GA 382 | Simplifying Value Stream Mapping with Steve Pereira

There's a tendency to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, well, you know, we're not looking to drive variation out of the system. We're not looking to create uniform quality or perfect, consistent quality because it's not possible in a software context. So, sorry, that won't work for us. We'll. We'll go looking for something else. And I think that's a big mistake and a huge missed opportunity.

Today I'm excited to welcome Steve Pereira to the show. And yes, his last name is the same as mine, and no, he's not related, but he's super nice guy, super smart guy, and I had a really good time chatting with him today. So Steve, as you'll hear, doesn't have a traditional lean background, doesn't have really a continuous improvement background, but he, he's kind of works in more in the, in the, in the software world. And he stumbled upon value stream mapping a number of years ago. And what he's basically done is he's found a way to simplify the process really. And you know, a purist may say that's not really a value stream map, and who cares? I mean, we're, we're going split hairs over terms. But what he's done is later in the podcast, I sort of summarize my take on his approach. And I said, it's sort of like a minimalist meets value stream mapping. And come to find out he started laughing that he explains that he actually is a minimalist, by the way he lives his life. So just a real simple life and that sort of thing. Not a lot of belongings. We talked about how many shirts he owns and all that kind of fun stuff. But he, he does a really good job of explaining his approach and, and why he does this simpl to mapping processes and again, in that software world. So really fun episode. It's a little bit longer, so listen to it and a couple different commutes to work if you need to. But I think you're gonna, you're gonna enjoy this one. So show notes for this episode can be found over@gemba podcast.com this is episode 382. Again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 382. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Steve, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going well. Thank you. Very pleased to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, well, I, you know, we have a lot of firsts on the, the podcast from time to time, but this is for Sure. A first that someone with the same last name as me. And we don't have a very common last name, Steve.

So that's right outside of Portugal. I think that's very true.

That's true. Yeah. Yeah, it's very. Or Brazil maybe, right? You know, Brazil, Portugal. Right. But. But no, I didn't. I guess we bounce into each other on LinkedIn or something like that. But it's pretty awesome to know that there's another prayer out there trying to continuously improve the world. So that's. That's pretty awesome. But anyhow. Well, Steve, we like to begin all of our shows with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one?

Yeah, well, this is one that bounces around my head a lot. And it's. It's actually, I have a hard time choosing between. There's two of them that were introduced by Eli Goldratt in Beyond the Goal that kind of blew my mind. And so probably the one that I will pick. And, you know, if we. We can cover the other one if we have time. But I really, like. There are no conflicts in reality. So he talks. He's a physicist, right? So he's talking about big stuff all the time, but just his ability to sort of step back and look at what is really at the foundation of everything. What are the sort of things that challenge our way of thinking and can really kind of frame us in a different mindset to shake things up and get us thinking creatively or challenge our assumptions about what we're dealing with in order to kind of unblock us and remove mental constraints. He's a big constraint fan, of course, but I think mental constraints and limiting beliefs are a huge challenge as well. In addition to all the technical constraints and process constraints and waste and all that stuff. Mindset is huge. There are no conflicts in reality. Just thinking about how everything is perfectly harmonized to perform and exist the way that it is performing and existing right now is just kind of a refreshing frame to think about things. And if you want to change things, if you want better, it doesn't necessarily involve conflict. It doesn't necessarily involve a struggle or anything not working the way that it should. We just have to think about things, are working now the best way that they can, and we can nudge things in a different direction, but we have to keep in mind that everything is sort of balanced all the time. Right? Everything is sort of just happening the way that it can happen. And for us to get to better, we have to maintain that balance. Right? We can't expect things to just happen automatically or quickly without something giving in return and resolving that or maintaining that balance and harmony.

Well, I think you win the award for the deepest quote that's ever been on the podcast. That is pretty deep. You could probably just sit there and think about that for hours, right? Or days or lifetime maybe.

This is exactly why it's been bouncing around inside my head. You know, it's a challenging one. So. Yeah, I love those. They do stick with me.

