GA 344 | Learning Lean Lessons From Powerful Stories with Steven Jackson

These teams had completely convinced themselves that this procedure was completely safe. But the result was that 273 people died because they were trying to save time.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Jackson to the show. Now, earlier this week, I was having a conversation with Craig Nicol, who is kind of our podcast editor producer. Greg and I really work together closely on these podcasts week in and week out. And Greg said, you know, Ron, we gotta get back to telling more stories on the podcast. And something that we do try to do as much as possible on these guests with our guests is have them share stories. Right. And, well, today, I have to say, and Greg, I think, would agree, we delivered. Stephen, as you're about to hear, is a fantastic storyteller. Now, he's got lean, you know, thinking, understanding, and a lean background. And you'll hear. You'll hear about his background here early in the episode. But there's two stories in particular that Stephen touches on. The first one is of tragic story, unfortunately, of an airplane crash. And so we talk about what happened, what we can learn from it, and basically the lessons that were involved. So something like that never happens again. That's the first story. Then the second story was back in 1941, there was a situation going on. The British naval fleet, their boats were being blown up by German U boats. And they were trying to figure out how to stop that and come to find out that there was. There were some young ladies who were. Didn't have any, you know, warfare experience or anything like that, but they were mathematicians, they were scientific thinkers, and they came up with some hypotheses, some different things to. And get feedback on and come to find out they were successful. And so Stephen walks us through that story as well. So, anyhow, this is definitely a longer episode. Okay, so listen in chunks if you need to, but if you're like me, they're really engaging stories and they pull you right through. So really, really enjoyed this one. So, show notes and we're gonna link to some different articles, and for sure, Stephen's LinkedIn can be found over@gembapodcast.com Just look for episode 344. Again, GE podcast.com look for episode 344. Also, Stephen mentions earlier in the episode, a particular Gemba Academy Live episode that we did a few years ago now, I guess it was with the good folks over at Seating Matters and Seating Matters, and they're in Northern Ireland. And this was a fantastic episode. And so if you're interested in checking that out, we've Got one of the videos you can watch for free on our website. Kind of the opening video. So go to gemba academy.com and you'll navigate to our Gemba Academy live section of in. Or just search for Seating Matters in our search box there at the top of the website and give that one a watch. We've actually had Ryan and a few folks from Seating Matters on the podcast as well, so you can. You can go back into our archives there. But really, really good. So, yeah, gemba academy.com for that to go. Check out the Seating Matters episode. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Stephen, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm fantastic. How are you?

I'm doing well. Doing well. It's getting a little chillier here in Texas. It's one of those. It's that time of year where one day it's hot, and we're running around in shorts and T shirts. And then last night, we were in winter jackets and ray coats. So it's one of those things. Now, where are you calling in from, Stephen?

I'm calling from the north of England. I'm a stone's throw from the Scottish border.

Beautiful part of the world.

Goodness, it certainly is. I hope my accent's okay. I appreciate it.

I envy your accent. I had this mix between growing up in Ohio and living in Texas, and it's all confused now. In fact, I talked to my mom, she still lives in Ohio, and I said, boy, you have an accent, Mom. And then she laughs at me and says, now she talks to my children who have been born and raised here in Texas. And so they definitely, definitely have a Texas accent. And, you know, so, yeah, it's this. Accents are a funny thing, you know?

Yeah. So, I mean, just. Just as a quick aside, you did some. You. You did a. One of your videos was set in Northern Ireland with Seating Matters.

That's right.

And I was actually just intrigued how did. Because of Northern Ireland. Action. Accent. It's really quite tough.

Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. There. Yeah, there was a fantastic organization there. Seating. Yeah, they. But you're right, there was a couple of people that I was just like, whoa. And so I didn't even tell you. Got to slow down. And, I mean, I've talked to so many people around the world over the years that I've kind of learned to. One of my tricks, honestly, when I'm talking to someone who has. And I'm struggling, is I used to try to, like, understand every word that they were saying, and now I Don't I no longer do that. Because if you stress out about missing a sentence or two and then you almost give up, and then it's hopeless. So now I just kind of just let it flow and just understand the context of what's saying, what they're saying, and, you know, maybe you have to say, wait, say that again. So. But no, but, yeah, that's a fantastic Gemba Academy Live episode that we did over there. Those folks are doing some. Some fantastic work, and I really, really enjoyed that.

And the Seating Matters one was just absolutely fantastic.

