GA 392 | Using Lean on a Horse Farm with John Knotts

True continuous improvement is where everyone at every level is identifying solving problems every day. And that doesn't mean that everybody's like a green belt or a black belt to be able to get them through it. It means that everybody has an understanding of what process improvement is.

Today I'm excited to welcome John Knotts to the show. Now, John recently joined Gemba Academy as a senior coach lean in Six Sigma. And so John' role really here is to help in our coaching and our certification side of our business. So he'll be coaching green belts and black belts and master black belts and lean practitioners and, and everything in between and just helping with some, maybe just coaching for folks that even aren't going through certification here at Gemba Academy. But he's got an incredible background, lots and lots of experience, and we're super excited to have him as part of the team. Now today on the podcast, we get into some really interesting conversation, just continuous improvement in general and some of the things that we really need to have in place organizationally if you hope to have this so called culture of continuous improvement. And then towards the end of the podcast, we took a completely different direction. I had no idea we were headed this way, but it was super fun. John also has a lot of background with horses. In fact, his wife and John have a ranch in San Antonio where they have horses and they do western horse writing and English and everything in between. And, and so he talks a little bit about how he's been able to apply continuous improvement principles to that business. So showing that, you know, this whole idea of we're different, you know. Well, no, nobody's really different. Process improvement really applies to anyone that has people or processes or anything in between that does apply. And so that was a really, really fun conversation to kind of wrap things up. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 392. Again, gembapodcast.com, look for episode 392. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. John, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going great. Thanks for inviting me.

Yeah, man, thanks for coming on. So I mentioned in a little intro there, you didn't hear that, but a little intro that just played for the audience that you're our newest team member to Gemba Academy. So welcome to the, to the family. How's everything been going? And by the way, you only share the good things, you don't share any of the bad things on the Podcast.

Well, I, you know, I've known Gemba Kennedy for a long time and I. I'm really enjoying working with them. I. It started coaching, I think last. Last week, maybe, maybe two weeks ago, doing some group coaching with Steve and, you know, already starting to meet some of the candidates and get some of the work shifted over. We're looking at, you know, the different programs that are out there and ways that we can improve things. And I'm really looking forward to what's going to happen next year.

Yeah, it's going to be awesome. It's going to be awesome. So. Well, it's fun having you on and I know we'll probably have you on many more times down the road. I don't know how many times Steve has been on, but, you know, a few. But. Well, I. Then. I know you have listened to the show, John, but we do like to kind of get things going with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one?

So I'm going to. I'm going to go with one that really is improvement focused. I always love this quote from Helmut Schmidt. The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. I love that one.

Nice. I've never heard that. That's really good.

Yeah, I love that quote.

Very cool. Well, John, tell us a little. Well, I already know, but tell us, tell the audience a little bit about your background, maybe how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff. And then. Well, you know, everybod knows what you're up to these days. You're working for Gamba Academy. So. So, so tell us a little bit about your background, though.

I got involved in process improvement back in the TQM era with the United States Air Force.

Okay.

And they were just starting to roll out quality Air Force program. And I was a cop at the time in the Air Force, and, and I started going to all these classes because I was at a closure base and I had an opportunity to attend a lot of these trainings. And they wanted to. Because they wanted to have a lot of butts and seats for the training. They would give you whatever opportunity you could to take these classes. And I really started to enjoy what they were teaching. And eventually I had the opportunity to retrain out of the COP career field into a career field called manpower and quality. And they were looking for. They needed to boost that organization by 500 positions across the Air Force. And they were looking for people that would stay in place. And I was over in Germany, so I had an opportunity to retrain and stay in Germany and Start working in that field. And that field. We were management engineers, we were process improvement practitioners and we were strategic planners that work directly for senior leadership officers and enlisted. When I got out of The Air Force 11 years later, retired after 21 years, I went to go work with Booz Allen Hamilton at one of the top 10 consulting firms in the nation, specifically in their strategy and organization team, which part of what we did was process improvement. That was part of the responsibility. But I worked kind of across the gamut and then eventually I left them and I went to go work for USAA in San Antonio. And I was, I had four major engagement with them. But one of the things that I did there is I helped re engineer their entire process improvement program, which was really exciting and done a little consulting on the side with my own business and now working with Gemba.

Yeah, I love it. Very good, very good. So I guess it's been a few weeks ago we actually posted a blog article that you wrote and we'll link to that in the show notes. People can go check it out. But I think the title of the article was something like how to build a culture of Continuous improvement. Which is a pretty big phrase there. Culture of continuous improvement and something that we talk about a lot within our movement. So I guess question I have for you, in your opinion, what does continuous improvement really look like in an organization?

