GA 364 | Why Continuous Improvement Programs Fail with Peter Christian

So if you don't take ownership, if you don't understand it, if you don't support it and your people don't understand and support it, it's going to fail.

Today I'm excited to welcome Peter Christian to the show. Now, we had a great chat talking about why continuous improvement programs sometimes fail and what you can do to kind of combat that. So Peter, as you're going to hear, has a lot of experience with Lean. He's worked in a variety of different industries. He did some consulting before he retired. So he's one of those guys who's just got a lot of wisdom and he's got a lot of stories to share. And I think you're gonna really, really gain a lot from this episode. So please give it a listen all the way through. Show notes for this episode will be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 364. Finally, if you're listening to this on like the Apple podcast app or maybe Stitcher or some other platform like that, and you, and you see where you can give the podcast, if you could give it a five star review, man, I would sure appreciate it. The more we learn about these ratings, the more we learn that the algorithms really like that. So we got like a hundred or so reviews on the Apple podcast, which is not that great, you know, so I would love to double that in the next, you know, 30 to 60 days. So I'm going to kind of be monitoring that. I don't know if I'm going to make a little, you know, control chart or not, but I might. So, yeah, if you would, wouldn't mind giving a review. Give an honest review if you, if you hate the show. Well, maybe don't, don't give a review if you hate the show. But, but if you listen on a regular basis and you find some value on it, a 5 star review sure would help us out a lot. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Peter, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am well. Thank you very much for inviting me to participate.

Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. And I want the listeners to know that I think Peter wins the award. This is episode 364. I think Peter wins their award for the most patience. We've had a, we're recording this on, you know, towards the end of February and here, here in Texas, we've had a crazy run here with some insane weather and yeah, we had some, some action here at Gamba Academy Studios. We had a pipe bust and all kinds of craziness. So I think we've rescheduled. I joked, you know, with Peter before we hit record, you know, we've rescheduled this 500 times. Maybe it's been not that many, but it feels like that. So thank you for your patience, Peter. I really appreciate it.

You're quite welcome. Patience was never one of my virtues, but it's become.

See, there you go. I'm making you more virtuous. See?

Yes, you are. Somebody needs to.

That's wonderful. All right, well, hey, Peter, as you know, we do like to kind of kick things right off out of the gate with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yes, I do. I thought about it a bit and I had three, and I narrowed it down to one. And the one I wanted to share with everybody was the definition of insanity, which is when you try to do the same thing over and over and over again and expect to get a different outcome. And that's the definition of insanity.

Yep. Yeah. And boy, it's, you know, even for us, you know, kind of so called lean thinkers, you know, sometimes we'll even find ourselves doing it right and instead of having that mind of an experimenter. So it's tough. Yep.

Yep.

Very good, Peter. Tell us about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement activities, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Okay. I have about 40 years of industrial experience. After graduating from Lehigh University with a master's in industrial engineering, I worked for air products and chemicals for about two years as a cost engineer and then moved on to Crayola Corporation, where I held a variety of different positions, from industrial engineer to director of operations, director of quality control, and research and development. Throughout my career there, we were always looking to make improvements in the organization, particularly with controlling costs, because by doing that, we were able to maintain our prices for three years. We didn't take price increases at one juncture because of the improvements we made and the cost reductions that we made, which gave us certainly a great competitive advantage. After I left Crayola, I went into the consulting world, and I've been in that for roughly about 25 years now. And then at the end of 2018, I decided to retire. And I put quotes around that because I have been more busy since I retired than when I was working. I think in that time I have written two books that have both been published and are out on Amazon. One is what about the Vermin Problem? And that was a book where I took together a number of experiences I had as a consultant and said, someday they should be in a book. And by golly, I made it into a book. And the person I was working with on the book said, well, nobody ever writes just one book. So she convinced me to write a second book, which I never intended to do. And that came out just at the tail end of last year. And that one's called Influences and Influencers. And that's kind of a companion to the first book. It's not so much about what people do, but about how we learn and how as we progress through life and we should be constantly learning. And then I got involved with educational. I went back to some of my old schools, Rutgers University, where I did my undergraduate, and I've been involved with them. Lehigh University, I just talked to them, and I'm going to do a student lecture and do some mentoring for students. Alvernia University in Reading, I'm teaching a class on project management. And the local college here, Pasco Hernando State College, I'm on an advisory committee for their educational group. So I'm pretty busy in retirement and enjoying it. Loving it.