Great. Well, Steve, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your. Your background, how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff, and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Well, thanks. Thanks for asking that. It's been quite a road, actually, if we go back far enough. I started my career aiming at computer animation because the first time I saw Toy Story, I was obsessed with the possibilities of creating virtual worlds and virtual representations of something that looked real or looked just hyper realistic. But then I found out, you know, how much of a struggle that life is and fell back on my technical skills. Because I grew up fixing everything from old telephones that my dad would bring home from work to printers and fax machines and whatever else I could get my hands on. And so got into tech support with IBM, and so I learned kind of from the customer backwards. That was kind of my first encounter with flow. And the idea that we got calls coming in one end and we got to have fixes coming at the other end. And without knowing it, just kind of encountering this concept of the value stream over and over again through my career, I moved from that into desktop support, solving physical issues with machines and things like deployment and automation. And then I moved into continuous integration and continuous delivery. So working on software delivery pipelines. I always wanted to be in the software space because I just felt like that was so interesting and so complex and growing so quickly that it was really exciting. And I eventually moved into a consulting space and then cto. And CTO was very challenging. A way to learn about scale and growing an organization and growing a team and kind of maintaining that balance of go as fast as you can. Don't burn out, don't burn your people out. Constantly be hiring, training, just a lot of really interesting and tough challenges and leaving that after a little bit of burnout and really kind of struggling with the chaos of that environment and wanting to do my own thing, feeling like I'd reached a level where I had a lot to share and a lot to contribute back to the world. That's what brought me to starting Visible. And I looked back on my career and I said, what is the most valuable thing that I can bring to other organizations? It was this concept of the value stream. I just realized that there was this common thread through my career, also this thing that people talk about all the time. You should always be mapping your value stream and you should always be thinking in terms of value streams and you should step away from your work and visualize it and measure it. And yet very few do that. And some people who do it really struggle with it. It's not straightforward, it's very challenging, but we know that it's so valuable and so important. So the mission really of Visible is to kind of close that gap between things that we know really work well and that we should be doing and making that easy and accessible for people and kind of empowering them to get the benefits of this practice.

Now, you know, many of our listeners, you know, are kind of lean thinker, lean practitioners in various industries. And so when we hear value stream mapping, many of us think of, you know, mapping a manufacturing process or something like that, or a hospital, you know, mapping the flow of patient or something like that. But I assume that you're doing most of your work in sort of knowledge work, creative work, is that right?

Yeah, that's right. And that's a really fascinating area. I think there's a constant running debate between folks who see the value of lean practices and value stream mapping, particularly in the manufacturing world, and yet they hesitate to use it in a software knowledge work context because of that focus on creativity and development. And I think that there's a tendency to kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, well, we're not looking to drive variation out of the system. We're not looking to create uniform quality or perfect, consistent quality because it's not possible in a software context. So, sorry, that won't work for us. We'll go looking for something else. And I think that's a big mistake and, and a huge missed opportunity.

Got it, got it. So you also talk about collaborative mapping. What is, what is that? What is collaborative mapping?

