't you take, it's a, it's a, it's a two day course, dmacc and you know, go take the course. I was looking forward to it because it was in this fabulous big hotel conference and I had never been to that hotel and you know, the big conference and stuff. So I was like, wow, great opportunity.

Yeah.

You know, so I went in, I checked that course. It was a yellow belt, two day basic lean Six Sigma course. I walked out and I Feel like that was, that was the moment in my life that changed everything for me. That made my career, that made that change. So until that time, Ron, I was, I was a problem solver, but I like to call myself with rough edges. Like I didn't know the technique of problem solving. And every time I try to problem solve, I think I rub people off the wrong way. So people didn't like it. Nobody wanted to work with me because I just didn't was I wasn't able to bring the team together and ask the right questions or provide them to navigate the problem with the right amount of tools and techniques.

Got it.

That yellow belt changed it. And then I proceeded over to green belt over the years. Now I'm a lean Six Sigma master black belt over the years. So yeah, that's where I started. Yeah.

Very cool. Very cool. So today, Earl, and we're going to spend, I guess the majority of our time sort of talking about maybe the how creativity, creative thinking in the future, maybe how they collide, if you will, with the spirit of problem solving kind underlying all of it. So where I want to begin is I want you to just talk a little bit about, I know you've done a lot of, a lot of research and a lot of studying of what some might call future work and maybe future skills. Talk a little bit about what you mean by future work, future skills, and then we'll dive deeper into just the whole idea of creative thinking.

Yeah. So creative thinking. So creative thinking is really about thinking creatively to come up with new or novel ideas. And in today's world, when we think about the workplace, where I spend most of my time in the day is problem solving. Quite recently, I think I shouldn't say recently, but three years ago there was a survey by the World Economic Forum talking about what are the future skills? And several leaders across the globe were surveyed. And among the top three skills were critical thinking, problem solving and creative thinking. Creative thinking was one skill that jumped to number three. It always, until before that year, I think 2016. Before that year, creative thinking was always somewhere around rank 10 or beyond. So it was never among the top 10 skills. But that suddenly jumped. And that's where some of my research really started is understanding why is creative thinking important? And then as I researched it is when you think about critical thinking or problem solving, we need creative thinking. Creative thinking is the ability to look at a problem and come up with multiple solutions. There's no right or there's no one way to solve a problem in the future. When we think about what the future is. We know that to sustain the competitive landscape, for an organization to sustain and remain relevant, we need to come up with new ways to meet customer expectation, to exceed customer expectation. And we can only do that is through invention and innovation. And both of those require great problem solving techniques and skills and exceptional amount of creative thinking skills. So that's where I put the two together for creative thinking skills and future ready. Like the future ready work is, are we future ready?

Talk a little bit more about the difference between critical thinking. Or maybe start there. Like when you say critical thinking. Let's talk about that. Like, what is critical thinking? Is a phrase we all, we all throw around and tell your kids, think critically, you know, but like, what does it really mean to you to think critically?

Yeah, I think for me, when it comes to critical thinking, for me it means about thinking about a problem or thinking about why the problem occurs, thinking about it through a systematic approach on problem solving. And I think that to me is critical thinking. It includes logic, it includes an approach of analytics, it includes an approach of thinking about is 2 and 2 4. Is there other ways to get to 4? Is it 3 plus 1? What are the permutation combination? And that to me is critical thinking is thinking about the problem. What are the different ways of getting to the problem? And how can we accomplish the same result through different approaches?

Okay, so then how does creative thinking harmonize, if at all, with critical thinking?

So with creative thinking, when we think about critical thinking, when we think about analytics.

Yeah, three plus one is four. Two plus two is four. Yeah, that's a great analogy. How to maybe expand critical thinking into it. So in critical thinking, sorry, creative thinking, I meant. Yeah, yeah.

So in creative thinking, right, it's about understanding, are there other ways to come up with the same answer and what are those different ways? So when we think about critical thinking, is tries to narrow down the approaches, whereas creative thinking is about expanding your thinking into other approaches. So in creative thinking, it's about looking at very unrelated concepts. Or like in my world, in the financial and insurance industry, we look at other two unrelated processes or procedures or skills that can be mapped together in order to produce a completely different and more efficient product or process for the customer.

