GA 354 | Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap with Patrick Adams

You know, one of the biggest reasons that people fail to maintain a robust lean system is their desire for complexity. You know, we begin simple enough, and then we add more and more levels of complexity until eventually we have a system that's just far too hard to maintain.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Patrick Adams to the show. Now, Patrick is a very experienced lean practitioner. He's got his own consulting business now. But this week, as it turns out, Patrick has launched a new book called Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap. So, really interesting title, Continuous Appearance Trap. And what the book is all about is really this contrast between what Patrick refers to as a culture of continuous appearance and a culture of continuous improvement. And as you can probably guess, you know, continuous improvement is what we want. Continuous appearance is not what we want. But as Patrick and I discuss, even the best lean companies out there may have aspects of their organization that falls into this continuous appearance trap. And so what we talk about is what those traps are, what they look like. Patrick then offers some ideas for what we can do to not fall into those traps. And then we kind of wrap things up with Patrick, outlining 12 questions that he came up with and that he shares in his book that we can all ask ourselves to determine what kind of culture we have. Do we have a culture of continuous appearance? Do we have a culture of continuous improvement? So, really fun episode. Patrick is full of knowledge and wisdom, and I really enjoyed chatting with him. I think you'll like it as well. Links to everything that Patrick and I talk to can be found over at the show Notes, which will be GembaPodcast.com look for episode 354. Again, GembaPodcast.com and look for episode 354. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Patrick, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Hey, it's going good, Ron. Thank you for having me.

Oh, no, thanks for coming on, man. Appreciate it. So, hey, man, where are you calling in from?

I am calling in from West Michigan.

West Michigan?

Yes.

Like. Like the western part of Michigan or a place literally called West Michigan.

Grand Rapids specifically. But yeah, we're in. We call it West Michigan. We like to put our hand up and kind of point at our hand to talk about where we're from in the. In the mitten. But yeah, West Michigan. That's where. That's where I'm from.

Yeah, I know college football is come and gone, but I'm afraid to ask, are you Wolverine fan or.

Yeah, that's always a touchy. That's Always a touch question, but no, I am a Wolverine fan.

Okay. Okay.

Yeah, my wife, she went to U of M for her master's, and I was actually, I trained ROTC students at the University of Michigan.

Cool.

In the military.

So I would say U of M's got the monopoly on lean. Man, you got rather like her, you know. That's awesome.

Absolutely.

All right.

That's a beautiful campus, too.

Oh, it sure is. Yeah, I've been to it. I spent some time at Zingerman's, you know, with the guys over.

Oh, yeah, Menlo, too, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rich and. And Tom root there at Zingerman's. Have you ever been to Zingerman's? I mean, everybody knows of Menlo, but have you been to Zingerman's, The. The. The mail order place?

Oh, yeah. They got some amazing stuff.

Oh, my gosh. They sure do. They sure do. Yeah. I need to get back there. It's been several years since. Since. Since I was there, so. Yeah. So cool.

When you were there? I think maybe I. Maybe I just watched a video then recently of you there, so that was probably from a couple years ago. But when you were there, were they doing kata yet?

No, if they were, they. They weren't really telling people about it, if they were. So I don't believe they. They really were, but I know they're. They're deep into it now, so. Yeah, they are.

And also they're doing some really good stuff over in their customer service area. I don't know if you made it over there on your last visit either.

Yeah, we did a little bit. You know, it was surprising. I shouldn't tell too many Zingerman stories, but it was surprising. Like the deli at that time, I was like, how's the deli doing? Are they lean? I'm like, nah, they haven't. So maybe they have by now. But boy, the food at the deli. Oh, my gosh, that was so good stuff. Anyhow, I know you listen to the show, Patrick. We like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

I do have a quote. My favorite quote is. Is from Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. And it's the most dangerous phrase in our language is we've always done it this way.

Yes.

It's just a good reminder of, you know, I have so many people that say to me, you know, why do we need to change? Why do we need to change? It's, you know, this is the way we've Always done it, you know, and it's like, well, and maybe we'll get into this as we talk today, but you know, being content with the status quo can be a pretty serious problem for an organization. So, yeah, always improving.

Good, good, good. So tell us about your background and maybe how you first got involved and continue some improvement and then what you guys are up to these days.

Yeah, sure. So I always like to tell people that my first experience in Lean was actually in high school when I worked as a grill cook at McDonald's.

Nice.