Yeah, thank you. No, that's great. Yeah, that's a great group. Great group of folks there, so. Well, Stephen, I know you listen to the show. As you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one?

I have two.

Okay.

The first one is from Wayne Dwyer or Dr. Duane Dwyer, and he said, if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

What'S that mean to you?

Well, to me, what I like about that is it kind of sums up Lean in so many ways, but it's about changing your perception of looking and thinking about work.

Yeah.

And when you do that, the same work looks different.

Yes, yes. Another way of saying, sometimes I say, don't be so sure. Right. Don't be so sure. There's a sticker that I got at the Katakon year last year or whatever. I think it was, you know, something about don't be so sure. Yeah. Good, good, good. Well, what's your second one?

Second one is a very short one, and it is by Jeff Goffill, who's a design thinker, does talks about Lean and user experience, and it's do less more often.

Gosh, I love that one. I've never heard that. Do less more often. Very good, Very good. I love it. I love it. Well, Steven, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you first got introduced to continuous improvement, and then what you're up to these days.

My background is in human resources. And I started back in the 90s, kind of drifted into it over a period of time, until someone one day suddenly said, oh, you work in human resources. And I thought, okay, I hadn't really thought of myself as doing that. And so I continued, did that. Did my professional qualifications. Been doing that for years. And in terms of continuous improvement, I was working in a manufacturing organization, and I was just doing normal kind of HR work. And someone came to see me one day and said, we're now Going to be a lean organization. I'd never heard of Lean. I had no idea what he's talking about.

So I said, were you like, weight loss program or what? You know, I know.

I just had no idea. I smiled a lot. And so we said, but we don't want to pay the consultants to do all the training. And because you work in hr, you know all about training, which I didn't. I knew nothing about training, but people have these assumptions. So I was given this folder and told, go to one of the classes with the consultants and then you're going to be delivering it to the bulk of the organization. And I thought, I'm still trying to work out what Lean means. But two, trying to convince a whole bunch of people on something that I've only just learned about just seems to be a little strange. But, you know, fair enough. So I created this course and delivered it. And, you know, they often say that the best way to learn something is to teach it.

Yes.

And, you know, because people ask questions, you know, you've created these, you know, your presentation, and you spiel. And then someone says, well, what does this mean? And I died on my feet over and over again. But I was able to go back. So someone asked me a question. I didn't know it. You know, I would say, I don't know, but I'll find out and I'll get back to you. And that's. That was basically my. My introduction to all things Lean was doing it the hard way. You know, my suggestion is that if you want to learn Lean, don't start off by training other people. But I'm glad I did it because it gave me a good insight into the processes and trying to understand it and trying to simplify it for myself so that other people could understand it. Because you're basically trying to show almost like a philosophy or an approach rather than saying, here is this technique and this will deliver X, Y and Z, because it doesn't quite work that way. So I was very comfortable with saying, well, in my mind, this is how I see it working. And people would nod and it seemed to work. I'm sure there was much more efficient ways of that organization becoming lean, but that's the way that they chose to work.

Yeah. Are you still in HR then?

I'm still a HR person. I do a mixture of interim work, doing projects and consultancy work. And I. I don't sell myself as being lean as such because I found that often just hits such a wall or such a barrier that I talk about organizational development or organizational design. And that seems to give you a lot of latitude to talk about continuous improvements and different approaches to why the customer is so important to what the organization wants to achieve. And that seems to, I don't seem to hit the barrier, but if I go somewhere and say, you know, look, I want to talk about lean, it's such a hard sell.

Yeah, yeah. All the labels that we put on things can, can be more detrimental than anything I say. I always tell people, I don't care what you call it. Let's just, let's just think. Let's learn to think and let's learn to make things better. How's that? You know, and.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Beautiful. Beautiful. All right. Well, listen, Stephen, so just to catch folks up, you and I kind of had an interesting dialogue back and forth on LinkedIn and I understand that there's a couple stories that maybe have some, some lean flavor to them that you wanted to, to maybe share. So why don't you take off and tell us some stories.