Great. Yeah. It keeps you out of trouble. Keeps you out of trouble.

I like to share with people. I have lots of experiences and stories to tell, and I want to share them with people because I think that it's helpful.

I love it. So, really, I guess the theme today, Peter, we want to kind of dive into here for a bit, is talking about improvement programs and continuous improvement, Lean, Six Sigma, whatever we want to call it. And sometimes they're not always as successful as we want them to be. And so I want to just kind of. With that framework, let's just jump in a little bit. And I'm curious to just hear just from your experience over the years, what did you see when folks were trying to run these improvement programs? What were you seeing? What were you learning? What were you experiencing?

It was a broad spectrum of things. And I looked at some of the research, and up to 95%, believe it or not, of improvement programs fail, which is astounding. Now, it could be less than that, but still, it was a fairly high number. And in my own experiences, I had a better percentage than that. But I saw some disasters and I saw some very good things as well. One company that I worked with, and I try not to use the names for whatever reason, but they were in the medical device industry, and they basically, they would challenge the things that we were working on and I was working on, but once they understood and accepted it, and basically that was 100% of the time. They then took and implemented whatever the particular project was and the outcomes of it to improve the organization and made it part of their daily process. And they were wonderful and extremely successful. They're a branch of a foreign company, but they're well over a billion dollars now in revenues in the United States, and they're looking to make the improvements. They've got a great attitude, and they do wonderful things, as I mentioned with Crayola back when I worked with them, which is probably 25 or 30 years ago now. So way before, you know, this really quantum is a big thing in the United States, we were looking at ongoing improvements and looking to control costs and do it on a formalized basis and including lots of people. So those are some great companies, and I have some others that were, you know, equally as wonderful and very receptive. And then on the other hand, I've got some that weren't so good. One of the companies I worked with before I retired wanted to work on inventory control. And when I went in there, it was a mess. They had literally no inventory control. They had three facilities, a warehouse and 80 tractor trailers of material sitting on their property. Now, they said that they were supposed to process materials within three days of receipt. So they did not have the capability to process anything in the factories or in the warehouse, no less than the 80 tractor trailers worth of stuff. Nor did they have any idea what really sat where. They didn't have numbers, they didn't have locations, they didn't have anything. And we developed a project to work it through, and there were supposed to be a number of their folks involved in it. There were going to be 12 people that were going to give us four hours a week of their time. So that was roughly 50 hours of time a week for 12 weeks. You do the math, that's almost 600 hours. And after 12 weeks, the entirety of their work was four hours of man time. They were not committed. They weren't doing it. They were making excuses. And the owner thought that the way to get it under control was to just put a barcoding system in place and all was going to be good. Well, that only works when you actually know what you've got and you've barcoded everything and you got it in the system. They weren't even close to that. And yet he was off and wanted to buy a new system and implement this thing going. Talk about putting the cart before the horse. It was miles ahead of the horse. So you can imagine it didn't work out. We had a very unhappy client. We were quite unhappy with the results of it. Because you don't want to see anybody fail. You want to put the time in with people, you want to see them progress. And when they don't cooperate and they don't get it, it's very disappointing.

So let's talk a little bit about some of the reasons why you think these initiatives. I hate to use the word fail because to me the only way to fail at continuous improvement is to quit. Right. If you quit and you quit trying, well, yeah, then you could chalk it up as a failure. But if you're struggling or you're moving along and it's not optimal, I wouldn't call it failure. But for those that maybe quit, maybe they just stopped trying. Can you put some, maybe a few different potential reasons on why that is why that happened?