Yeah, I don't know if this is a common term. Actually. I started to talk about collaborative mapping as I started to look beyond value stream mapping, because I would run into challenges where first of all, I talked to folks about value stream mapping and they would immediately, if they weren't familiar, they would go to Wikipedia and just immediately their eyes glaze over and they're like, well, this just looks completely boring and complicated and I can't even read this map. And so what kind of a map is unreadable? And then you have the other camp who has seen value stream mapping. Maybe they've even tried the value stream map, and they didn't get a lot of value from it because they took four days, they locked everybody in a room, and they got all this stuff out in a map, and they ended up with something that was over complicated, or they were. They just didn't see the value out of the exercise that they were expecting. And so, you know, I'm. I'm not out there to convince either of those folks that value stream mapping is not what they thought it was. I think that the larger opportunity is to look at something like collaborative mapping as a capability that I would like to see individuals and teams adopt on a regular basis, a continuous basis, as a daily practice for getting ideas and issues and perspectives out of our individual heads and combining them together in a space where we can all see them and work with them. So I see a huge opportunity for collaborative mapping to really bring people together and reconcile their differences in perspectives, because we all see a different part of the elephant. We all have a different opinion on where the biggest bottleneck is. And until we can constructively bring our separate perspectives together and close the gap, it's very challenging to say to people, you just have to work together and just trust each other and do your best. I think we can do better than that. I think we can get everything out in the open and create a new respect and appreciation for other people's perspectives, understand them at a deeper level, see where they're coming from, and build relationships through things like workshops doing collaborative mapping. The other reason is that I started looking beyond value stream maps. So I would run into challenges where I had a team ask me to come in, map a value stream with them, and it would become clear after working on it for a while that the goal wasn't very crystallized or clear or understood by everybody involved. And so we were heading in a direction without a lot of clarity on the destination. That prompted me to step back and say, okay, first we need to be very clear on outcomes. And that was the origin of outcome mapping for me, which is similar to impact mapping. If people have seen that before, there's a bunch of different ways that you can collaborate on defining a target outcome. But that became just as important as the value stream mapping for me, so kind of broadened my horizons beyond the value stream map to this idea that let's just map everything, let's Just map everything that we are not crystal clear on, or maybe we feel like we understand, but we don't really have any data to support our understanding, or we need to convince someone else that what we're talking about is a good idea or the way to go. And so this collaborative mapping in general, it provides a framework for doing that in a very constructive but also a fun way. You get this side effect of everybody getting kind of excited about how much we didn't know before. But now we feel much better about the things that, the things that were nagging at us, that were kind of rattling around in the back of our heads that we didn't figure out, we didn't think we'd figure out. We didn't think we'd resolve these conflicts between our department and another department or that person on the team who never seems to be bought into our ideas. Now we understand them, they understand us, we're on the same page.

So if you go somebody who's not familiar with how to Value Stream app, they go onto Amazon or whatever and they Google it and they come up with this sort of classic approach to value stream mapping. Current state, value stream map and a future state value stream map and a Kaizen newspaper to close the gap and Kaizen bursts all over the maps and that sort of thing. So is that sort of how you're approaching it with knowledge creative work? Are you doing sort of a current state, future state, or do you do it different way? Because collaborative mapping sounds like, you know, you're sort of constantly updating, if I'm understanding it right, Because I, I've personally never heard of it. So if you, you know, you're, you're constantly collaborating, it sounds like you might be updating a particular map, you know, in real time. Is that, is that right?

Well, that's, that's an interesting read on it. That's certainly not the intention, I would say, you know, if, if I think continuous collaborative mapping sounds like that scenario to me, when I think of collaborative mapping, it really is.

Working together to create the map sort of thing.

Exactly.

Yeah. Okay.

Exactly. Which can be a static map, it could be a one time map. But to answer sort of the first part of your question, I think it's really challenging right now. If you go to Amazon.com and you, you look up value stream mapping, you're going to get Karen Martin's book, which is fantastic and it does cover knowledge work, it does touch on software, but it was written back before we were doing everything remotely. That might be a challenge to Folks to think about what do we do now that we are distributed and remote first or we're only in the office for two days a week and we got this four day mapping program that she's laying out in the book or three days, I can't remember if it is. My approach to it is a little bit. It's a lot leaner than the traditional approach. It's very simplified. Really. The most important things that I want people to focus on are the steps in the process and the timing. I think that's where you get, that's the 20%, where you get 80% of the value in knowledge work. It's just simplifying and clarifying what's actually happening because otherwise it doesn't really happen. The teams aren't really clear on how the whole value stream comes together. Most of the time they're not even familiar with the term value stream. So expecting them to go from zero to here's what the spectacles mean and the Kaizen burst means that to me I think is a leap that I don't expect people to take. I remove all of that from my mapping process and the most that I look at is really layering on extra dimensions on top of that basic skeleton of steps and timing as needed. It's following this concept of graduated complexity that I think is really important. Let's cover the basics and then we'll add more and more as we see value in adding it, but not dictating that it has to cover percent complete and accurate or else it's not a real value stream map or that we have to do value added time or else it's not a real value stream map. That may be so by official definition, but I think I'd love to spend an hour with every team just covering the basics and then we can go back if that's valuable, we can go back and add more. But saying that either this is four days or you don't do it at all and it's not going to be good unless you spend four days on it, I think that sets the bar a little high for people and I think those a lot of opportunity to hit low hanging fruit well below that threshold.