That's a really great question and it is a very loaded statement. Building a culture of continuous improvement. Yeah. What I've seen over the years, I've been doing this for like 30 years, is that most companies, they look at process improvement as a program. I even mentioned that I got involved in the Quality Air Force program. So when you treat it like a program, what happens is you tend to stand up some type of function in these process improvement teams, maybe there's just one team and then they go out there and they start mapping everything. Because when you, when you go and you get trained to be a practitioner, one of the first things that you do is you understand the problem. And that involves mapping. So everybody thinks that process management, creating this kind of environment means you got to map everything. So you spend a whole lot of time running around mapping stuff. And then we have these practitioners that are out there running process improvement projects and reporting out process improvement metrics. But that's not really continuous improvement. What that is is a bunch. It's just a tactical team that's out there problem solving and paratrooping in to whenever there's a problem. True continuous improvement is where everyone at Every level is identifying, solving problems every day. And that doesn't mean that everybody's like a green belt or a black belt or a lean practitioner. It means that everybody has an understanding of what process improvement is and they understand the basic tools to be able to get them through. Doesn't mean that we don't need that process improvement team, but their role changes. So if you want to build continuous improvement in your organization, you have to start by teaching everybody how to use the very basics of data analytics tools. Control chart, Pareto chart, and a box plot. It's really all you need. One of the things that I often see in processes that people don't focus on is they don't understand what a defect is. They don't want to say that there's a defect in their process. What they will identify is, oh, I do that differently. It's an exception to the way they actually work. So when you receive something downstream from another office and it doesn't have a piece of information which prevents you from doing your job, part of your process is to set that aside. And then when you get a break, you call up that office that sent it to you and you say, hey, I need this piece of information. The problem is that exception happens 15, 20 times in a day and it causes rework stoppage. All kinds of problems are occurring there, but people just see that as the part of their process until they learn to identify what's actually a defect and then to start counting those defects, which. All that takes is a simple check sheet.

Yeah.

A piece of paper with a list of the, you know, the 5 to 10 defects that you'd normally have in your organization. And every day you just put a check next to them. And at the end of the day, you put that in Excel and then you can look at that with a control chart, a Pareto chart, and a box plot and you can see what's going on. So what I see is the need for leaders to empower and engage their employees at all levels to identify and solve their problems. And then you have a culture of continuous improvement. And it's supported by a process improvement team that can provide for training, mentoring, coaching, and solving the bigger problems that are beyond what's the capability of the person on the front line, wherever that front line might be.

Yeah. And I think what's so critical about that is so often kind of, as you alluded to, if you do have this so called, you know, process improvement group, Lean team, operational excellence, team, whatever, you know, sometimes the organization looks at them as like well, they'll take care of it, you know. Well, exactly. It's one group of people. And one group of people can't, you know, fix all of the ills of an organization. Right. It takes everyone. So it's almost like everybody has to kind of do do their part. Right. And to create this culture. So. No, I really appreciate that you delineated that, so that's great. So. Hey, so something you didn't mention in your, in your background is I understand you're also a pretty, pretty prolific author, written books and tons of blog articles and things over the years. But I know in your book Overcoming, I think it was, what's it called, Overcoming Organizational Myopia. Yeah. Breaking Through Siloed Organizations. You talk about how important employee engagement and change readiness is as, as it relates to continuous improvement. Without employee engagement and without change readiness, this is going to be really difficult to have this culture. So I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit more about the importance of employee engagement and change readiness.