At the time I didn't know it, but looking back now, I know that actually learned quite a bit, you know, quite a bit about Lean in its infancy. I don't know if you know this or not, but McDonald was. They developed a process for getting the burger to the grill in under 30 seconds. Actually, if you've seen the founder, you've probably heard all of this. But it's pretty amazing what they did back then and what they're still doing now and how it ties to continuous improvement. So it's pretty fun now looking back and understanding all of those things or even going there to get a burger and a fry, being able to see some of the work that they're doing. But after I graduated high school, I spent about eight years in the United States Marine Corps where I worked under many different leadership styles. Ultimately learned the power behind servant leadership, which has helped me as a Lean leader working for various companies since then. But after being medically retired, I found a job as a production supervisor in a plastics blow molding facility in Holland, Michigan and then spent the next few years working as a production supervisor for a few companies. And I landed at a tier one automotive supplier. And this was really my first formal introduction to Lean. And I received some really good introduction on value stream mapping and was involved in a transformation of an entire facility. And then because of my experience there, I was able to land a job a few years later at Parker Hannifin as a plant lean manager. And for anyone that knows Parker Hannifin, they have an amazing continuous improvement culture. I was able to work under a number of Lean coaches and became certified in their problem solving and every level of what they call Lean boot camp. But I finished my time there as a value stream manager. And then just a few years ago I launched my own consulting company and since opening my business have helped hundreds of leaders improve process performance, you know, using different process improvement solutions with bottom line results.

Nice, nice. Very good. So the first question that I've got for you, Patrick, Is. I know, you know, you've. You've been around Lean for. For quite a while. Let's talk a little bit about misconceptions. What do you. What kind of misconceptions do you believe people have about Lean?

Yeah, you know, I have worked with many organizations, and a lot of the organizations that I work with, you know, unfortunately, they have this feeling that just because, you know, this one company did it a certain way, or this one, you know, they saw this one area, or a lot of people obviously tie back to Toyota, which Toyota is amazing. But they say, you know, just because Toyota did it, well, that's the way that we have to do. And at the end of the day, Lean is not about the tools. Just because Toyota deployed a specific tool at a certain time doesn't necessarily mean that that exact tool is going to work in your organization, in your industry, with your team at this time. Now, Lean is. It is a timeless strategy. It's focused on incremental improvement over time. But your company is different than that other company. They're different than Toyota. So you might even be in a completely, totally different industry. Right. So for Toyota, through experimentation, they develop solutions to problems that they were facing. And your problems are different than their problems. You have a different team. It's a different time. So if you don't understand what true continuous improvement is about, what a true continuous improvement culture looks like and feels like, then you may find yourself stuck trying tool after tool in hopes of becoming Lean in quotation marks.

Right.

I think that's probably the largest misconception that I see or that I've experienced, you know, in my. In my time out and about.

Yeah, got it. So, hey, this is a pretty big week for you. I guess you got a pretty big event happening, possibly related to a project that you've been working on. So what's going on?

Yeah, so we. We just launched. Well, I just launched my first book. It's. It's called Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap, and it gives the readers 12 questions to determine what's really underneath their culture. I'm pretty excited about it. It's my first book, and we've had a pretty successful launch so far. We had an amazing launch team. A lot of work that went into this, but it's finally here.

How long did it take you to write the book, if you don't mind me asking?

No, not at all. I actually worked on it for about a year. Obviously, it took, you know, 20 plus years of experience that came up to that point, but. And I always Knew that I wanted to write a book. And so, you know, over time I was collecting my thoughts and ideas and kept, kept some things down. But it was about a year ago when I committed to. All right, now I'm going to get this thing out there and put it in the hands of those people that need it.

Yeah, I love it. So congratulations, by the way. It's a huge, huge accomplishment. So avoiding the continuous appearance trap. What is continuous appearance?

Yeah, great question. So early in my career I worked for two companies. And if you were to walk into both of these companies, they would look very similar at the surface. Both had visual management, similar KPIs, safety, quality, cost, delivery. Both had very similar org structures. And in walking through these two companies, it would probably be very hard at the surface to determine differences in their approach to business solutions or their approach to business in general. But underneath, both companies were very different. One of the companies had a true culture of continuous improvement, while the other had what I like to call this culture of continuous appearance. And underneath all the floor tape, underneath the pretty scorecards, the lean posters, was a very toxic culture where people hated to work. The company had high turnover, they had no stability. And one of the telltale signs within this company was that they had visual management, but their charts were completely green. Never any red, just always green. And so this has to raise a question. It might not seem like a problem, it's like, well, they're green, great jobs. But the problem with a company that has a culture of continuous appearance is many times they have this command and control or they also have fear of failure. And because leaders at this company were afraid to fail, they simply set their targets low enough to ensure that they were always green. And this is a huge problem for many companies. Continuous appearance is really the opposite of continuous improvement. Companies that like to appear as if they have it all together, but struggle with what you might hear as flavor of the month activities, no real sustainment of initiatives, things like that.

