GA 367 | The Dichotomies of Continuous Improvement with Ron Pereira

If you ever find yourself so far in one direction on any one topic, chances are you are out of balance and you might do well to think about. Is there a dichotomy here? Is there value in understanding what's going on on the other end of the spectrum? Hey everyone, this is Ron Pereira and today I'm going to be flying solo. We'll get back to our normal, you know, scheduled podcast with our guests next week. But yeah, I just wanted to fly solo. I had a few things on my mind I wanted to share and I recently wrote a blog article and for those that don't know, you know, we actually blog a lot in our company. John Miller, he actually writes an article and releases it every Monday. And then Kevin Meyer, myself and Steve Cain, we rotate every Friday. And then obviously this podcast comes out on Thursday. So we're publishing all this content and all of it's, you know, free of charge, obviously. So if you've not ever been to Gemba Academy's blog, you need to go check it out. The easiest way is just type in the word blog and then.gemba academy.com and you'll have access to. There's, there's over a thousand articles. We've been blogging for years, but, and yeah, this article that I wrote on April 2. And we'll link the article here in the show Notes, which is episode 367. The title of it was the Dichotomy of Continuous Improvement. And the inspiration for the article came from an audio book that I recently finished. So my 14 year old son and I drive about 25 minutes every morning to his school and he's again, he's 14 and my son's similar to me and that, you know, first thing in the morning. Neither one of us are big talkers, so we're not kind of chatting it up on the way into school. You know, he's tired and grumpy and, you know, all the rest of it. And so, but, but, but I kind of decided, you know, beginning of the year that we weren't going to sit there and listen to music or whatever and just essentially pass the time, we were going to do something as valuable, try to get something out of that at that time. And if it wasn't us talking and we needed to be learning. And so we have been listening to audiobooks all year long and we've gone through a bunch of different books and some of these books are kind of focused on our, on our faith, but then some of them are also just focused on other topics. And the last two books that we've listened to were more leadership focused, written by two gentlemen who were former Navy SEALs. And we've talked about these. These folks here on the podcast over the years, but the two guys are called. Named Jocko Willink, and then Leif Babin and Jocko Willink. You know, if you've never heard Jocko, he's got this big booming voice, and he's this huge Navy SEAL dude, you know, and he's just sort of, like, scary to look at, scary to listen to even. But he's super inspirational. Really smart guys, and obviously very, very successful and very good. They end up, you know, running Navy SEALS school after they both came back from being deployed for. For many years. But anyhow, they've written several books. And the first book that my son and I listened to, and I've actually read both of these books before and listened to them before. If I like a book, I read it and I listen to it sort of sometimes I listen to them first, and then if I like them, then I'll go and read them. And for me, it's a different part of your brain, you know, reading versus listening. But the first one's called Extreme Ownership, and sort of, as the name implies, this one was really all about, you know, you're ultimately responsible for your own actions, and you need to own your actions, right. And take responsibility, accountability for your actions and so forth. So really good book. And the next book that was right after Extreme Ownership, I guess maybe a few years after Extreme Ownership, was called the Dichotomy of Leadership. And this one I found very interesting because the emphasis of the book was on balance. And you see, I guess what happened was when Extreme Ownership came out, one of the things that Jocko preaches is discipline equals freedom is one of his big buzz phrases. And then another one is default aggressive. Like, in other words, by default, be aggressive. Now, it doesn't mean, like, be pushy or anything like that just means kind of get after it. Go after things. Don't be passive, Be active. Okay? But I guess what happened was people kind of listened to Extreme Ownership or read Extreme Ownership, and they may have gone a little bit too far and lost balance. And so what they tried to do in Dichotomy of Leadership, which was actually one of the chapters in Extreme Ownership, was the Dichotomy of Leadership, but they built on it and wrote an entire book on it. And they wanted to really stress about how important it is for leaders to be able to find that balance between things like Being aggressive but not reckless. They also talked about things like how to be disciplined. You know, again, discipline equals freedom. It's one of their big, big phrases that they really stand behind. But you can be so disciplined that you become rigid. And then another one that I really liked