GA 376 | Navigating Visual Management and the Obeya Method with Greg Woods

Visual management is any sort of visual cue that changes behavior. And that could be as basic as the stop sign that we observe driving down the street or the speed limit sign, or any sort of visual cue that says I need to pay attention to something and potentially change my behavior or watch my behavior.

Today I'm excited to welcome Greg woods to the show. Now, Greg works for a company called iAobea. And if you've been to any, like, Lean conferences and whatnot, you've probably seen those guys exhibiting. I had for years and talked to many of them over the years and really, really cool company. But really the theme of the episode today was just visual management in general. Now, obviously, Ayobea plays kind of on the digital side of visual management, but what we did was we sort of began at the beginning, like, what is visual management? And then we sort of walked our way up to, you know, the different types of visual management, including how you can use things like digital, you know, whiteboards and, you know, digital obeyo rooms and different things like that. So pretty fun episode. Greg has got a lot of lean background and I think you'll hear that coming through loud and clear. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 376. Again, gembapodcast.com just look for episode 376. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Greg, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Great, Ron. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Yeah, man, no problem. All right, well, Greg, as you know, we do like to get all of our episodes started with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yeah, I would say Einstein's quote on simplify everything but make it no simpler. So just getting things to the right amount of a basic level that is understandable and usable. Yeah, I think there's a lot of appeal to. To lean in our lean world.

I love it. I love it. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, Greg, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you first got into all this continuous improvement stuff, and then tell us what you're up to these days with Iobea.

I appreciate that. So I really got started into the continuous improvement and organization development world quite a number of years ago when I was living in Moscow or Russia, kind of after the fall of communism and I got started just learning about organizations. I was working as a customer service manager in a bottled water company and started learning about how to essentially operate within organizations and help organizations operate more efficiently. As you can imagine back in the day there customer service was not necessarily something that was, was very familiar to folks back in the day in post Soviet Russia. Yeah, from, from there, you know, so it was, it was interesting start, interesting journey and my career has come through organization development and I've. My core skill sets and background is really a lean project management, performance improvement, data analytics and executive coaching. So I like to wrap the business results along around with the, around the people and the behaviors. How do we get the best out of both worlds?

Yeah, got it, got it.

And currently I'm doing that at IOBEA as a client success manager and my goal is to partner with our clients to help them maximize the use of our tools. So bringing the best of the methodology applications so lean and agile to the technology that we offer from a digital visual management solution.

Got it, got it. All right, well, let's jump right in. So where do I want, I want to begin? I mean most folks listening to this, Greg, are pretty experienced lean thinkers, but just to maybe just start at the very beginning, I just like at a meta level when we talk about visual management, it's a term we speak a lot of within the lean community. What does it mean to you? Visual management? Let's just start there.

Yeah, that's the basics like we talked about at the beginning. It's a great place to start. Visual management is any sort of visual cue that changes behavior and that could be as basic as the stop sign that we observe driving down the street or the speed limit sign or even recently within Covid when we see the masks pictures on the doors of a restaurant or grocery store that we're going into. Any sort of visual cue that says I need to pay attention to something and potentially change my behavior or watch my behavior.

Yeah. So now obviously there's a lot of different types of visual management and some are more effective than others, as you said. Like the speed limit sign depends on who's driving, on how effective that sign was be, but let's just say sometimes not very effective. Right. I would say most of the time probably not very effective. People sort of decide, hey, I'm going to go five miles over no matter what. Right. Or however. So like if you think about visual management from a lean perspective, like are there different levels of visual management and perhaps, you know, different levels of.

You.

Know, how well they work? I don't know how to say it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, if you think about, you know, walking your factory floor, you know, assuming some of our listeners are in Manufacturing, you're walking your factory floor and it could be something as simple as striping your walkways with yellow tape so everybody stays within the walkway. And you know, outside of operating equipment areas or taping off the floor with red tape to indicate where a fire extinguisher might be. Or some folks use like blue tape for where an electrical box is so that, you know, nothing gets stacked in front of those critical pieces of equipment like a fire extinguisher or blocking electrical boxes or things like that. So yeah, so those are some of the fundamentals when you get into a manufacturing facility where you can use visual management like that.

Mm, mm. Now, when we think about visual management to, let's say, run a company, right? Like, well, you mentioned where a lot of artifacts like tape on the floor and here's where the trash can goes, here's where the, you know, that sort of thing. But obviously there's a big movement within, like even especially the digital visual management world, which is obviously where IoB is mostly playing, I would guess. But you know, there's a way that this visual management is helping us operate our companies with dashboards and whatnot. Maybe let's talk a little bit about that and talking about the progression that might look like, I don't know if you're an old school whiteboard guy at all or if it's all digital for you.