So okay, so what I'm curious, like I'm genuinely curious. I'm on your website kind of poking around a little bit visibly tackle your unique challenges and I see what I assume is what you're like sort of a sketch of a value stream map, a digital one. So I mean back to my question, do you create like a current state Map and a future state map, or do you just start with how's it working now and how do we make it better?

I apologize, I skipped entirely over that part.

Yeah, that's okay.

I actually like covering current state, ideal state and future state. And I know a lot of people don't do ideal state, but I'm a big fan of ideal state because. And the flow. For anyone who's not familiar, it's basically your current state. You're looking at what's happening right now. Your ideal state. You look at what could it look like if we could do anything if we were to redesign this from scratch, if we didn't have the constraints that we have, if we didn't have the dependencies we have and within the laws of physics and reasonable reality. Because you don't want to go to now it's a one step process. We just press a button and magic happens. But I think that the ideal state for me is the opportunity for the team to get creative and to step outside of what they assume are their limiting constraints. Things that they just take for granted that are just this is just the way things happen and there's no getting around it. I find it's a very good way of energizing the team and seeing what are those creative ideas that are kind of hidden in people's heads that might actually give us a huge boost or a very dramatic improvement opportunity that we wouldn't find otherwise unless we were prompting people to think big. And so I like the ideal state for that. And then we come to future state and that's basically kind of inspired by and energized by the ideal state, but bringing us right back to Earth and saying, okay, well, in the next three to six months, what could we do? What could we do given our current scenario? And I think that that combination is really powerful. So I'm a big fan of that sequence.

Right, right. So are you. Do you kind of ditch all the traditional value stream mapping icons and whatnot and simplify it or how do you go about that? Or you do it on a big piece of paper on the wall with post it notes or what's your style?

Yeah, so the style was very simplified back when I was doing it in person on a whiteboard. I would actually come in with like, usually teams don't have a lot of access to whiteboard. So I'm coming with these big sheets of whiteboard.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Paper I love. They stick to the wall.

Yeah, I'd slap that up on the wall. Yeah, they're impossible to erase.

Right, right, right. Don't screw up. Yeah.

Yeah, well, they're fine. It's just you gotta, you gotta make sure you wipe them down before you bring them home because if you wait a couple days, it's on there. Good. So I'd map that up very, very simple. So just text and numbers and very, almost oversimplified. But as soon as Covid hit and everything was remote, I started using mural and just basic post its and text. And that to me gave me. It was a big advantage actually. It meant that the difference between me and the people that I was helping shrunk because I could show people you can make it look exactly like this. You can make a map that looks just as good as mine. And so I didn't want to make it very sophisticated or stylish because I really would like people to be doing this on a regular basis. And that kind of closed the gap between. I've got decent handwriting on a whiteboard. I've been at it a while. It's very legible, it's easy to read. Most people, I think you tell them to go write something on a whiteboard and it's like you're asking them to public speak. There's a bar there and I don't like that. I don't like anything that gets between people and expressing themselves or doing the thing that they want to do. So I like that mural really lowered that bar and made it extremely simple and so I could show people how easy it is to put it together. Which to me is fantastic because it's lowering the amount of work that I have to do. I can focus on where I really add value, which is not creating post it notes. It's sharing my insights and my experience from doing this for 10 years now. So it really just got all that toil and detail out of the way so that I could focus on where I add the most value and then sharing that with other people and saying you can cover the basics too. And then you can focus on where you can really add value yourself.

Yeah, we'll link to it in the show notes. But on your website here you have an example of a current state value stream map of employee onboarding. And then right below it is a future state map of employee onboarding. And as you describing, so you arrival greeted and so forth and all these various steps to the process and then with a time above it, so sort of the what I would call the value added time. And then you have some queue time or some waiting time or processing Time in between these steps. So it looks like you're, you know, you're tracking time, you know, for the activity and then time in between the process steps. Is there anything else? So is that really an efficiency, productivity thing that you're going after, or is that your primary emphasis?

Yeah, it's really about just boiling it down to the simplest pieces that are going to deliver value. And the other challenge that I was trying to address was making it readable to anybody. Whether you just started in the company yesterday and you've never heard of this thing before, or you're in executive leadership and you don't care about the special lingo and the lexicon and you're just looking for. Just give me the gist. Give me the thing that I need to know. I want to appeal to what both of those scenarios and make it accessible to each of them. My current practice is that's kind of a simplified illustration of what I would digitize back in the day. But now with Mural, I haven't gone back and actually updated all of those graphics because I still kind of hope to be back in a couple of boardrooms in the next little while. And I'm not sure if I'm going to be using Mural in those cases.