Well, the first one is it's about a famous air crash back in 1979, but it's become quite famous and it's heavily studied. But it's the flight of American Airlines Flight 191, which took off on the 25th of May, 1979, going from Chicago to Los Angeles. I should say this is not a good news story, but I think it has some very important points. And as the plane shortly took off from Chicago, within a few seconds of taking off, the pilots noticed a very large bang coming from the wing and follow procedure, which was to assume that the, that that engine had died and to make height as quickly as possible because they're now airborne, they need to continue. You know, you obviously can't just turn around. And 30 seconds later, the plane went from flying level at about 300ft, banked heavily, nose dived into the ground and two hundred and seventy three people died. There was no survivors. And of course, you know, this, this launches a major investigation for, you know, when a plane is so catastrophically goes wrong. And what they discovered was that as the plane was taking off, there was a highly unusual event and that is that the left engine fell from the aircraft, but it didn't just fall, it ripped from the rear, went over the top of the wing, damaging the surface of the wing, and then fell away to the ground. And this caused, you know, some very serious, obviously very, very serious problems. And during the investigation they found that, I mean, if can basically describe the way a attached, the way an engine is attached to a wing. You basically have the wing, you have the pylon underneath it, which is the kind of supporting mechanism. And the engine is bolted to the pylon by many bolts. And you can imagine, you know, engines falling off planes is a very rare event. And you know, they are incredibly strong designs. So an engine fallen off is highly unusual. And I suppose to cut a very long story short, what they discovered was a part of the pylon had been damaged by compression and that has caused a crack over a period of time. So they could identify this wasn't done during the crash. This crack appeared before the plane took off for the final time. And so in the spirit of going to the gemba, the National Transport Safety Board, which covers all serious accidents in North America, went to the maintenance area where engines were being looked at and was basically asked to be talked through what was going on. Now normally when an engine is being removed and at that time it is a very, very time consuming process. There's a huge number of bolts, there's lots of cables, hydraulic fuel lines and all this kind of stuff. It's very complicated. And they had found, the maintenance teams had found a way of reducing this by about 200 hours. But the formal procedure says that what you do is you remove the engine, then you remove the pylon and then both parts are separated separately. And they had found, these maintenance teams had found that actually you can say that about 200 hours if you use a forklift truck to go underneath the engine, take the weight and you can unbolt things and save a huge amount of time. And this is not an approved process by any stretch of the imagination, but had become common practice, but sought advice. And this was in conjunction with the engineering teams. It wasn't just the maintenance teams doing it of their own volition. They tried to try and do it properly in a kind of deeply unofficial way. And one of the issues is that the tolerances inside for all these bolts holding the pylon engine to the wing.

And just not to interrupt you, but just, just in case folks don't know, I actually just looked it up because I wanted to be sure I understood pylon is. The pylon is actually the, the, the bit that kind of attaches the engine to the, to the wing. Correct.

To the underside. Sorry, sorry, I should have said that. Yes.

Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah, I had to look it up because I wanted, I thought was what was the case, but I just googled it really fast while you were talking. So, yeah, I think it's an important part to understand, to visualize what you're talking about here.

Right, yes. So, but the official procedure says that you separate these all separately. So you would remove the engine and then you would remove the pylon. And about eight weeks before the plane crashed, the plane had been in to have some work done on, on the engine. And this work called for the engine to be removed and then the pylon to make some adjustments to improve something. It was a safety issue. So by using a forklift underneath this, you're reducing heavily the amount of things, the amount of work that you need to do. And so of course this saves time and time is money. So even in the ultra safety conscious world of the airlines, even going back to the 1970s, it was still unbelievable. The safety was still part of the DNA of the airline industry. But they'd convince themselves that this was a safe feature and they even made mention in the inquiry that the reason for using a forklift was it was for, it was for the benefit of safety. And they said that it would, and I'm quoted here, but from a safety standpoint, it would reduce the number of disconnects of systems such as hydraulic and fuel lines, electrical cables and wiring from 79 connections to 27. So, so that all sounds good. The problem is that a forklift truck was never the official method for doing this. There was no formal training for it, it wasn't approved by the manufacturer. And forklift trucks are not designed to be incredibly precise in their movements. Even with the most skilled operator, the tolerances are very small. And what seems to have happened to this particular engine is that the forklift can take the weight. I mean, it's a five, the engine is about five tonnes. So, you know, it is very heavy. But the fork, this is a huge forklift, it could take the weight. And so they reduced the weight. They lowered the engine with the forklift so they could unscrew some of the bolts and then there was a change of shifts and the change of shifts didn't happen quickly. When they returned to the work, the engine had moved slightly and so they had to lift up the engine again. And doing so, they got it stuck. And this is where the accident investigators thought that actually this is where the engine had compressed heavily against the pylon in a way that the pressure isn't, you know, the pylon is not designed to take that type of pressure in that way. And it dented part of the flange, which then cracked on the pylon or the engine, sorry, the pylon so pushing.