I like it. I like it. You know, we spent a lot of time on this podcast and in just Gemba Academy in general, preaching the power of what we would call scientific thinking. You know, Mike Rather popularized it with Toyota Kata. But we start, we think about maybe a way to align it is to think of this routine, this coaching kata, this improvement kata, the steps of it as a form of critical thinking. But then when we get into identifying, you know, potential experiments. Right. In order to overcome an obstacle, perhaps these experiments is where creative thinking can start to come in. Let's be creative in designing these experiments. Right. That might help us overcome these obstacles. What do you think about that analogy?

Yes. And I have done. I am a kata practitioner myself in the organization. And creative thinking is that piece right there. When you talk about experimenting, the question that we ask for that expansive thinking is, how else can we achieve this task in, for example, in under five minutes?

Yeah.

And by just asking that question, it triggers the brain to start thinking about, oh, what are the things I should do? Or what are the things I should combine? What are the tasks that I should replace? What are the tasks I should eliminate? So you're thinking about different things. So there's no straight answer. Right. In this process, but you're asking different things, and you're trying to connect different dots. And I think that's the piece of the puzzle in kata practice, where creative thinking is extremely important. And I think it's embedded in the kata practice.

I hesitate to even bring this up because I can't remember the actual episode of it, but I had a person on in the past, it was a gentleman, and he was all into value engineering, and they were talking about working with a client to develop some new tiles, ceiling tiles, you know, that go and drop in ceiling tiles, you know, and they needed a particular texture. Texture on this. On this. On this tile. And what they ended up using was to experiment is they took some cereal, some like, I don't know, frosted flakes or something, and they crumbled it up and they glued it to the ceiling tile somehow or another or something like that, and this led them to, oh, that's the right texture. And then they found a way to achieve that in a mass scale. So I thought it was a very, very beautiful and excellent example of how creativity and thinking out of the box, if you will, can really lead to good improvements.

Yeah. There's a saying by Henry Ford and one of his famous quotes, and I can't recall exactly how the quote goes, but he mentions. He talks about if asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Yeah. You know, but nobody would have said a car. Right.

Yeah, exactly. I just watched a video yesterday on Elon Musk, and he said something very similar. You know, just that. That our. Our brains sometimes just aren't even capable of. Of Grasping what's, what's, what kind of potential we can have because we, we limit ourselves, you know, in our own thinking. So, so let's talk a little bit more, Erlyn, about, about this whole idea of creative thinking. Talk about some of the barriers. Why is it so hard to think creatively?

Yeah, so I think a lot of it really comes down to how we design our operations. So think about the, so I think about in banking and financial industry where I have the last 10 years of my experience, a lot of work is in the computers, a lot of it is digital. Everyone's looking at focusing on efficiency, how to get faster horses, right? So how can we get more things out? You know, just crank it out, just crank it out and you get an application for mortgage, or you're looking at some insurance claim, how to get it faster turned around to the customer. So the whole culture that typically in any organization is around efficiency. There's a huge focus on efficiency. So that's I think, the biggest hindrance to leaders to think outside of efficiency because that's the mantra that we need to be efficient as an organization, turn it around. So efficiency, highly focused, a lot of focus on efficiency tends to be the biggest hindrance in creativity. The other piece that ties right into that, I think is again, in just my opinion or in my research, is that it's the lack of time. The frontline or the leaders or the managers, the frontline people are the most equipped people when it comes to the knowledge of what is happening, what's going on with the customer, understanding the pain points and understanding how we can creatively solve for those. But those are the people who don't have time. They're like, we spend 90, 95% of our time trying to work through our processes, work through our objectives of being efficient by being, you know, trying to achieve a utilization, trying to, trying to chase that, utilize it, try it, try to chase that efficiency. So that to me those two, I think are, are the biggest hindrance. And the third thing is, is nobody. I think when, when you think about creativity, a lot of leaders say, oh, creativity is messy. We don't have time to clean your mess, right? Because experimentation, experimenting, understanding requires time. It creates a mess. It's so unrelated. You're trying to do different things. It's messy. So leaders think, oh, that's going to waste our time and it's going to take our focus off from our efficiency goals. So we don't have time for that. So creativity or innovation projects sometimes tend to be like the side or the pet projects and they don't really tie into the day to day operation. So I think that's where we have a gap and truly embedding that into the DNA of organizations. Those are the three things I would think.

Let's talk more about the efficiency one because that's interesting to me and maybe you just answered it just in your last few statements there. But is the conflict between creativity and efficiency in that maybe we're just in a rush for efficiency and we don't have the patience to experiment? Or is it something else?