What I've seen over the years is that a lot of businesses, they struggle with problems that they don't understand. And typically what happens is they say, well, we're just going to change things. We're going to tear down the silos, or we're going to make an organizational change. We're going to move the deck chairs on the Titanic, whatever it might be. They're. They're responding to silo situations in organizations. And silos are really important. We separate things like human resources and marketing for a reason. Functional specialization. When you start building those silos, though, things happen. And if you don't have employee engagement and change readiness in these organizations while you're building this, then you're going to struggle. But a lot of people are like, oh, well, employee engagement, that's like a number that I chase. I go and I do a survey once a year, and I try to improve one specific number that doesn't engage people. You can't force people to be engaged. You have to create an environment that encourages engagement. So people will often ask, like, whoa, what engages people then? And I see it as four things. The first is you have a really strong mission and purpose. People want to come to work every day because you have a great organization. You have really good communication up and down the chain and laterally across the organization. People talk. There's no. The walls aren't up, so the communication stops. The third is that you are developing your people. Everybody wants to be developed, and they want people to develop them when they work for Their organization, they want to feel like, I'm going somewhere with this company. I'm not just stagnating in this job. The last one, which is really important to continuous improvement is there's an emphasis on quality. What I mean by that is that everybody who comes to work, they look around them and they see everybody else who's doing the job differently is doing the job wrong. Because we're never doing anything wrong. We're doing it right. If we weren't doing it right, then we would change it and then we'd be doing it right. So what happens is you're experiencing a situation of a lack of standard work, a lack of accountability. To be able to build quality in your organization and that that fourth factor of engagement, you need to set good expectations as a leader. You need to have metrics and measurements that you are watching on a regular basis. And you need to hold people accountable to the expectations, the metrics and measures that you set. When you do those things, those four things, then you will build that environment for engagement and people will feel, oh, I want to help because if they're not engaged, they're not going to step up and do anything for your organization. Maybe like whatever, you know, like I'm just here to collect a paycheck. I'm not here to help. And the second piece of that is change readiness. We talk about change management all the time. It's like the super buzzword today. The problem is, is changes are occurring so fast in organizations and we'll leave Covid out of this. But changes occur so fast that if you're managing them, you're too late. People are passing you by. If you want to be able to keep up with the disruptors and handle things, you need to create an environment where change is the accepted norm and everybody is simply just managing the changes that occur. They're actually seeking them out. And it's only leaders that can create this environment of change readiness. So you notice these are both environments can't force people to do this. You have to give them the ability. And I like to talk about change readiness by leveraging pro size AD CAR model. So they have, they have. The AD CAR is AD K A R awareness. Normally it's used in management, but you can use this to build a change ready organization. First you start with awareness and you teach people. Why is it important that we need to seek out change? Why do we need to be at the forefront of our business? What are the threats that are facing? So that means being open, honest, authentic and transparent. Oh that goes back to employee engagement, communication. We want to be at the forefront of this change. And then you want to build the desire in the employees to make changes. And that means you need to tune into everybody's favorite radio show, wiifm, what's in it for me? And you need to understand what they're feeling and why they would want to change. And one of the reasons why people don't change is the third letter in adkar, and that's knowledge, because they know their job. But if I improve this job, I might actually put myself out of work. And I only know how to do this job. So it's incumbent on the leadership, the organization, to build what I call business transferable skills. You're teaching people how to be a good communicator, how to work in data analytics, how to do process improvement, how to manage change. All these skills that it doesn't matter where you go in an organization, you're valuable and you, we can just teach you how to do X job, because any X job can be learned. But those soft skills are really hard to master, and you get really good at them. You're not afraid of losing your job. And then I talk about empowerment and the importance of empowerment. Well, that's ability. I'm giving you the ability. It means I'm empowering you to make the changes that are required to be made, or I'm identifying who you go to to get help. I'm giving you the team, the resources to be able to go to a green belt or a black belt or a master black belt in your organization, a sensei, whatever, to seek out, hey, I don't know how to fix this problem, and I need your help. Can you help me through this? And then the last piece is reinforcement, and that's that you're constantly recognizing the efforts of the employees. And one of the things that we did in usa, I love this, is we, we had this executive and he used to say, 100 pennies equals a dollar. So I was like thinking about this and I was like, yeah, 100 pennies equals a dollar. It was all about, you know, like, didn't matter what size the improvement was, just as long as we were doing improvements. So we went and we printed up this big, huge dollar bill. And then around it, we printed these pennies on eight and a half by 11 pieces of paper. And we slipped them in these little cards. We had a hundred of them. And every time an employee made an improvement, we flipped a penny and we count. We basically, we recognized everybody every couple of months. About this program and what they did, and they would come up and present what they identified and what they did about it and the benefit of it. And we would have executives there. And I remember our goal was when we got to 100 pennies, we were going to do this burger burn for all the employees. Big party. And we had the chief administration administrative office officer for USAA there, and he was speaking. And then the employees got up and they talked about their pennies. And we had just flipped our 89th penny, so we had 10 more pennies to go to get to our burger burn. And he was so impressed by those employees getting up there and talking about the improvements and looking at that board and seeing 89 improvements upon the board that the employees came up with on their own. He stood right there and he said, when you guys have the burger burn, I'm buying the burgers and I'm flipping them. And in that room, the executive director, he got up on us, he stood up on a chair and he held a brainstorming session right there to figure out what could we do to get us over that line. And they had 15 ideas in the room, and we had the burger burn a month later. Wow. With our hundred and five pennies. Wow. So that's. That is an environment where you are people. They're just ready to make the changes and they're excited about working for that organization and making it better.