What percentage of companies would you, I mean, I know it's an impossible question to answer, but what percentage of companies, so called practicing lean or attempting to practice lean, do you think fall into the continuous appearance bucket?

Well, in my experience, in my experience it's a very large percentage. I would say over half. I definitely know that, you know, and I think there's a lot of, you know, lean practitioners out there that know or have heard that, you know, there's that lean in general has a very high failure rate. But at the same time, you know, one of the things I Like to say is like, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Depending on how you look at it, as long as you're continuing to learn and progress and grow, then is it really failure? Right, but that's also a different question than what you're asking me. And I think that it's also important to know that many of these organizations don't intentionally fall into this type of culture. They're trying really hard. They don't come to work one day and say, we're going to put on this big act and hope that people think we're leaning. That's not their objective. But I think it is a high percentage. It's hard to say how many, but I think probably the listeners out there, there's probably quite a few of them that are shaking their head and they understand exactly what we're talking about.

Yeah, yeah, they're saying, yeah, we are totally continuous appearance. So why do you think so many companies are falling into this trap?

Yeah, you know, like I said, I believe that most organizations don't intentionally fall into this type of culture. I think that they start out hoping that they can achieve a true culture of continuous improvement. Right. They've seen other companies achieve great things. They've heard of all the amazing results that a company has when it adopts lean or this continuous improvement methodology. However, one of the biggest reasons that people fail to maintain a robust lean system is their desire for complexity. We begin simple enough and then we add more and more levels of complexity until eventually we have a system that's just far too hard to maintain. And when we're working with human beings, we have to keep things as simple as possible or things will begin to fall apart. Another huge contributor here is leadership. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. And how many companies out there think that they can continue to manage the same way, doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result. To sustain continuous improvement initiatives that we've built, we need to institute a different leadership system, a different management system. If we don't, then the whole process is going to fall apart. If we manage the same way with the same meetings, the same metrics, we're going to get the same behaviors, beliefs, and the same results. So I would say one of the greatest barriers there under leadership for establishing a culture of continuous improvement is that leaders avoid spending time in the place where value creating work is being done. And I talk about this in my book, but that location should be the starting point for any continuous Improvement journey. No one knows better about what's happening with a product or service than those who are closest to the value creating work. Right. It's not happening behind the computer or in a conference room or a meeting room. They have to get out of the corner office, out of the KPI meetings and get out there where frontline workers are at, where the value add work is being done. And that's really where true change is going to happen. The leaders have to change.

Got it. So folks listening to this right now, practicing lean, no one wants to have what you would call a culture of continuous appearance. So what can we do? I mean, because, I mean, here's the other thing that's interesting about this concept is that, you know, even companies that, you know, you might consider lean exemplars, I'm sure there have, there might be aspects of their, of their program or their movement, whatever you want to call it, that might be continuous appearance, you know, even if the whole thing is not so, so what can organizations do to not fall into this continuous appearance trap? What are some practical steps that we can do?

Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right, Ron. There's definitely, you know, people that are listening that, you know, fall into the, you know, I'm, this is it. I work in a completely complete culture of continuous appearance. And then there's others that probably have aspects of this. And so I think it's important that you, you know, begin by taking assessment of where you are. You know, you have to be humble enough to assess yourself honestly, you know, and really understand. And this is on a regular basis. It can't be just a one time point where you do some kind of formal assessment and then walk away. This has got to be, you have to be humble enough to regularly assess yourself and then if things stink, then admit that they stink. Right. I don't know if you've heard the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes, but the moral of the story is that we can't let pride keep us from speaking up when we know the truth. Right? Make problems visible, admit that they're problems, and this has to come first. And second, don't believe that the same tools and techniques that worked for other companies will work for you, which we already talked about. Benchmarking is definitely good. I'm not saying don't benchmark, but your problems are going to be unique. So therefore your solutions have to be unique. And this goes back to becoming a learning organization willing to learn and adapt and grow as an organization. And then the last thing I would Say, create an environment where people feel safe to experiment and fail. Create a learning organization. Right. I once worked with a plant manager who spent the majority of his days firefighting. He struggled to make one walk around his production floor without getting pulled to help solve a serious problem. And at one point, obviously, I asked him for permission, but I had to step in. And this gentleman came running up, literally running up to us as we were walking on the production floor, and he started yelling about his machine being down. And so I asked the operator, and this was the turning point for this plant manager. I said to the operator, what do you think we should do? And he looked at me a little crazy like. And he looked at the plant manager, and he said, well, I guess, you know, the last time that this happened, I had to clean the rail, so I would. I guess the first step would be I would try to clean the rails. And I said, okay, go clean the rails and then let us know if that worked. And then as he left the plant, Major turned to me and he said, you know, that's not going to work. You know, I'm pretty sure that one of these rails is actually bent on his machine. And I said, that's okay, because when it doesn't work, your operator is going to learn something, and maybe he'll learn that the rail is bent, and then he'll know what to do all on his own without having you having to come get you. Right. So every time that you solve a problem for your team, you enable them to create fires for you. Yeah, right. They begin to rely on you as the one person who can fix everything. However, if you want your team to be the experts that they are, then you have to enable them and empower them to solve problems. And that up front, you know, that could take a little bit more time for them to get to the answer, but in the long run, it's going to be way better for you and for your organization. Right. Imagine how much more time and how much more that you can get done if your entire team is solving problems versus just you. And I came back a few weeks later, and he was nearly in tears because he said he started asking them that one question, what do you think we should do? Even when he knew what the answer was, he let them determine what the answer should be themselves through experimentation and learning. And he said, it's completely changed everything.

I love it. I love it, I love it. So in your book, Avoiding the Continuous Appearance trap, you outline 12 questions that we can ask ourselves in order to determine, you know, which kind of culture we're working in. Are we a culture of continuous improvement or a culture of continuous appearance? I know there's 12 of them, but. And we know I don't want you to give away all the goods, but I wonder if you could maybe just summarize the 12 steps just quickly and maybe, maybe if there's one of them that you're passionate about, we could dive deep, deeper into one of them. But maybe if you, I don't know, if you want to just kind of summarize the 12 steps to give us an idea.

Sure, absolutely. It's out there right now on Amazon. So anybody can go out there and grab the book, and I'd love for them to do that. My real hope is that at the end of the day, that this book is going to help people. You know, the people that need this the most are going to get it in their hands, and this is going to be something that transforms them and their organization. So I love sharing these questions. And this, this is really what I, you know, any organization, anyone that I work with that I'm coaching, you know, these are the things that we're focused on. The first question is, are you content? Are you content? And I'm actually going to get back to that one because that's the one I'm going to dive into a little bit more. But the second question is, which we already talked about this topic a little bit, but where are your leaders spending their time? Where are your leaders spending their time? The third question, are you pursuing perfection? So this is all about True north, and do you have a direction or are you just wandering aimlessly hoping that you'll arrive someday? The fourth question is, how stable are you today? And this really talks about stability and that you cannot improve on chaos. Right? Number five is who's accountable? And this is all about shared accountability and the importance of enabling and empowering your team for success. And that the leaders are part of the accountability, but it needs to be shared. And I talk pretty extensively about, again, just that shared accountability. The other thing that's really cool about this book is, again, I have a case study, these two companies that I worked for, right? So at the end of each one of these chapters, I actually talk about very specific stories from these two companies. And I tie them back to the question at Company Continuous Appearance, which is the company that I talk about there and then, versus Company Continuous Improvement. Those are the two companies. I give specific stories from each of them that are specific to these questions. So number six is, what are your Goals. Number seven is your organization designed to meet your goals. And this is all about silos and, you know, value stream management and how important that is to look at the big picture and not just one piece of the puzzle. Number eight, we talk about leadership again and we specifically talk about leaders behavior. How are your leaders behaving? Number nine is how safe is it for your employees to fail, which we talked a little bit about today. Number 10 is what is your high value target area? And that's really about model areas and taking one area, not trying to eat the whole elephant at once, but really taking one small piece at a time and then replicating your learnings to the different areas. Number 11 is are you generating small, simple improvements? So we talk about, you know, the power of small things versus big projects. Not to say big projects aren't necessary, but you know, if you think about the, you know, the Colorado river and what that played part in, in creating what is now, you know, known as, you know, one of the greatest areas. I was just out here a couple months ago to see the Grand Canyon and what an amazing sight. I actually got to see it at sunset, which was just super powerful. But the Colorado river weaves through the Grand Canyon and you cannot deny the fact that over time, little by little, that water has developed what we're now looking at as this amazing site. And it's the same thing with improvements. Small, little improvements lead to amazing, large, huge results. And there's a lot of power in that. So I talk a lot about that in chapter or question 11. And then the last question is, are problems easy to see? And this is where we talk about visual management and the importance of making problems visible to everyone in the organization so that we can go after them and being okay with that.