I think it is some of that. There was a finding from one of the surveys by the World Economic Forum survey and I'll give you the link so you can put it in your notes. I think it's an eye opener survey which talks about. It's the focus. Right. If you're being purposeful and we intentional of what we want to accomplish, we will just go after it. So today in our organizations, in day to day operations, we are highly focused. The number one focus on the table is being efficient as an organization. And it's a good thing, it's not a bad thing. But what's not on the table in the forefront of the leaders, the managers and and the workforce is that creative thinking. Do I, do I give you time to think about different ways we can solve for efficiency? Right.

Okay. So what's the ramification of not being good at creative thinking? So if we're focused on efficiency and we are trying to become more efficient, which as you say it's not a bad thing. But. But if we lack the ability to think creatively, how is that hurting organizations?

Yeah, I can give you an example or a question as an example. Okay, so just imagine if I had the best cab company in, in the country or in the city of Des Moines and Uber comes in. My company is very efficient. It has highly efficient cars. It has everything per the old model. And then Uber comes in, all Lyft comes in and they change the dynamics of everything they changed. They bring customer experience in the forefront. They bring in customer interactive portals. They may have cars which are not even half efficient of, of the cab service that I have, but they have everything else. So what they've tapped on. So what happens in efficiency rush is we try to improve and make our products so efficient and better. And as a result of that we make our products expensive for our clients. So we have a better product now. We have a better, better service but at a premium rate. But then there is a lot of the requirements of the Customers that are going unmet and tapping on those requirements requires creative thinking. It requires listening and understanding. Okay. These are the requirements that are not being met. What can we do? Or how could those requirements be met?

Yes, yes.

And that requires creative thinking.

I love it. I love it. That makes a lot of sense. A great analogy of the taxi. When you started that story, I almost said, you mean Lyft or Uber.

You.

Know, so it's like, great analogy. Right? So, okay, well, let's talk a little bit about. Those are some of the barriers. But so how do we overcome those barriers? Like how do we foster creative thinking? Maybe as individuals, leaders, organizations, the world, if you will. How do we go about it?

Yeah. So I think I'll start with organization and then I'll go with the world. Okay. With the organization. I think, I think it's baby steps. One is when we think about the intent being intentional and purposeful. So it starts with, do I have goals? Have I set goals? Have I set smart goals for creative thinking? Do I reward in my reward process or rewards and recognition process? Do I have something around rewarding people for coming up with creative ideas and then developing the skill? So that's sort of being intentional and purposeful. But then there's also a part where we have to develop the skill. You know, all of us forget our box of crayon in school, right? And then we are asked to be creative at the workplace and we're like, well, I don't think I'm creative. Yeah. So there's always that. And nine out of ten people tell me that they're not creative and I'm like, no, that's not right. You can work. It takes practice. Deliberate practice. There, I'm speaking my counter language. Deliberate practice. And you can achieve it. So developing the skill. So some of the things, some of the ideas that I share with being a leader, leading my own teams is let's do something which requires creative thinking. Let's do some art class. Let's, you know, the wine and campus is awesome, you know, or just do different things where the team loves to explore different ideas. There was one time in my career with, with Wells Fargo, we had called a consultant who came in and helped us with a team bonding activity that it was a board game with different groups and we worked on a problem of mining gold and there were different ways to go to the mountain and mine gold and everyone had to do it and it was just an amazing exercise. So things like that are always very important when every company does team bonding or team Activities every quarter, every year, based on the budgets, et cetera. But having something more intentional to say, okay, this is where we will do something fun, but something where we can also tap into creativity skill and just kind of explore that piece. I think these are the three things I feel at least the foundational for us to start in an organization to help foster creative thinking. And just by having an innovation team in the team and checking that box off doesn't mean that you become a creative organization. It has to be a top down approach where leaders are intentional and purposeful of what we want to do. Allowing people to share ideas openly. And it takes a lot to understand and gauge where the organization's culture is when it comes to some things like that. But understanding that, having people feeling safe, that okay, this is a safe environment, right, for me to share an idea, even though it might be the dumbest idea. And there are dumb ideas, but it's the dumbest ideas. But if you take the dumb idea and you talk to like 10 people, that idea becomes a smart idea. So that's what is creative thinking and fostering the culture of allowing that idea to grow through networking, through conversations and learning and sharing. I think these are some of the things I feel are like very foundational in an organization that you can see, you can hear from organizations that are highly innovative. These are the basic foundational things in my research that I've come across and kind of bubbled it into like three or four things that organizations should do and start honing into these things and just creating more rigor around developing these things at an individual level and at an organization level.