was how to be focused but also detached. In other words, you don't want to get so focused in on something that you lose, you know, you can't see the forest for the trees. So to spe. Okay, but as I was listening to the book again, I think it was like probably the third time that I've been through this book. When I was listening to it with my son, I got to thinking about, boy, there's so many parallels between what they are talking about and what we're doing here with continuous improvement. And so what I wanted to do and what I did in this blog article, but I'm going to kind of bring it to audio here is talk about three different dichotomies that, that I've seen over the years and honestly continue to see to this day. And the first one is this whole, I don't know how to say it. Lean versus Six Sigma. This dichotomy, okay, for some reason there are people out there in our continuous improvement world who feel like they need to take sides. And you know, some folks will, you know, believe that, oh, Six Sigma, it's just, it's nonsense or it's, you just sit there and stare at your Mini Tab or Sigma Excel then. And you don't need all that. You know, all you need to do is go stand in a circle and ask why you know, something like that. But then there are some folks who believe on the other end of the spectrum that Lean is nothing more than common sense and that, you know, you really need higher level thinking. You need to be able to think in complex ways or whatever it might be, right? And, and so they might have the opinion that you need to go more towards statistics or just bring more complexity into your problem solving. And the truth of the matter is, in my opinion, and really the opinion of Gemba Academy, is that as continuous improvement practitioners, we would all do well if we all remain humble and we all attempted to learn all we could about all aspects of continuous improvement. So in our opinion, you should learn as much as you can about Lean, but you should also learn as much as you can about the body of knowledge, what is commonly taught within Six Sigma. And some of them cross over, okay? So whichever body of knowledge you want to put it in, I don't care if you want to call it all Lean, call it all Lean. Want to call it all Six Sigma or you want to call it Lean Six Sigma and it drives some people insane when they hear Lean Six Sigma, whatever, you know, just call it whatever you want. But you should really learn as much as you can about all aspects of continuous improvement. For example, Agile is something that we are working on here at Gamba Academy. In fact, we're about to release our first internally we're calling them phases, but we're not going to really publicize them as phases. But this first phase for Gambit Academy, internal dialog is Agile Kanban, like Kanban, but within the context of, of Agile. So we're putting agile in front of the word Kanban just because some people get confused. And when, you know, we think about Kanban in a, in a factory, it's, you know, which are all Kanbans and production Kanbans and so forth, signal Kanbans. But within Agile there's, it takes on a slightly different context. So you typically see these big boards with, you know, to do and doing and done that sort of thing. And so we've got this big course coming out and I'll be honest, I'm personally not an expert and agile and so I've been learning a lot. As I wasn't really involved in the development of this particular course, my colleague John Miller took the reins and ran with it and has done a great job with it. But this is an example to where, you know, I've been at this for quite a while and you know, I've read a little bit about Agile and I've read some books and watched some courses and been to some conferences and, and so forth. So I'm not a complete newbie, but I should know more, okay? And so I'm excited to learn more about Agile. And so I would argue that if you're on Lean or you call yourself a lean thinker or you're in Six Sigma and you, you, you're a black belt or master black belt or something like that and you don't have a good understanding of what Agile is all about, you should learn, okay? And I don't care what industry you're in, because it's like anything, there's going to be aspects within the agile body of knowledge that are going to be valuable for you no matter who you are. So this whole dichotomy of this versus this, we need to stop it, okay? Stop it and just keep learning. Be humble, be open, that, you know, there might be a better way, and that's okay. It doesn't make you a bad person if you didn't know something. Okay, so keep learning. I guess that's the key lesson for this first dichotomy of. Of what I called lean versus six sigma. But it could be lean versus agile or lean versus whatever. Okay, so keep learning. The second dichotomy of continuous improvement that I want to talk about is standard work. Some people call it standardized work or a number of different terms for it. But this one is interesting because on one end of the dichotomy, some people believe that once you put a standard in place and people are trained to the standard, and, you know, you know, if you could walk through a Toyota facility, the