The engine up onto the pylon damaged the pylon?

Yes. And this is not the first time it had happened. It had happened several times before. This was not the first time that these maintenance teams had used this technique. They'd been doing it for some time, and only several months earlier, a plane was damaged in a similar way. But it was noticed at the time that the metal was damaged, and it was an investigation, and it was put down to maintenance teams making errors, when actually it was the imprecise nature of the forklift truck. What we ended up with was a group of maintenance and engineering teams who had created this unofficial process that had previously caused damage to other aircraft, but had convinced themselves that everything was okay. So even, you know, as I go back to the, even in the ultra safety world or conscious world of the aircraft, these teams had completely convinced themselves that this procedure was completely safe. And, but the result was that 273 people died because they were trying to save time.

Yeah.

And, but by going to the Gemba, you know, if you just looked at the procedures for changing an engine, there'd be nothing in there that indicated, you know, why, how such a piece of metal was damaged. But it was so common in the maintenance teams that when the investigators turned up, they happily showed them exactly what they were doing. It's just, it was a completely unofficial, unapproved process. The engineering teams, when you're trying to write the processes for doing this, were guessing at tolerances, so we're guessing the accuracy of a forklift truck, and they were guessing wrong. These are skilled individuals who are clearly motivated to, one, do the job right, but two, do it cheaply and they got it wrong on both sides.

Yeah, yeah. Now, wasn't I, I don't, I did a little research on, on, on, on the, on the crash. And wasn't it that in one of the earlier reports was that they thought there was actually a collision that caused it, which they, they, they then later debunked. But is that accurate? Do you, do you remember that or do you know that?

I, I, I, I don't remember that. There was a report when, because I thought when, when a plane comes down and the ntsb, the, you know, there is immense pressure. This was a DC10 plane and it was relatively new into service, and there'd been several other crashes involving DC10s, nothing related to the engines. And so there was a question hanging over it. And so the DC10 following this crash was grounded in America, and no foreign DC10 planes were allowed to enter American airspace. So, you know, there is immense pressure on the investigators to get to the truth of what's going on. And they had a false start in that they found a bolt that has sheared and they made the incorrect assumption to say this broken bolt caused a crash and, you know, went in front of the cameras and made a press statement say, you know, we found it. And of course, you know, you're under immense pressure, you know, you're desperate to try and find the truth. And accident investigations, particularly with air crash, they take a very long time. Yeah. I mean, you can go now to the NTSB website and dig out the main report. The main report is, I think, 101 pages long. You know, so they do very, very detailed investigations into what's going on. But, you know, if it wasn't for the, for the investigators going to the place of work and finding out exactly what these maintenance teams were up to, it could have been a different conclusion to the investigation. So a great deal changed following this. Obviously, the use of forklift trucks was banned and there was a whole other raft of things that went on. But I thought it was an interesting story. You know, it's. It's so easy to convince ourselves that we are right when we are doing something.

Yeah, well, yeah, and I actually, I was just reading that it was interesting that, you know, not to pick on American Airlines because it looks like they weren't alone. There was actually, I won't name them because I don't want, you know, calling out other companies or anything like that, but there were several other airlines that were actually using the same procedure, you know, and luckily, thankfully, obviously, that those airlines didn't have a tragedy like this.

But they did find, because it was, you know, it was mandated afterwards that all, all aircraft have to be checked afterwards. And I think they sound something like another eight or nine defective flanges. Yeah, holding. Holding the, you know, together. So, you know, that could have been, been, you know, many, many more people being hurt or killed. Yeah, so, yeah, it was, it was fairly common within a group of, you know, this was not an isolated incident.

Well, word spreads. You know, you save 200 hours. What, you know.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. You know, maintenance teams are, you know, are expensive people. You know, these are skilled technicians. So, you know, and of course, you know, for every hour that a plane is not flying, it's costing the airline a great deal of money. So there will always be pressure to increase turnaround time. And sometimes you just need to double check to say, does this truly make sense? And in this Case they weren't doing that, they'd convinced themselves that this was a perfectly safe.

Do you know how it's done now? I mean, we've had several aircraft maintenance folks on the podcast. I didn't obviously think to even ask it. I know that one airline was actually using an overhead crane, I believe, to support the engine instead of a fork.