Well, in the case of the example that I just gave you, maybe we could call it the magic wand theory. That you've got this magic wand where you just wave it and miraculously everything works. And it's not that there's a lot of hard work involved. And when there's a lack of commitment on people's parts, when they don't, well, they either don't accept that or realize that or fully understand it. That's a problem. So commitment is certainly a big thing. Yeah, Sometimes ego gets in the way. And I certainly had that with that person and I've had that with some others. I had one instance where a company wanted to put a clean room and they had never done it before and they, they were going to do clean room work. Then one particular client in particular, we got to the point where we specked out and you know, there are varying degrees of clean room from where you're doing microchips to where you don't have quite as tough a standard. And the owner said that air handling and filtration stuff is too expensive. We're just going to put some window air conditioners in and we'll have a clean room. And I went, no, you won't. You'll have an air conditioned room, but you certainly won't have it. And we got into a tussle and literally we stopped working on the project. I said, I'm not going to be associated with this because you're going to take it to the end. You're going to bring a client in, they're going to go, you don't have a cleaner operation and you're going to point at me. And say, well, he didn't tell me that that was the case. And I'm telling you right now it's not the case. And if that's the route you're going to, I don't want to have anything to do with it. So they get that ego. They get, I know better than you and I don't want to spend the money on it. I want to be cheap about it. I don't want to do it the right way. And you know, if you want to say giving up, I call it a failure. Because when it doesn't come to a happy conclusion, I consider that a personal failure, you know, So I had that kind of experience, had another experience with company where the owner who was brilliant, had invented one of the best heating stoves in the United States. But he was struggling business wise. He was not a good businessman, had hired a lot of family and relatives and friends to run the company and they didn't know either. He wanted to spend an amazing amount of money to do automation and he really didn't need it or could afford it. So we're doing studies on it and showing him a cheaper, more practical way to do it, but didn't have the automation and he just poo pooed it and said, nope, nope, this is what I want to do. I want this high tech warehouse and all the bells and the whistles. Well, he never got it. Wound up failing to the point where he couldn't afford to run the business, had to sell it out to his competitor. The money that he got from the competitor didn't go in his pocket, it went to pay all the debts he had incurred. So he sold his business for nothing. So after all, as a great inventor, and at the end of the day, had nothing to show for it because he thought he knew better than the people he brought in to help him, tried to prove it to them and wound up failing. So it's a variety of different things. It depends on the circumstance. But those are the big things that I see as to why programs don't.

Necessarily go, yeah, and I almost feel like those examples that you just gave, there's almost a meta term that I want to use here. Like, almost like a lack of humility, right? Like whether it's ego or it's pride or whatever, you know, it's, it's, you know, you've got to be humble, right? In order to continuously improve, you've got to be okay with saying, I don't have the answer, but I'm willing to go and experiment and see If I can figure it out, right. And see what we can learn.

Right.

Like having that learner's mind and that learner's heart. That's really hard for people. I've seen it in my career over the years when I, back when I worked in the corporate world, you know, the higher the executive was, you know, especially kind of C suite type folks, you know, I mean, they're making a big, big, big bucks, right? And they're supposed to know, right? And so they're, they, they're, they're afraid to be vulnerable and to say, I don't know, I don't have the answer, but let's go figure it out, you know, so that's really hard that I, that I've seen, especially in these publicly traded companies. They got to get on, talk to Wall street and all the rest of it. Wall street doesn't want to hear that. You don't know because that's, that sows doubt. There's uncertainty in that. Right. And that's why it's so difficult sometimes for these big publicly traded companies to, you know, practice this stuff or to be open and honest, you know, sometimes they just got a lie to Wall street, you know, and even though they don't know, they're making something up just so their stock doesn't tank, you know? Yeah, it's tough. So what about, what's your. So you were a consultant, right, for many years, and you went in and people paid you to help them, right?

That's correct.

But what about. Is there a dichotomy, Is there a balance that we need to have as it relates to relying on outside experts such as yourself, such as Gemba Academy, different organizations that go out and try to help people? Is there a. What kind of balance does there need to be between relying on outside folks and, you know, ensuring that your internal resources are being grown and nurtured? Talk about that a little bit.