Yeah. Or a combination maybe of the two. Right. I don't think it's going to be either or. Right.

Exactly. Yeah. And that was kind of always a strategy. Was like, what? Like, I'm not going to force you to use my tool either. If you guys want to use Google Drawings for this or you want to.

Jamboard, you know, is another one. People will use Google Jamboard.

Who cares? Yeah, right. I think, you know, tooling is. Is not a. It's not a hurdle. It shouldn't be a hurdle, and it shouldn't be an excuse either.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

You mentioned Karen's book and big great friends with Karen, and she's been on the show before, and. And she's doing awesome work. You mentioned, like, the one thing in her teaching that I. I personally am a big fan of. You mentioned it was, like, percent correct and accurate. You know, it's a. It's sort of a. Yeah, maybe it's a tougher one, you know, because you got to really get into it. But, you know, I could argue if, you know, in a. In a, let's say, an onboarding process, if there was, like, massive errors happening in a particular step that you constantly had to go back to. Right. Because it was never right the first time. Right. Then that that's going to blow up. Right. Your. Your efficiency. Right. So, like, how do you account for something like that if you have terrible quality in a particular area? Or, I mean, it doesn't matter if people are scared of it or not. It's the reality. We stink in this particular area and we got to get better and we got to identify that somehow on the map. So how do you go about that?

Yeah, so I still do, I think, probably with the exception of one or two scenarios where they really had a time crunch and they really just wanted to kind of like, get a. Get a taste for mapping. I always do percent complete and accurate. And it is really challenging in a software context because complete and accurate isn't well understood in almost every team.

Yeah. You'd have to define it.

There's no concept. Exactly. And it has to be just defined for every activity.

Sure.

So, and another big departure, and I think this is. This is probably like Karen just so far ahead of me in terms of the rigor and experience and even the theory behind this. Like, she's just at another level, and I have so much. She's just a hero of mine. I'm trying to bring a vastly simplified version of this to the software world that's tailored for all of the complexity and nuance that exists there where there is no solid understanding of even value, these concepts of quality and value. People know when code is broken, but who knows when a story is complete and accurate? Right. Because you could lay out your story as, you know, as a user. I want to click on this button so that I can create a new account. And if your story definition is that, then maybe that's complete for you and maybe that's accurate. But that could get all the way to development. And then a developer can look at that and say, this is not enough information for me to do anything. And so in what sense was it complete and accurate? Right. Is it. Where are you drawing those boundaries and what is complete enough and what is accurate enough? And a lot of these things, it's not like you're inspecting at the next stage to validate. You might be inspecting eight stages later and connecting it back to where the real percent complete and accurate challenge was. Can be a big headache to try and find out, okay, well, where did the quality break down here? Where was the information missing from? In a lot of cases we have, things get thrown back, and they can be thrown back multiple times. In software, you've got code review where you have maybe a senior engineer look at a junior engineer's work and toss it back to them. But then that junior engineer could think, oh, wait, I thought I understood this, but maybe I don't. And then maybe it has to go back to the product owner. And then maybe because of the timeline that they're working on and it becomes a bigger problem, it has to get thrown back into the backlog. So illustrating a lot of these things in the software world gets kind of hairy. And that's where I think that there's, there's a big kind of a void in the software world just because of how creative and varied it is, presents kind of unique challenges.

Okay, so the direction I want to go now is. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts. So at Gamba Academy, we're sort of in the software world. We make videos, right? That's our primary. I mean, this podcast, obviously, but videos, that's our, that's how we pay the bills, right? And so we actually use sort of a Agile Kanban board now, right, to monitor, you know, each video is its own Kanban card. Right. And the, you know, when it's moving through the various phases of our, you know, development process and our production process and post production and back, you know, the IT side and all the rest of it. And so by, at the end of it, you know, we're using some software, right, that it allows us to digitally move cards around. We're not actually doing it on a board on a wall. And you know, at the end we're. It's crazy what these, the software can do now these days it's very advanced, you know, Monte Carlo simulation and all the rest of it. So I'm curious, like, how do you, let's say you got a team of software folks who are all, you know, I know there's a Scrum and then there's a Kanban. Guys, you know, depends on who you're talking to. But let's say it's a team that uses like a Kanb board, a digital Kanban board, and they do have plethora of metrics and they can see where their blockers were and they can see how long things just stopped in certain phases of the process. How do you harmonize with something like that, a scenario like that, with your value stream maps?