No, absolutely. Old school whiteboard guy. That's where I started. And certainly, you know, whiteboards and paper and pencil, you know, and pen still have their place. And like you said, things are there is an evolution that's going on. And you know, from a visual management standpoint. So the earlier examples were maybe more safety or process safety oriented from a performance management standpoint, a lot of organizations will hang up their whiteboard and have your safety cross or your safety indicators where you would go up. And for every day of the month that you don't have a safety incident, you color in the S or you color in the safety cross with a green marker, they might have a manual process where they're counting how many safety days without incident. And as technology has progressed, creating Excel spreadsheets and graphs and charts to show performance indicators such as quality first pass yield, and charting that information over time or delivery on time delivery, all different kinds of KPIs that, you know, pick whichever one that you want from a safety, quality, delivery or cost standpoint, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, all that kind of data can be collected. And you know, historically, you know, up to this point, there's been a Lot of that being collected and posted. You know, you print out your, you manually key something into your Excel spreadsheet, you create your graph. You print out your graph and then you go post it on the whiteboard. So either stick it up on the whiteboard or you kind of go a little bit upscale and you have the plastic sleeves already on the whiteboard. You slide that next hard copy print out into it. And then of course you have the meeting or the conversation about performance. How do you get better? And that's been, you know, kind of the, the first, or maybe not the first, but the next step of the journey of making performance visible using, you know, technology and then hard copy to get that information posted it. Yeah, people are aware of how the company's performing.

Yeah, I like to say, you know, if I walk into any company, I like to be able to walk up to any employee and just say, hey, are you winning or are you losing right now? You know, at the game, at the game of your business? Like, are you. You know, and, and so typically there's some sor. Management for the folks that are able to answer me and they could be like, oh, actually it's kind of a tie right now. We're neck and neck with where, you know, or whatever, you know what I mean? And, but sometimes it'd be like people like, oh, you know, and they just kind of roll their shoulders and have no idea if they're winning or losing. Right. And so, you know, I think at its heart being able to answer that question really kind of tells you whether or not how well you're doing with visual management.

I was going to say, and the key there is the engagement piece of the people. If they don't know if they're winning or losing, how engaged can your team be?

Yeah, I mean I remember there was a, there's many, many, many years ago I was in, it was actually in England. I'll never forget Hayward's Heath when England. And at this little facility, this little. They made valve actuators and had this little cell where these guys would need a little one piece flow. And they were doing a great job with lean. But I went around and I said, hey, well how many, how many of these do you make in a day? And they're like, I don't know, we just make as many as we can, you know. And, and, and so I went to a supervisor and I said, you know, do you guys, do you have a goal? Well, yeah, of course we have a goal. I said, well, do they know what the goal Is and no. And so I looked down and there was this literally a whiteboard just laying on the ground, not being used. I said, hey, what if we just grab that whiteboard and throw it up on the board and give me a marker. And then I just wrote plan and then act. And then we broke it down. I didn't even do it by hour. I did it like, you know, by lunch, by tea time, by whatever, you know, and we set goals for them and in fact, we let the operators write it in. And I remember hearing later that that simple act of just writing down plan versus actual, like their productivity shot through the roof, you know, because it was. They'd gamified it, you know.

Yeah. And. And they understood what was important.

Sure, exactly.

And wanted to achieve it. I mean, that's, I mean, if, you know, any of our sports fans out there, if you think about, you know, when you turn on the TV and you're watching your favorite game or match or whatever it happens to be, what's the first thing that you look for?

Yeah, who's winning?

What's the score? Yeah, you know, who's. Are you. Is your team winning or losing? Yep. And that's what's in. And that's, that's, that's the engage. That's an engaging piece there.

Yep, yep, exactly.

Awesome story.

So talk. Let's talk a little bit about digital visual management and like, what is that all about?

Yeah, it's. It's the next evolution. It's, it's a way to just like we talked about, continue to engage your people, but use it in a digital format. So think of a digital whiteboard for like, meetings and brainstorming sessions, but also sophisticated interrelated dashboards so that not only do you maybe see how your own team is doing, or if you're in a management position, being able to see if you got three, four or five, whatever different lines in your. In your factory or even across the corporation and around the world, being able to aggregate performance data so that you can see and answer that question we were just talking about, are we winning or losing? It's. Take Excel and put it on visual steroids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No, I got it, I got it, I got it. Now, what about, like, you know, something that we're hearing a lot of here at GEMBA Academy, A lot of customers calling in and asking questions, you know, Covid era kind of thing. You know, a lot of people are still virtual and, you know, even when I think things eventually come back down, you know, it'll Be curious to see how much remains virtual just because people realized, hey, we can do it this way just as well, sometimes better, you know, so things like virtual Gemba walks in virtual Obeyas, you know, different things like that, those are, those are things now where, you know, maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago they weren't. So what's that all about? How do they work? How's a virtual Gemba walk a virtual Bayer? How does that work?