Got it, Got it. So I know before we hit record, we were kind of brainstorming some ideas of what to talk about and you kind of walked through almost a process of this creative thinking that started with understanding a value proposition and things like that. Maybe. Can you talk about that process, those steps?

Yeah. So when it comes to creative thinking, when it comes to problem solving, we're always solving problems and we're saying how to make it more efficient. How do we go about making this better for the business or for the person who's doing the job? How can we make this operate the procedure right in line with what's expected. But as things change, and my experience is in the regulated, highly regulated industry regulations keep changing and so does the requirements for the process keeps changing. The regulation today may not be in effect or it may be more relaxed in the next, but change in office and all of the fun stuff. Right. So when we Think about creative thinking or a process. I think the first thing I like to understand is what is the value proposition? If you're changing something, if you're making any improvements, does that add value? Does that change the value that we are presenting to our end customer? And I think that's a good for me, I have seen success in any of the process improvements that we do. Any projects that we pick up to sick. Is this really worth us going down the path of improvement? If this is not helping solve for our customer or help create a new value or solve for a value that's most important to them in their lives in doing business with us, then why is this even important? And just kind of looking at it and focusing creativity in those areas where we can truly make a difference is where I feel like is the first step of creative thinking projects that at least that I've worked on.

Got it.

That's the approach that I use.

Good, good. So talk a little bit then about this whole idea of making a service a utility versus a product. You know what I mean? Talk a little bit about that. We talked about that before we hit record as well.

Yeah. So one of the things that when I think about the how, when we talk about the future. Right. What's the future skill. And we think we were highly focused on creative thinking. But then when I think about just kind of turn it around to lean practitioners or lean Six Sigma practitioners in a position of facilitating these process improvement, the Gembas and the Kaizens, what becomes critical? What is the future for a process improvement person? When I think about that today, the product that we offer or the service we offer is problem solving, process improvement. How does that become a utility now? What does utility mean? Think about when electricity was invented many, many years ago, the intent was to light a bulb. Bulb.

Yeah.

Right. But today, if you think of electricity, it's. It's not a product. It's not a product that you buy or you pay for to light a bulb, but it's a utility. Meaning you can use electricity to light up your laptop, to charge up your laptop, charge up a car.

Yeah.

So it has transformed from being a product to now a utility. So when I think about lean Six Sigma process improvement of practitioners and what I teach and mentor other lean Six Sigma mentees is that you have to know what's out there. The Internet of things, you have to know what's out there. Like the hyper automation, you have to understand not just the tools of problem solving, which is great, you have to be good at it. But Apart from that, you need to have a full understanding, not a full understanding, but a good grasp of what are things changing. The Internet of things, the APIs, the robotics, the artificial intelligence, hyper automation or the hyper science. Because when you look at. So when I look at processes and. Or when the process improvement consultants, we look at the processes, we are coming up with the target state. The target state, it needs to be sustainable in the future. It needs to provide us the competitive edge and advantage for the future. And we can't just have a process developed using the same techniques that we have been, we have to use different techniques. So having a good understanding is when you look at the process and you say, oh, that can be done by robotics, so that I can give you time back or your team's capacity back to do other complex things such as creating a new product or service through creative thinking for our new customer market. So that's where I think is Lean Six Sigma or practitioners is transforming into being more of a utility by just having. And that's an onus on practitioners to go out there and get, keep up with what's going on in technology and it. And it's not a separate thing, it is our thing. And if we don't know this today I've learned it, but over the time I didn't know it, but I made sure I had somebody from it, from robotics or somewhere else from these unique skill sets, data scientists who I would talk to and made sure that they were my phone, a friend when I did my Kaizen event. So they could give inputs to the team, then the team could then start thinking about those ideas.

I love it similar to just when you are doing these events or these projects. I remember we used to do Kaizen events in a factory doing a quick changeover on a big machine. We'd be sure to invite someone from the office, maybe someone from human resources or someone from the accounting department, something like that, who had no idea about how to run this machine or even what SMED or quick changeover was about. But it didn't matter because those people then would be like, why do you do. Like that? You know, and well, we've always done it that way. But just having that different mindset or having no biases, right? This bias, the whole idea of bias is ruining the world. There's so many different types of biases, right, that just cloud our judgment and we just can't get out of our own way due to whatever it is, you know, confirmation bias or recency bias or whatever it might be. But Just having that, that, that, that outside view can be so, so beneficial.