That's a really interesting space. And I think that on the one side we have tooling now that provides so much of the data that we used to only have available through mapping and sitting everybody down and getting their best guess of how long something takes. Or you're reverse engineering and trying to go from lead time if this takes that long and that takes that long, but we don't know about this, maybe we can deduce how much it takes by doing the other calculations. I think that the more we have automated data collection, the better. It can give us a big head start and it can validate things. I think that there's also this kind of aspect of perception reconciliation where we think something might take a long time, but if we look at the numbers, it's not actually taking that much time at all. Or maybe there's something else that's taking a dramatically longer time to complete. And so that reconciliation of like, okay, here's what we think, here's what sits in our heads. But if we look at the data, maybe we're correcting some assumptions. And so I like the idea that you might have a source of truth, you might have JIRA or you might have Trello or something, some reporting or value stream management software that gives you a nice head start. But even when we have all the data perfectly collected, just the opportunity of the team to kind of step outside the daily work and look at all of it. How often do we do that?

No, I agree.

How often do we look at all this data we're collecting? All the time. And in a context, a useful context, we can go and pull metrics, but unless you have a goal y and something that you're trying to do, all the data in the world can be just noise.

Yeah, well, our, our personal story, Gamba Academy peeled the curtain back a little bit. So we, before we started using this Kanban software package that we, that we love, we're. I don't want to say the name because I want to. You know, we're working on possibly doing, using in them some videos and whatnot, but it's not done yet. But the. We were using literally a Google spreadsheet and the team would just literally go in and move the card, if you will, by typing a date in a cell. And that meant, hey, we're at this point now. And so we were like manually calculating how long it took to get from this point to that point and whatnot. And so at the end of it, we had this massive spreadsheet. I'm like, what the hell is it telling us? To your point, my ex words were we need to put some post it notes up on the wall and we need to summarize this monster spreadsheet in a basic vsm. So it sounds exactly sort of like your approach. Am I right?

That is exactly the goal. It's just, you Know, I think that there's so much value in just stepping away from all the hustle and bustle and separating that signal from the noise and doing it together. Right. I mean, we can do these things. We do these things individually all the time, opening that spreadsheet and trying to make sense of it. And maybe they do, but then how often is that going to get percolated to the rest of the team or the organization? How often is that learning being shared and what's that opportunity for people to come together and gain that appreciation of? Here's your piece of the puzzle. Here's my piece of the puzzle. I appreciate yours. I see how I affect you by being upstream of you and you can understand what I'm doing because I'm downstream of someone else or something else that is huge. That I think builds a strength in the team that few other things do.

I love it. So, you know, what I appreciate about your approach is it's almost like to me it feels like, and maybe this isn't the right word and I apologize if it's not how you want it presented, but it's almost like a minimalist meets value stream mapping. Right. And sort of like, how do we simplify it down to, you know, we can. Everybody can get on board with it, everybody can do it. And then, you know, we work together and we collaborate and we make stuff better. That's my summary of your approach. How did I do?

That's a beautiful summary and I really appreciate that in the terms that you placed it. I think it's very generous. I think I came into this space feeling very much like an outsider. I don't have a Six Sigma belt of any kind. I came to lean, I came to value stream mapping from the outset from just stumbling into it. There's folks like Karen just so far ahead of me. I just figured, what's the thing that I can contribute that leverages my strengths as a minimalist? I'm wearing one of two uniforms.

Oh, I didn't know you were really a minimalist.

Oh, very much so.

Oh, I didn't know. Okay.

That informs a lot of what I do and a lot of my approach. And so I'm just trying to bring something as an alternative to.

Did you say you have two outfits? Is that what you just said?