Yeah, it's literally what we've done is created what we like to refer to as a natural human centric, immersive experience. So that when you're logging in and looking at your screen, it looks like you're looking at a board or a wall that's got all of the information posted on there. It's as natural of an experience translating things from the analog, the paper based environment into now I can see everything that I would want to see in the physical room on my computer screen. Certainly, as we've talked about, the pandemic has accelerated maybe some people's awareness or the necessity for the remote working. The fact of the matter is, for centuries, thousands of years, there's been organizations that have been global in nature and the challenge has always been information sharing. How do you do that as quickly as possible? Just as an example, one client of ours operates out of the West Coast. They have a facility in South Korea and they have, I believe it's R and D operations in Singapore. And they can all gather in this virtual Obey and they can, again based on time difference, if they can coordinate their schedules to all be in the room at the same time, to be working on the boards at the same time and holding meetings at the same time, that's great. But we also know that the time differences can really be a challenge. So just like if you've got a key to a building, you show up when you need to, you can work on the, on the content that you need to, on your Iobea boards. And then the next day or you know, next several hours, somebody else could come in and work on that same information and be constantly up to date.

Yeah, well, and if somebody wasn't available, you know, for the thing, you know, it's all there, right?

So yeah, yeah, that's one of the great things is that from a virtual standpoint, we like to say your digital sticky note doesn't fall off the wall.

Right.

And just like you share that, you walked factory floors. And if you're doing a CI event or Kaizen event, I know one of my favorite things to do was prepare for the event, get to know people, get to know the business, you know, shape the event, get the engagement going, get that in person energy going, post the event. And then, you know, at the end of it, everybody is happy, they're engaged, they're excited, they've created something. And then at the end of it, as the facilitator, the biggest challenge is always, you know, afterwards, having to take pictures of the flip charts, retape the sticky notes back into place.

Yeah.

And do all of that extra, essentially what amounts to rework because you've already done the work in the session to then capture it in electronic format to make it shareable and actionable with people. Now in the virtual environment, you host the session, everybody's in the session, I guess you'd say virtually walk out of the session and five minutes later, if somebody wants to, if they've gotten an action item and five minutes later they've made the phone call and gotten an answer, they log back into the session and they close out their action item. It happens as quickly as that, without any extra effort or rework having to be accomplished post session.

Got it, Got it. So I know you've been in the lean movement for a while and you've seen a lot. I'm curious to get your opinion on what do you believe the next frontier is for this movement of ours. What's next?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it is about scaling up to the enterprise level. There are a lot of. I mean, IOBA is no secret that there's other tools on the market out there. And I think the next frontier is moving beyond what most folks are familiar with is just the basic digital visual whiteboard where you can do your brainstorming type sessions. And I know I've had a lot of fun where people would design games, you do your Zoom happy hour, play Hangman or Connect 4 or whatever happens to be, just to kind of build the relationships and maybe break some of that remote monotony. But it really is about upscaling so that the information exchange, both from executives, cascading information down, setting goals and objectives, and having your front line through the management to your front line, being able to execute on those things and then provide feedback up the chain to be able to get help and resources to solve the problems. It's really about accelerating that information exchange. It's about accelerating the feedback loops to solve problems much, much faster. We're in a position now where, again, from a lean perspective, waste is anything your customer doesn't want. To pay for. The closer you could get to the customer and the faster you can get to the customer, which nowadays is often through information exchange, the better off you're going to be. So in being able to align not only your own individual enterprise with those customer expectations, but then be able to virtually pull your suppliers into that process as well.

Yeah, got it. Well, good stuff, man. This has been fun, Greg. I appreciate you taking time to come on. Maybe let's wrap things up. I don't know if you have any kind of final words of wisdom or maybe folks who are listening want to kind of get started with visual management and they don't know where to begin. Like maybe you have some advice for them.

Yeah. From our perspective, please feel free to check out our website, iobea.com and I would say go out and just check out some of the classics out there. In terms of Lean, you know, the Toyota way, there's a whole host of good books and resources out there and websites that lean.org, the Lean Enterprise Institute has good resources as well. And obviously our friends here at Gemba Academy check out. Yeah, check out the information there online.

Don't forget them, please. My kids need to eat. No, no, good stuff, good stuff. Hey, what you just mentioned, Iobes website and all, but if people want to connect with you individually. Craig, what's the, the best way?

Yeah, absolutely. Through my own personal email address. It's gwoodsiobea.com.

Okay, cool. Are you on LinkedIn or anything like that as well or.

Yeah. Yes I am. Find me there too.

Okay. Yeah, and we'll. So we'll, we'll link to everything there in the show notes. So that's GembaPodcast.com this is episode 376. So. Well, good stuff, Greg. I appreciate you coming on and maybe we'll come on down the road and talk some more visual management and all kinds of good stuff.

Great, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

All right, take care.

Bye bye.

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