I think anybody who hires a consultant and thinks that that consultant is going to make them whole is barking up the wrong tree for sure. And when I start a program with any company, I say, I will help you, but at the end of the day, you own it. Because at some point our project is over and I'm going to walk out the door and whatever is left, you've got to deal with. So if you don't take ownership, if you don't understand it, if you don't support it and your people don't understand and support it, it's going to fail. So it's not really on Me, it's really on you. We will work together. I will give you all the tools that I can, I'll give you all the knowledge I can, I'll give you all the help I can. But you've, you've got to take ownership of it and you've got to run with it. And again, it goes back to that magic wand or that magic person where somebody thinks that they're going to bring somebody in and they're going to wave whatever and everything is going to be whole and it doesn't work that way and they're kidding themselves. You have to take the ownership for it. You have to be involved, you have to understand, you have to learn. And every project to me was a learning experience because whatever we were doing and there would be techniques that would be used and you're certainly familiar with them through the academy. A lot of companies don't have that knowledge. So you're teaching them and they've got to understand it and then they've got to apply it again while you're there. And once you leave and you don't want the consultant to be there forever, anybody who turns their business over to somebody from the outside is making a big, big, big mistake. You cannot do that. You're running your business, you've got to have the control of it. They're just there to help you as an assistant. And if you go in with any other idea than that, then like I said, you're barking up the wrong tree and you probably shouldn't get started.

Well, yeah, it's not going to work. Here's an interesting twist to that as well. I would argue it's not just an external consultant or an external company that, you know, can't give you all the answers, can't give you all the, you know, solutions, if you will. I would argue that it's also internal. Experts, experts. Because you'll have some companies, they have the so called Lean team or the Six Sigma team or whatever, these experts that run around. Well, sometimes I've been one of those experts, if you will. I was on one of these teams back in my corporate days and there would be times where the general manager would call us in and say, man, we got problems, help us. And we would go in, we would swoop in, if you will, and we would spend a week or a month or however long it took to help them. But if we weren't, so called, teaching them the fish while we were helping them, you know, we weren't doing our jobs. Right, right. And so, so I Think it just because the, the company doesn't use outside experts doesn't mean they can't fall into that same trap. Everybody within the organization needs to be learning, needs to be growing, needs to be improving. That's what makes companies and they're a smaller company, so it's a little bit easier. But there's companies like FastCap out there. Again, they got 50 people. So you can't compare FastCap to, you know, 3M who has, you know, far more than 50 people. But when you have a small company, you really can. Everybody can walk around and fix what bugs them or whatever it might be. But we need to have that attitude. No matter how big we are, we need to be striving for that right to where everyone is learning, everyone is growing, everyone's trying to improve, not just the local experts who, you know, have been formally trained or whatever it might be.

Yep. And I like to use the term continuous improvement and continuous means I'm going to get you started, but you're going to continue forever to work on things because new techniques come out, new tools come out, new products come out, new supply chains come out, all sorts of new things and you have to adapt to them and you've got to make the changes. And as you make changes, you know, whenever you put anything new in, you get good at it over time, but you're making improvements to it, small adaptations and tweaks and so forth. So it is truly continuous. And I tried to get that across. This isn't a one time deal. Yep. This is now and forever. Yep. And the people who buy it, and I go back to that first company that I had mentioned, the medical supply, they were great at doing that, they understood that and they brought myself and my company in to do the oners. And then once they got the hang of it, then we were done with that and they took it over. One of the big projects we worked on was they never did operational strategic planning. So they brought me in to develop that and help them and then to get that set and they put a guy on it full time who was working with myself and one other person and he became the expert, expert internal and then he took that over. That's great. Those are the companies you love and you want to hug and cherish because they really get it and they understand and they want to do things. And then there are others where again they expect you to do everything and when you walk out the door, they struggle and it falls apart because they haven't committed to it on the long term. To them, it's not continuous. It's a one shot deal. And that's not going to work.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Very good. Boy. You know, I do, I want to. That whole thing with your, the continuous improvement, man, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. In fact, you know, we do, you know, your traditional green belt black belt certifications here. But my final message to everybody that we so called certify as a black belt, green belt master, black belt, whatever it is, is that, listen, you know, we've got this demaic framework that we kind of just work through and that supposed to stand for control. Whoever came up with the word control is stupid. They're wrong. You can't control anything. It's either getting a little bit better or it's getting a little bit worse. There's this thing called entropy, second law of thermodynamics and it's pulling on our processes non stop. So the only way to combat entropy, the only way is not to maintain the gains or sustain the gains as we try to pretend and put in our PowerPoint slides. When we're teaching that step, it is to make it a little bit better every day. And that's the only way. Right. And so yeah, if I, in fact, when we teach the control phase of dmaic, we say yes, formally called control phase, but you're not really controlling anything. You're either making it a little bit better or it's getting a little bit worse. Your choice, you know, and so, yeah, it's never ending. Right. And so I really appreciate your sentiment there.