standard work actually faces towards the aisle in most cases, because the operators don't need to be looking at it. They've already been trained, right? Whether they use something like twi, job instruction or whatnot, these operators are the people doing the work. They know what's up. The standard work is really there for, you know, if an error is made, then we can immediately go to the standard work and try to figure out what happened, what didn't, what didn't go right. Okay? But here's the thing. Just because you have a standard, it doesn't mean that that's the only way that we should ever do this job, okay? Standards are meant to be improved. So if the operator, you know, experiments with something one day and does find a better way, they have the responsibility, I would argue, to go to their leadership, go to the supervisor, whoever it might be, and to say, hey, listen, you know, we experimented with this way, or. Or maybe it was they had some downtime. You know, maybe you can experiment during production or during the actual, you know, whatever building the product or service that you're building, but you have some downtime to experiment, to find a better way, okay? When you do find a better way, you need to update the standard work, okay? Standards are not handcuffs, okay? And so this is. This is one end of the dichotomy. Now, on the other end, sadly, many times, we don't have standards. And if I'm doing a job, I do it my way. And then if Cindy comes in and she does the job, she might do it her way. And this is bad, okay? Now, if you've been in the lean, continuous improvement world, you've probably heard the saying, without standards, there can be no kaizen, or another way of saying that without standards, there can be no improvement. And it's true. Because, listen, if I'm doing it one way and Cindy's doing it another way. Well, which way is producing a better result? If Cindy's way is producing a better result and I'm just being stubborn and not wanting to do it a different way, well, then I need to humble myself and get some training on Cindy's approach and adopt it so we have a consistent way of doing it. But if everyone's doing things their own way, really this is just chaos, okay? And it's going to be very difficult to make that whole process better because there's no standard way of doing it. So there's this dichotomy of, you do need to have standards, but you can't be so strict and so rigid that you never try to make them better. But on the other side, you better have some standard way of working, otherwise it's going to be chaos and it's going to be terrible. So, like it, like anything here, we've got to find that balance between standard work and in the mindset of constantly improving. Okay? Now the last one is just probably the one that I, I personally struggle with the most, is the dichotomy of coaching. So coaching, you know, you've listened to this podcast for those that listen on a regular basis. You know how passionate we are about scientific thinking, about Toyota Kata. And within Toyota Kata, there's this improvement kata, and then there's this coaching kata. And within the coaching kata, there's this, this. This rhythm, this routine that we follow as coaches. And in the beginning, when you're first learning, you literally read some question questions from a. From a card, you know, and, you know, don't even deviate. Just read the card, you know, but eventually, as you go on, you know, it kind of takes on your own personality and you might change the questions up a little bit, and that's perfectly fine. But here's the problem. Coaching done poorly. And this is, again, I, I can. I can personally attest to this. Can lead, quickly lead, if you're not careful, to micromanagement. And what I mean by this is, you know, you know, I just had a conversation with my. One of my colleagues, Leslie, and, you know, going through. And she's telling about some things that she's been working on, and I'm sort of like kind of coaching her through it a little bit. And next thing you know, I'm running off a list of things for her to go try. Well, what about this? I got all excited, right? So I'm like, hey, what about this? Did you try this? How about this? You Know, like, I'm basically just telling her what to do. Okay. And that's not good coaching. Okay? That's basically just telling her what to do. And, you know, I'm one of the owners of the company and so if I say something, Leslie's probably going to go try it or probably going to do it. And you know that. And it may work, but that also is problematic because if it does work, you know, Leslie didn't figure it out on her own. She's like, well, yeah, Ron gave me the answer. Okay, so what we want to be able to do as coaches is we want to encourage, we want to inspire, we want to probe, you know, ask questions. Socratic question. Well, what do you think? You know, when in doubt, just ask what do you think? You know, and put it back on the learner. Okay? So that's one side of coaching. You don't want to fall into micromanagement. But we've been talking about dichotomies. So let's go to the very other end of the spectrum. And this happens when the learner or the person that you're