Yeah, I mean, I suppose we were going way outside my, my theory of knowledge. Now I know that at the time that we're using, it started off with using kind of overhead choice to, to do this and you know, maybe someone just thought a forklift truck looks a lot easier.

Yeah.

For whatever reason, the modern way of doing it. I. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that'll be my question for the next airline folks. We have on, we've had a few on over the years, so.

So.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's an interesting story, you know, where time is money kind of thing, but boy, oh boy, anytime safety is, you know, I've been in, I've been, I had one of my previous jobs, you know, I think I've told the story on the podcast and a matter of fact, it was in England and there was a young man, he was in his 20s, and he, he thought he was, he was dealing with a high pressure valve and he was, he was, was trying, he, he thought that there was no pressure in the valve, this assembly, and he thought he was tightening the bolt. So he had a, you know, a pneumatic driver and righty tighty, lefty loosey, he had it backwards. He thought he was tightening and he was loosening it and he loosened it and it shot off and hit him in the chest and it killed him, you know, and, you know, and it's just, it's, it's so sad when, when, I mean, mistakes happen, accidents happen. But of course, you know, we need to be, you know, I, Sometimes when we're teaching people things like 5s or, you know, any of these lean tools and we talk about safety, people kind of roll their eyes and you know, I just want to just reiterate. You never ever want to have to deal with that type of a situation, you know what I mean? Where someone's life is lost as a result of, of, you know, not following work instructions or trying to cut corners when, you know, it's not, it's not safe. Right. So, yeah, it's, it's such an important, such an important lesson that we just, we, we can't ever forget. You know, it transcends lean.

Obviously, you Know, Paul Akers has spoken about this for, you know, one of the. The first tests on. On any improvement is, you know, know, does it make it more or less safe?

Yeah.

And if there's any reduction in safety, it just, you know, the rest of the conversation is. Is null and void.

Yeah, exactly.

No one should get hurt at work, you know, it's just. It's.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

No reasonable person could defend, you know, putting people in harm's way. Yeah, in work.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So let's touch on the. On the second story. Maybe. Maybe we have about, oh, I don't know, five, ten minutes or so.

Okay. Right. I'll quickly go through this. So I have a question for you, and you probably have never been asked this question before, but I want you to imagine that you are a submarine commander in the 1940s, and in front of you, you see a large convoy of vessels. Where would you attack from? Would you say attack from? From the front, the rear, the side, somewhere. Somewhere else.

So I'm. I'm moving forward.

You're the submarine commander.

Yeah, but I. But I'm looking out my submarine window and I see some vessels coming towards me. Is that right?

Yes. So where would you attack from? The side would you attack from the front, the rear.

So are these enemy vessels? Do I. Have I confirmed their enemies?

These are enemy. These are enemy vessels. Vessels your job is to sink or damage, you know, these vessels.

Oh, my gosh. How many vessels are coming at me?

Oh, these? I don't know. There's 50 in front of you. But these are not military vessels. These are, you know, carrying food and supplies and this kind of stuff.

But I'm supposed to sink them, right? I want to be clear, because now you're tricking me. Like, I shouldn't shoot them down at all. Like, I don't know.

No, no, no, no, no, no. Your job as a captain, if you see the enemy, you know, if you see an oil tanker in front of you, you know, your job is to disable or attack that vessel.

Well, I mean, if I have to do it, gosh, I don't know.

I.

Probably would just shoot the one closest to me. I don't know.