Thanks.

Yep, beautiful.

I agree totally.

Well, hey man, it's been a fun conversation, Peter, you got some great stories, man. Thank you for sharing those. Let's go ahead and wrap things up with. Why don't you just maybe just share final words of wisdom or some tips or some practical tips that folks can take away on this podcast and then definitely tell folks how they can connect with you over LinkedIn. I don't know if are you like a Snapchatter or anything like that? Peter, I'm just kidding. But best way for folks to connect with you.

Okay, my advice to folks is, and I will go back, person who had a big influence on me and it's in one of the books, was Joseph Duran. I got to meet Dr. Duran before he passed away. I was still at Crayola and we were doing a lot of different programs at the time and we met him and he said to myself and a colleague of mine, so what is it that you guys are Doing. And my colleague says, well, we're doing JIT, and we're doing tqm, and we're doing, you know, a variety of things. He listed about 6 or 8 or 10. And Duran looked at us, and they were all acronyms. They all, you know, tqm. Yeah, yeah. And he says to me, it sounds like you guys are doing Alphabet soup. He said, they're all good programs. He said, but pick one, he said, because they're all kind of the same. They all have their own little idiosyncrasies to them. Because somebody developed, you know, took one program and added his little piece to it and wrote a book, right? He said, pick one and do it. Well, yeah. He said, that's all you have to do. Stop chasing them. Don't be the flavor of the month club or the program of the month club. And there are companies like that. And that hit me, and I even wrote an article about that, and I call it pick your path. And you should do that, but make sure that you pick a path and then you stay on it and you continue to work it. Like I said, there's always going to be changes to your business environment. There's new technologies and new things and new ideas, and you want to integrate those in. You have to integrate those in. Crayola Corporation has been around for, I think it's 130 years now. They make crayons and they make markers, and you go, what the heck? But they have managed to stake their place in the world with all the technology and everything else that's going and were able to establish their business with all these other things going on. And you need to do that. If you ever give up on that, you're going to fall behind. And sometimes it's pretty hard to catch up when you fall too far behind and to the point you made. If you want to say that there's never a failure, maybe there isn't. It's people that are giving up or quitting. Don't give up. Don't quit. Things aren't easy. It's not an easy thing. Sometimes it is, but most of the times it's hard work. And there are bumps and there are bruises along the way, but you'll get through it. So do not quit. Do not give up, because that's the worst possible thing you can do. When you do that, there's only one outcome after that, and it's not a good one.

Yeah.

Because then other people and other companies and other things will dictate to you. You want to have as much Control. And I know you just talked about not having control, but you want to have as much as you can. You want to have as much say in what's going on. And when you give up, you see that. So do not do that.

Yeah, fantastic. And what's the best way for folks to reach out to you? Peter?

Okay, so three ways. First of all, I am on LinkedIn, so you can find me. Peter Christian, I don't think there are a heck of a lot of the folks and I'm listed under author. So if you go to LinkedIn and you see me and you would like to connect, I have been connecting with quite a few people recently as I espouse viewpoints. So that's number one. Number two, my email is Ph and then my last name, Christian, and then the number 53mail.com. So if you want to get in touch with me and you would like to chat about something to kick some ideas around or thoughts or, or get my opinion on something, you can do that. And then last but not least, I have a website which is HTTPs and then two backslashes and then a colon and it's Pete christianbooks. That's all1word.com. And that's my website. I talk about my books, I talk about speaking, I talk about consulting. I have blogs on there, which has lots of information and it also has a way that you can hook into me and say, I would like to talk to you about something. So there's three different ways that you can do that. My LinkedIn, my email address, or my website.

Got it. And we're gonna put it all in the show notes page. So folks, just want to go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 364. We're gonna link to everything Peter just mentioned, so don't worry if you didn't get it all written down. But Peter, thank you for, for coming on to the show. It's been really fun hearing your stories and, and yeah, again, thanks for your flexibility and for your patience. But hey, I think it turned out great. So I'm glad that we persevered and we didn't quit, right? We didn't quit. We didn't give up.

Absolutely. We didn't quit. We had commitment.

That's it. That's it. All right, well, take care, my friend. Thank you.

Thank you also. I appreciate it.

All right, bye. Bye. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you and While we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching and as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.