coaching is just flat out stuck. They are completely demotivated. They're about to just, you know, throw in the towel, so to speak, and they're just really unable to move forward. Okay? Me telling that person, well, what do you think? You know, for the hundredth time, probably isn't going to add value. So there are going to be situations to where you need to engage a little bit more as a coach and you might have to just kind of dip your toe in there and give them some ideas, give them some suggestions, you know, pick them up, you know, encourage them, whatever it might take. So you've got to have, you know, that balance between not micromanaging. But then if there are situations to where, you know, the learner does just need a little bit of help, then you need to go give that help. Now don't give too much. Don't just again, take the, you know, sometimes I talk about stealing their monkey, like off their shoulder, right? Don't, don't, don't, don't just, you know, do it for them. But you need to, you know, give them a little support, give them a little advice and then fall back into that non micromanagement coaching aspect. So those are, those are three of the dichotomies that came to me. And again, I'm sure if we were all talking together, we could come up with, you know, 15 others, 20 others, and I'd love to hear them maybe on LinkedIn or something like that. What dichotomies you, you, you're personally dealing with. But I think what we really need more than anything in continuous improvement and probably life in general is balance, right? Is, is being able to, you know, see the other end of the spectrum wherever you are, if you ever find yourself so far in one direction on any one topic, chances are you are out of balance and you might do well to think about is there a dichotomy here? Is there, is there value and understanding what's going on on the other end of the spectrum? So if you are into audiobooks or you're into reading or anything like that, I would encourage Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomy of Leadership. They're both fantastic books. Now they're not like Continuous Improvement flavored or anything like that, but they're leadership flavored. So I guess in a way they are. They don't talk about Lean or Six Sigma or anything like that, but, but they're really, really good and I would argue really important for anyone who does lead people. Lots of good lessons in there. And if you're not, you know, there's actually some abridged versions of on there. Those guys are on YouTube a lot. So if you just kind of YouTubed extreme ownership or Dichotomy of Leadership, you'll find some good summaries out there as well. So yeah, that's all I got for today. Just wanted to cover those dichotomies of continuous improvement. Again, just a couple updates for Gemba Academy. If you're listening to this here in April, we are going to be releasing some Agile content coming out. We're really excited about it. I think eventually we're going to have a pretty comprehensive body of knowledge as it relates to Agile. So if that's something that you're interested in, we're go over to gambiacademy.com, sign up for our newsletter and you'll get an announcement when that, when that's released. After Agile, we are going to be working on a, another Toyota Kata body of knowledge, if you will, series of videos. I don't know exactly what we're going to call it, but the first that we're going to do that also in, in, in a couple of phases. We're going to have sort of an overview phase now. We've already, we have a pretty comprehensive course already. I said a very compreh already on Toyota Kata, which is, it's a, it's a live workshop with Mark Rosenthal working through that. We taped it while Mark was doing an in person workshop a few years ago and it's good, but we want to create a studio version of this material. So it's pretty tight, pretty scripted obviously. And so the first big release will be on the improvement kata, then the second release will be on the coaching kata. And we're going to sprinkle in a few things that are in the maybe the main Toyota Coda body of knowledge. There's a few things that, I don't know, we may, I don't know, raise some eyebrows, but one of the things that we're going to introduce is we talk a lot about within Toyota Kata. Picking one obstacle and working on one thing at a time, or one factor at a time we might call it. And if you've been around kind of Lean and Six Sigma for a while, that might raise some eyebrows. You'll be like, huh, one factor at a time isn't that bad. And sometimes, and this is the dichotomy, okay, sometimes it can be bad, it can get you in trouble. And just a quick little teaser on why we believe that is taking, take the example of opening a door. You walk up to a door and assume this door has a doorknob on it. Okay? One of these types of doors and you got to turn the doorknob and open the door. Okay? So you got a couple factors involved, okay? And so you could, one might say, hey, is turning the doorknob an important factor to opening a door? Now we know as experienced door openers that it is, but let's just work through the experiment. So imagine we have a door that's closed and