All right. The only reason I was asking is when you see the old war films, what you tend to see is that the submarine is off to one side, and so you've got a very large vessel in front of you, something like an oil tanker, and it's a huge target. Some of the advantages about being a submarine is that you can attack from Some distance away and you can fire from underwater. And this was a problem that in the early parts of the war for the British, food and supplies was coming from around, around the world. And most of it was coming to the west of England, to the ports in the west. And German submarines called U boats were sinking a huge amount of ships. And this was a big problem for the British. There was a, you know, there was a. The risk of starvation from food and materials was very real in the early days of the war for the British. And so finding a way to stop the successful German attacks on these convoys was a national priority. And the way they resolved it is that they set up a tiny little unit in Liverpool, which is on the northwest coast of Britain. And their job was to work out out what the strategy of the Germans were and how to come up with a countermeasure. Because what was happening in reality is that when a ship was blown up, it would frequently have escort ships from the navy protecting it. And they would see a ship go up and then they would whiz off to one side and start looking for a submarine, but with very, very poor results. And they were doing this because if this was the attack, this was the kind of attacks being used in the first World War. And it's the kind of attack that if you were a surface ship, that's where you would attack from. You would attack from the side. But this tactic wasn't working. So a tiny unit was set up. And key to this unit we took out about 12 people. And key to this unit was five young women aged between 17 and 21 who had no combat experience, no knowledge of military tactics, and were definitely not able to go to the Gemba. But what was important about these women is that they were all deemed very intelligent and had a very good knowledge of mathematics. So they were there to act as analysts or war gamers. So when information came in, their job was to try and work out the tactics. They had access to after action reports and they were able to talk to commanders when they returned from work. So what they started doing was experimenting with the sparse information they had come up with hypothesis testing and then they were able to map it out of what would happen if you do this or if you turn take this kind of approach. And what was interesting at the time is that tactics evolved constantly during wars. And this tiny little group were able to come up with real time analysis. So a convoy's under attack and they were able to radio back, this is what we think is happening, this is what we think you should be doing so. One of the most famous ones. And. Sorry, the reason why I started by asking you where would you attack from? Is that it was assumed by the surface ships you would go to one side. What these young women were able to identify is that actually it was much more audacious than that the submarines at nighttime would surface in the middle of a convoy, which gave you several advantages. One, you wouldn't be picked up on radar because radar was just seeing lots of big ships and a submarine is tiny. And two, if you were listening, trying to listen for a submarine, it would be completely drowned out, out by the sound of all the other ships in the convoy. So they would, you know, sink a ship. And then what they would do is they would dive. And when a submarine is underwater in that area, it is very, very slow. So they would dive, and then they would just wait for the convoy to go over them and then surface at the rear and then rejoin the convoy over and over whilst the British were off to one side, working it all out, trying to bomb bits of empty water. But it was these women who were given the space and the information to think about the problem and to experiment all the way along to work out what the enemy was doing at that stage.

Let me back up for a second because I lost a little bit of the. I want to make sure. Just a. I want to make sure. I understand, because I'm sure other people got it, but they're like, ron, shut up so he can keep going. But I want to be clear. I understand. So the U boat would. Is under the water. Right. And it would. It would shoot at the. The. The boat. Right, the vessel. And it would hit it from under the water. Yes, correct.

And then it would be. It would be on the surface. It would be. Because a U boat is much, much faster on the surface.

So it would shoot from the surface?

Yes.

Oh, okay. So it would surface and then shoot and then it dove. Yes, and then it dove underneath what they just shot.

Yeah. And the convoys would just. Would just go over the top. You know, it would dive. It would, you know, clearly go deep enough so that the convoys would pass easily over the top, and then it would resurface. U boats, I mean, we tend to think of submarines of that area spending most of their time underwater. They didn't. They spent the vast majority of the time on the surface.

Is that why it's called a U? Is it doing a U? It starts at the top and I don't know. I never know why they call it a U. Boat.

Oh, it's an Anglicized name for. It's called something like unto sea boot, which, which the, the Allies called U boat. Okay, okay.

So it starts at the top. So it starts on. It's on the surface. It shoots, then it dives underneath. Goes underneath what it just shot, then pops up behind them.

Yes. And then we'll use its speed on the surface to go through. You've got to imagine that there will be lookouts all over the place, but they're all looking out outside of the convoy. No one's looking inside a convoy.

Yeah.

And a U boat compared to an oil tanker is a tiny speck on the water.

Got it, Got it. Okay, so what did the, what did the ladies hypothesize?

What the lady said was that when you see a ship. Ship that blows up in the middle of the night, don't go steaming off left or right. Go to the back of the convoy and start a search pattern. And that's where you are likely to find a U boat or a German submarine. And it was extremely successful. And so, you know, obviously the Germans then change the tactics to do new ones, and these ladies then came up with new ways of doing it. But what the ladies. One of the advantages about being the ladies is they were not indoctrinated into the naval tactics that were failing. And they had the space to think about, well, if you do this, what does this mean? And so they could experiment, they could test a hypothesis. They had the space and time to do it, and often they could respond in real time. I mean, there's a famous case where an escort vessel had been attacked. One of the other vessels came up next to it, and men were being dragged out of the sea, and a number of U boats popped up out of the water and did not attack. And this obviously piqued the interest of all those involved. Why these, why these boats? Why are these submarines not attacking? And they didn't attack because they had just taken shipment of acoustic torpedoes, torpedoes that needed an engine sound. And so when you're stationary, you know, pulling men out of the water, the engine is not going. The torpedoes were useless. And it was these ladies who were able to work out, wow, it's, it's, you know, and we're able to speak to engineers and whatever, and, and we're able to, to very quickly identify they have a new type of torpedo. Torpedo. And the faster you move, the more accurate that torpedo will be hitting you.