Two uniforms? I got multiple copies, but I got a bunch of black T shirts and a bunch of black button down shirts and a couple of black pairs of pants. And I'm kind of like a Steve Jobs thing where I don't have to think about getting dressed every day.

How many pairs of socks do you have in your drawer?

I think I'm at probably 12 pairs of socks.

That's a decent amount. It's a decent amount, Steve. They might have to work on that a little bit.

Yeah, well, I don't pack them all when I go traveling. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. My business partner, Kevin, one of my business partners, he wouldn't call himself a minimalist, but he pretty much is. He. He comes to Texas every once in a while from Houston, California, and he'll stay here for a week. And he gets off the plate with this little backpack, and I'm like, where's your bag? He's like, I got it right here. And he's always got different clothes on. It's not gross or anything, you know, so. But I don't know how he does it.

I mean, part of that was. Part of that was, you know, just a reaction, having to travel for business all the time.

Yeah.

Like, how do I make this as simple as possible? Yeah. And, you know, if you repeat something, I mean, we know this, we know this from Lee. If you repeat something often enough, you're going to find the spiky edges and you're going to round them off. Eventually you're going to figure out what's where the opportunities are for improvement.

Yeah. I love it, man. Steve, this has been a lot of fun. I've really enjoyed. This is a different feel from some of our past episodes on VSM and all that, but I think it's great, you know, I mean, there's, there's so many different ways to make the world better. Right. And I don't. I think we got to be careful with Dogma. I think we got to be careful with. This is the only way to do it because the book says it, you know, and so I really appreciate your style and your, your, Your humility and, and, yeah, I'm super happy that you, you came onto the show.

Well, I, I really appreciate the time. I mean, it's. I honestly, I think if it weren't for the last name coincidence, I might not have the courage to reach out to you and set this up, because I just, you know, I kind of feel like a tourist in the space coming from a completely different angle and, you know, with folks like Karen leading the way. Have you ever connected with Karen contribute? I have, yeah. We've. I mean, I like almost everything that she puts out on LinkedIn, but we've chatted back and forth a couple times. But, you know, it's Reminding me that I got to reach out and.

Yeah, well, I mean, I think what you find in this community of ours, this. This lean community in particular, it's just. It's like a. A little family, you know, and there's some dysfunction, you know? Like, today I was on LinkedIn, and these two guys, you know, yelling at each other about, you know, kanban and flow and dropping big. My Japanese sensei said this, and I'm like, oh, my gosh. I was like, do you guys have a job? What are you doing? Y. You know, sitting on LinkedIn, fighting with each other, you know, but. But for the most part, everybody's very welcoming, everybody's very curious, and they want to learn and they want to help each other. And so I think, man, come join the family officially, man, come. Once conferences get rolling again, you know, go to Ame. I don't know if you've ever been, but Ame is probably the biggest, you know, lean conference. And it's not just manufacturing. I mean, it's manufacturing in a name sort of thing, but it's a. It's a great, great conference, and just networking with people, and you'd fit right in, my friend. Trust me. Plus, you know, got a cool last name, man. You'd be like, hey, you the guy on the videos? Oh, that's awesome.

I appreciate that very much.

How. How can people best connect with you, Steve?

Well, you know, through my website. Website would be awesome.

What is that?

People are interested in what I'm up to. Visible is. There's a contact form there, but Steve at Visible is. Goes directly to me, and I'd love to hear from anyone who's curious about this. I'd love to hear from anyone who disagrees with the minimalist approach, too. Like, I love hearing different opinions with different experiences. That's also all wonderful stuff. So, yeah, I love. I love just generating these conversations. It's a lot of why I do these podcasts is to start conversations and keep them going, and for sure. So very much appreciate the opportunity to do that.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, this is episode 382, so, folks, just go to GembaPodcast.com look for episode 382, and we'll link to Visible. What's the story on. Is. What, Is that some software thing or what?

It's the last domain available.

Oh, is that it? Okay. Okay. Yeah, Visible is probably your pretty popular. Pretty popular name, I guess, right? So, yeah, good stuff. All right, Steve, well, thanks again for coming on, and keep mapping those processes, my man.

Thanks very much. Appreciate it.

All right, Take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been 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, 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.