we walk up to it and we turn the door handle, turn it to the right, turn it to the left, turn it, the door doesn't open, nothing happens. You're like, huh? I always thought that turning the door handle was important. Well, I guess it's not. I ran the experiment. You know what I thought was going to happen? I thought the door was going to open. What actually happened? The door didn't close. What did I learn? I guess turning the door handle is not important. Okay, well what's the next factor? Well, another thing that we used to do back when we used to open up doors was we would pull on the door. Okay, well, let's run the experiment. What's the experiment? I'm going to walk up to the door, I'm going to pull on it. What do you think is going to happen, man? You know, based on what I know from the past, I feel like the door is going to open. Okay, so you go up, run the experiment, walk up to the door, you pull on the door, what happens? What actually happens? The door doesn't open. What did I learn? I learned that, golly, I don't know, my world is being rocked here. Pulling the door doesn't open the door. That's not an important factor. And I don't even know how to open up a door anymore. Okay, well, obviously what's going on here is that there's an interaction and we teach this when we teach things like design of experiments. Okay. The importance of interactions and understanding interactions. So this is an example to where we have an interaction between turning the doorknob and pulling. You can't do one without the other or it won't work. Okay. And so we actually, we're introducing in the module that in most cases doing one factor at a time is appropriate because it allows you to really get kind of get honed in and not get too, not too out of control. And a majority of the time, single factor experiments or going after one obstacle at a time, it's going to be fine and it's going to be appropriate, but there are going to be situations and we spell out in this module when you might want to start thinking about multifactorial type approach. Okay. There's even within the Toyota Kata community now, they're starting to teach one factor at a time experiments. When you shoot catapults and it does work, you can, you can dial in the catapult pretty good with single factor experiments. However, if you've been through any black belt training and you've learned design of experiments, or you've learned how to do response surface methodology, design of experiments, you know where I'm going with this and like when, when we teach black belts how to do response surface methodology, doe, the final kind of test is the teacher will move the cup to any, they'll move it within, you know, a 10 foot range and they'll say, okay, it's at 13ft 2 inches. Put the ball in the cup and you, you have to figure out what the settings are. One time, you got one shot. And so you go to your doe, you go, you've got all these factors and you type in, you know the exact output that you want and it tells you where to set the pullback angle, what to set, what cup, what ball to use, all the rest of it. And then, you know, if you've done it right in, your model is strong, you know, you can put the ball in the cup no matter where the teacher puts the cup. So this is the power of a multifactorial design experiments. Okay. Now they take more time to do, but I would argue you can sit there and do single factor at a time experiments. It still takes you a little while. So you might be better off doing a multifactorial DOE and really deeply understanding your process. Okay. And so that's the kind of stuff that we're going to kind of bake into this course that might not be typically taught within the Toyota Kata body of knowledge. So we're pretty excited about that one too. John Miller is also working on kind of a TQM course that'll be coming out. So just trying to give a little bit update, something that we don't do a great job of at Gambia Academy. You don't do a great job of telling folks the things that we're working on. And we've got a number of other things in the, in the, in the kitchen, if you will, that we're pretty excited about. So anyhow, I've been going on for about 30 minutes. I want to wrap it up here. But show notes for for this episode we'll link to the the blog article that I talked about and then also maybe we'll link to a few Jocko Willink videos and so forth if you want to go learn a little bit more about that. So again, this is episode 367, so go to gembapodcast.com look for episode 367. Also, if you're listening right now, thank you for going to the end. And if you don't mind, something that we're also trying to do is ask folks to give us a five star rating on whatever podcast app that you're listening to. And also subscribe to the show. If you've not, there's a subscribe button. If you're listening on Stitcher or Spotify or the Apple podcast app, there's a subscribe button. So go ahead and subscribe and give us a five star review. If you like the show. That sure would help help us a lot. We appreciate it. Okay, thanks and we'll be back to our normal interview podcast next week. Take care. Thanks for listening. 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