Wow.

And so came up with a countermeasure to say, well, but it's got a narrow window that it can take noise from. You need to move outside of that and take a long detour to attack the submarine.

Yeah.

So they could do this kind of stuff almost, Almost in real time. But one of the key points is these are young women who have the space to think about things and we're not indoctrinated.

Yeah, well, I mean, gosh, you know, it lays right into what we preach when we're speaking about scientific thinking. Right. Don't, don't, don't be so sure about what you think the answer is. You have to experiment, you have to see, you have to make a prediction. I'm sure these ladies were. They were, they were. They were scientifically thinking back then. They were making a hypothesis. They don't know for sure if the. I'm sure they wonder. The hypoth. Well, perhaps they pop up the back. Right. Or they go underneath, you know, and they didn't know if that was true or not until it was confirmed, by golly. Yes. That's what's going on here.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And how about having the space? I mean, I mean, there was a couple of weeks ago, Gemba Academy posted something on, on LinkedIn about NASCAR and how you can change four tires in a race car in 22nd and you're limited to about. I think it was five people. So changing four tyres in 20 seconds is deeply impressive. And I responded to say, in Formula one, completely different set of rules. A good pit stop is about 2 seconds. A slow pit stop is anything that takes over two and a half seconds. But the rules are obviously very different. So you go from having five people in NASCAR to Formula One uses roughly about 21 people.

Yeah.

So the resource, but the speed is there. And I just, I appreciate. I've been rambling on for some period of time now. The. In Formula one, the most dominant team in years is the Mercedes Formula one team. And to say they're dominant is just not even describing how utterly powerful they are. But their leader is a guy called Toto Wolff and he gave an interview a while ago where he said that when he took over the team, he noticed that as he was walking through the offices just how busy all his engineers were all the time. And he said he didn't want that. He wanted them to have their. Put their feet up on the desks and look out the windows and have big thoughts. Not because he wanted them to be lazy, but in his view, he is employing these highly skilled people. People. And being busy is not the same as being productive.

Yeah.

And I want these, and I want these people to have thoughts for how we improve things, how we make things better. And you don't do that by clacking away on a keyboard for eight hours a day.

Yeah. Well, you mentioned Paul Akers earlier, and you know, he's, he's one of his passions, as I know Paul very well, is, is to, is to, you know, be able to elevate your thinking at a higher plane. But the only way that you can do that is that you do have to have stable process underneath you. Right. You do have to remove waste and you do have to remove inefficiencies and fires, if you will. Right. Because if there's fires popping up left and right, then you can't think at a higher level. You're always firefighting. Right. So, yeah, wonderful analogies there. Wow, this has been a fun episode. Stephen, thank you for, for, for sharing these stories. I'm sure you have many more. Maybe we'll have you back on. We can, we will. Maybe we'll call it Story time with Stephen. How about that? You know, I think it great.

I just want to say before you conclude that you have these fantastic videos, and one of the ones that I mention a great deal when I'm training people to go on reference is your video on One piece Flu with stuffing Envelopes. It's such a beautifully simple but brilliant.

Thank you.

Way of demonstrating that funny story on that video.

So the one that you've seen, I'm sure is more of a kind of polished one. Maybe it's the one where we have the rock and roll music playing, you know, from time to time, you know, but that, that, that video is actually, I don't know if I've told the story a few times of some folks, but that, that, that, that, that simulation, that envelope stuffing simulation, it actually comes from that book Lean thinking James Womack wrote many, many, many years ago.

Yeah.