Yeah.

So let's go back to question one. Unless you had questions about. Dive into question one.

No, let's do it. Question one. I love it.

Perfect. Yeah. So this actually ties back to my quote that I mentioned at the beginning. The most dangerous phrase in our language is we've always done it this way. So are you content? I really have had people over the years say to me, why do we need to change? We've always done it this way. So is the way that we've always done it okay? What's your defect rate? Is that okay? You have to ask yourself that. How efficient are you at your job? Is that okay? We never want our leadership or our team to become content with the status quo. Rather, we want to create this kind of dissatisfaction with the status Quo. And for some organizations, creating dissatisfaction with the current state is easy. Maybe your business is not performing well and maybe you're losing sales or maybe you're not fulfilling your mission. In these cases, it's easy to communicate and create alignment around why you need to change. However, it's not always that easy. It's not always that clear cut. Right. So if we imagine that your current output is top notch, is it enough for you to just stop innovating, stop reaching for more? Right. You know, other companies are racing to catch up to you and pass you by. You know, your competition is improving. So standing still in effect is the same as moving backwards, you know, and that. And we never want to be in a place where we're moving backwards because we're not going to be around very long if that's the case. The other thing that I hear a lot is, you know, let's create this burning platform. Well, I don't like the term burning platform because it really tries to create, you know, fear. And we don't need to create fear to instill excitement for change. Rather, what I like to do is I like to tell a compelling story or create a compelling story for change. A compelling story is really a narrative that charts change over time, demonstrating how potential solutions fit into certain problems that you're already experiencing. So do you have real competitors that are working hard to steal your business? You could create a compelling story around that. Do you work in an operating room and real lives depend on zero defect mentality? Well, we can create a compelling story around that. So creating compelling stories and then communicating them consistently across the organization can help give you the edge that you need in order to keep people from becoming content in the status quo. And that's really, that's kind of a summary, but a good kind of, I guess, teaser for that question one. And again throughout the entire book, I'm tying everything back to that case study of the two companies, Company Continuous Appearance and Company Continuous Improvement, which are two real companies that I worked for. I changed the names of the people, but I walk the reader through very real stories that tie back to every single one of these questions.

Yeah, I love it. I think it's a great contribution to our movement because, you know, if we're all being honest, I think early in the year everybody's got your resolutions and all the rest of it. I think it's, it's important to just to, to self assess, you know, where are you on the journey? No one's perfect. Toyota. I'm guessing even Toyota could could probably, if they look close enough, find some, some, some examples of where that might be appearing more than, more than they want. Right. And absolutely, you know, that's right. No one's perfect here. So I think it's a great, a great addition to the, to the, to the Lean movement. So thank you for writing the book, Patrick. Congratulations again.

Yeah, absolutely, Ron. And it's not by accident that it's 12 questions and we're at the beginning of January ready for our New Year's resolutions. Right. Don't be afraid to apply a question each month and learn, experiment and grow throughout 2021.

Oh, I love that. That's a great idea. Great idea. All right, well, Patrick, thanks again for coming on. If folks want to connect you, what's the best way?

Yeah, so obviously they can find me on LinkedIn. I try to do really well at getting back to messages. You can also find information about what we do on our website@findleansolutions.com but the book is available on avoidcontinuousappearance.com and you can find the book there. Or you can go to Amazon and obviously search my name or avoiding the continuous appearance trap, either one, you can grab the book there. So. And the ebook will be out in February.

Got it? Got it. Yeah. So we will link to everything in the show notes. So this is going to be episode 354. So folks in this, go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 354 and we'll link to everything that Patrick just discussed. So again, Patrick, thanks for coming on. Keep up the great work and listen, next time you're in Texas, man, swing by and we'll do a face to face interview.

Absolutely, I'll do that. Ron, thanks so much for having me.

All right, you take care.

Take care.

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