Yeah. And the struggle is when we think about Lean or Six Sigma because it, it, it was, it's a practice that started in a manufacturing environment and taking those concepts today and it's, you know, I've heard on your podcast people, Lean Six Sigma concepts and methodology in legal and law firms and health care and finance and banking. So there's always, there's different ways for us to look at the methodology and then translate that into it works. I have seen success. It works. But there's always a challenge on about leadership not, you know, wanting to hear the term it only works in jap. It's a Japanese term or, you know, and all of that. So there's always been several struggles for me personally in my journey of 15 years as Lean Six Sigma practitioner, but always passionate about the subject of problem solving. And so I have used, taken all the techniques of Lean Six Sigma concept like Kaizen is no more Kaizen, but it is what I use is today is around a problem solving session, or we call it the ideation session. So we use the same Kaizen approach, but we call it something else. It's just some of those things. So when someone talks about manufacturing examples, I totally understand the concept. And a lot of. Even today when you ask me about creative thinking in the world, the very first world part, another part of my research is around looking at how we can improve the skills for creative thinking through the classes that are offered in high school and through for young adults. So much of those classes today are either decommissioned or they are electives. And a lot of kids, you know, young adults, they don't even opt in for those classes. But then when they come in organizations and, you know, corporate America or they want to become entrepreneurs, there is a requirement to be creative. You have to think creatively. So there's a widening gap there that I'm that also we are seeing as a part of our research that we think we have some opportunities to design systems in the education where we can instill creative thinking early on and stop people from dropping off their box of crayons in order to take other classes. So I think there are some correlations and implications there and some more to come on that.

Yeah, fantastic. This has been a fun conversation, Erlynne, so thank you for coming on. Maybe to wrap things up, why don't you maybe share some final words of wisdom as it relates to creativity. Maybe around for folks to learn more about creative thinking and things like that. Maybe some practical things they could do even today, as soon as they get off the podcast, what can they do? And then definitely tell us how folks can connect with you directly.

Yeah, I think right off the gate you can jump start creative thinking by just looking at what you're doing and asking what value is this work creating for the customer here in this process or in my business? And then looking at opportunities and asking questions around what is it that we can do differently so that we can still continue to add the value or increase the value proposition for our customers and what would that look like? And I think those are the two things I feel like are the first thing that comes to my mind when it comes to just looking into a process. Why do we do 10 steps? Can we do it in two? And then quite recently I'm on this journey where I'm like, why do people need to even touch it? What if it's very common sense? Or if it's a straight through, you know, easy coded, rule based, can it go straight through processing? Why does it need to even be touched? So I think those are some of the key things that there are several industries doing it today. So don't be afraid to challenge the status quo. Ask the questions. And I think, you know, if you participate in ideation, talk to whoever is doing the work, the upstream and downstream of whoever does the work before you and after you. I think getting a good knowledge of what happens in their area is very important to understand the end to end value stream of the process and then asking questions on how we can change this, combine it, rearrange it, eliminate steps so that we can, you know, increase that value proposition for the customer.

Yeah.

So those are my quick tips in terms of connecting with me. I, I am on LinkedIn. So Erlen Kakanad and spell your last name. Yeah. K A K. K A N A D. Okay.

And Erlin is E R L I N. Yes.

Okay.

Yeah. Okay.

And then Twitter. I do, I'm, I'm on Twitter and I don't do a whole lot there. So I just started Twitter like a month ago. So I'm at Ekakanat. So just my last name. Ekakinat. Yeah, that's my Twitter handle.

Got it. So this is episode 335. So we'll link to everything. I know you had some surveys and whatnot that you were going to send some links for. So we'll put all that in the show notes so folks can go to gemba podcast.com this is episode 335. So we'll link to Erlin's Twitter and LinkedIn and all the survey links and whatnot. So yeah, well fantastic. Earlene, thank you so much for coming on. This has been fun and yeah, maybe we could do it again down the road and we can take creativity part two.

Yeah, would love that. Yes.

All right. Okay. Well you take care and appreciate you coming on.

Yeah, same here. Thank you Ron.

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