And, and I remember reading, but the book, I'm like, I wonder if that works, you know? You know, I say reading, you trust him, you know, but I'm like, I, I want to just do it, you know, and so one day I actually just did it. This was way before Gemba Academy was even born, right? And man, it worked. And it kind of like I was already bought in, right. To Lean, but this really bought me in. So I had other people do it and I do it different ways, you know, with three people, you know, and, you know, you can just do it a number of different ways. But back before Gemba Academy, I actually had a personal blog. Some people might remember this. It was called LSS Academy. And it was just a blog that now we've now rolled into what we call Gemba Academy's blog. But back then it was just me. And I would write articles on whatever I was thinking about. And I thought, boy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a video to show people this, this envelope stuffing thing. And so I remember I did it. It was about 1am in the morning because I had young children and it was the only time that I could have any quiet in my house, right? So. So I remember very vividly like it was yesterday. I went into my kitchen and I set up this little thing. And I didn't have. I didn't know how to make videos. I didn't know anything, right? And so. But my wife had this old digital camera that, that would record video. So I thought, well, I'll use that. You know, I don't even think I had a cell phone that made a video back then. And so, so I, I propped this, this, this camera up and I was like, wow, I'm really dark. So I had to get some light. So I went out to my garage and I had some, these, these lights from, from the Home Depot or whatever it was. So I'm. I'm clipping lights onto my kitchen cabinets and all this kind of stuff, trying to, trying to rig this up. And then, and then I made a video and somehow I edited. I still don't know how I edited it because I didn't even have editing software, but I think my laptop had some, some, some, some crazy software that I could use. And then this is even before YouTube was a big, big hit, I uploaded it to, what was it? Google Video, Remember that? I think it was Google Video. Yeah. And it does. I uploaded it there. And then I put blog. I thought, well, I'll just put it on my blog and see what happens. And it was. The blog had pretty good traffic, I'll be honest. I had several thousand people a day coming to the read the articles that I put up. And then all of a sudden the thing just blew up. I got like 70 or 80 comments. And some people were being vicious towards me. They were like, you're playing camera tricks and they were like, attacking me personally. I'm like, I'm just stuffing envelopes. I'm like, you can do it. Just go get some envelopes. You do it. You know? But I thought, boy, there's something to this video thing, you know? And so this is what Got my mind working, that boy, maybe we should make more videos. And so that was one of the things that led me to contacting my now business partners, John Miller and Kevin Meyer. I was like, hey, there's something to this video. Have you guys ever thought about it? And next thing you know, in March of 2009, Gemba Academy is born. But that vid, that envelope stuffing thing is, that's a. It's a very important part of the Gemba Academy story because without it, I don't think this company would exist.

So very recently, Gemba Academy got me out of trouble. I was, I was doing a presentation and I was, I was just dying. All. All my jokes died, all my but I thought were brilliant insights died until I mentioned stuff in envelopes. And. But it was quicker to do it, you know, one at a time as those one piece flow. And then suddenly the room erupted into conversations about, one, I was an idiot. But two, how could this possibly be? And so I referenced your video, and one of my favorite other videos is with Bradley Miller. He uses it for demonstrating washing dishes.

Yeah.

And I just, and I just adore those two videos, but everything I had tried died until I mentioned your video. You know, you need to go and have a look at this. And so we did a quick, you know, we got some envelopes and some scrap pieces of paper and just, it's just, you know, the light switch is just going on. Well, this is just magic. But it somehow works.

Yeah.

And then talking them through the process.

Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, we can talk all day long. We could even show videos all day long. But until people put their hands on it and do it themselves, that's. And that's why these experiential learning exercises, whether it's stuffing envelopes or emptying a dishwasher, you know, in more efficient ways. You know, these people, some people just have to do it to believe. Right. And. And I, I say, don't try. Trust me, you'd go do it. You form a hypothesis, make a prediction. What do you think's gonna happen? Go do it. What actually happened? What did you learn? Right? And then that's when the real change occurs. Right. When people see the change themselves.

Yeah.

Wonderful.

Wow.

Stephen. So what's the best way? Because I'm sure folks will want to connect with you. What's the best way for folks to connect? LinkedIn or.

What do you think on LinkedIn? If you just type in Stephen Jackson, HR Stephen with a EV. I'm there. If you see a photograph of an old man, that looks like a, with a terrible photograph. That's me.

Okay, well, we'll put it in the show notes as well. So this is episode 344. So just go to gembapodcast.com look for episode 344. We'll link to Stephen's things. And I don't know if you have any articles or anything on the, on the stories that you told that for. Maybe people want to read further. If you have, email those over. We'll put those in a show notes as well. And, and I love history, you know, I love reading about history and what can we learn from history? Because, you know, if we're not learning, what's the point of history, Right? So wonderful. Well, thanks again, Stephen. Take care. And yeah, keep telling your stories.

Thank you very much.

All right, bye bye.

Bye bye.

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