Yeah. You know, there's. There's so many parallels to. I don't know if you've read the book Dan Pink Drive what motivates people. And he talks about. He contrasts intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation and talking about, you know, extrinsic motivation, meaning the carrot, you know, that you dangle in front of the carrot or in front of the. The, you know, go, go do this certain thing, and then you'll get a bonus or whatever it might be. And that works okay for. In. In some cases, but this intrinsic motivation is far more, you know, far, far superior really, in the long run. Whereas it's mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Right. And. And you. You essentially all mastery, autonomy, and purpose are definitely intertwined in those things that you just mentioned. But I feel like it's. So it's so important for us to realize that, you know, ultimately what motivates people is that they want to feel like they're really doing something, like it really matters. Right. There's a bigger purpose they want to know, and then they don't want to be micromanaged. They want to have some autonomy, you Know, and, and then mastery. Right. Like being able to get. I'm getting better at this stuff, you know, and I feel like I'm growing as a person. And boy, when we start to recognize the needs of recognition and all the things that you just mentioned, you tie all that together. It's a very powerful combination. Right. That will really. It's almost impossible to stop an organization at that point when you get those things embedded and, and growing organically. Do you agree?

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because people, they know that every day that they're doing something, they're making a difference and you'll start seeing it. When I was working in there doing this kind of stuff with that team for that Pennies project, I remember this lady was document processing operation and she came up to me and she said, every day I do this process and it prints out these two pieces of paper. They were identical. And she held them up in front of me and she said, one of them I take and I throw in a trash can. And she demonstrated throwing into the trash can. And he said, the other one, I take over next door to the contractor and they're going to scan it into the customer's record and we're going to pay them for that. So why can't I just do that? And what it, what the problem was is that the system, so system driven silo here coming out of the bank was designed for an old way that they would take one piece of paper and they would put it into a records box, which we didn't do anymore. And the second piece of paper we would give to another employee who had been outsourced. That whole unit of scanning and recording had been outsourced to a third party. So there was really no cost associated with it at the time. And I was like, that makes perfect sense. Like, what can we do about that? So she called up the bank and she said, this is what I'm doing. And they're like, oh, we can make a fix. And they improved it and it was done. Yeah, I mean, she did it maybe 20, 30 times a day. But you know, think of all the paper that she was throwing in the trash can and the extra money that we were paying a contractor to do work that she could just do by pressing F5 on the keyboard. Amazing.

I love it. I love it. Hey, John, I want to just change gears a little bit and I'm more curious and digging into, into your story a little bit. I'm curious. I know over the years you've done a lot. You've coached thousands of People, and you've made, made impacts, you know, military and every and everything in between. Even a horse farm, for what I understand. Right, yes. I'm curious, is there anything that stands out that maybe you're, you're, I don't know, extra proud about something that you've done in the past or been a part of?

I, I, I've been a part of a lot of really big things. So one of the things, obviously, I. You said, my wife and I, we own a horse farm. We have a hundred acres just north of San Antonio, Texas, and we board horses and we teach both Western and English riding. I have an entire staff that runs things. We're just kind of like the figureheads. My wife wanted to have this horse farm, and it's. A lot of people will say, oh, well, you know, that, that process improvement stuff is great, but you can't do it here.

We're different.

Yeah, we're different. And you don't understand. We're unique is the word. And so what I did, I, you know, here, being one of the leaders of the organization and understanding this stuff, I apply it. And the first year we were here, I created a presentation that I call Leaning into a Horse Farm. And it's about applying known lean solutions to problems at something as weird and unique as a horse farm. And I talk to people about the improvements that we've made, but I also give them very simple tools and ways to identify when they should make these improvements and how to do them. And because it's really in lean, most of the stuff that you do in lean, there's a solution for that. Yeah. Oh, that's happening. There's a solution for that. So when you walk in and you see something disorganized, what's the number one thing we do?

5S.

5S, right? Oh, it's disorganized. Let's clean it up. Let's get it all organized. Then we can start working on something like standard work or. But you can identify when you see something. That's why we do the Gemba walks. And we gather, we just pay attention, and we're like, oh, there's an opportunity for this, and there's an opportunity for that. They just present themselves. So by walking them around the farm and showing them what we do, I can demonstrate this in action. And people are like, oh, that makes perfect sense. So one of the first things that I did here when we first started, we put all of the hay and the alfalfa in the middle of our barn. So 22 stall barn. And we put it in the two stalls in the very middle. But our feed room was right on the end by the door. So we would back our Kawasaki mule up to the feed room, and we would get out the all the feed and we put them in the buckets, and we would stack the buckets in order, because we at least were smart enough to do that in the order that we were going to deliver them. Because you cannot feed a horse different food on a different day. It's like dogs, you know, they'll throw. They can't throw up, so they get sick. But a dog will throw up, a horse can't. And then. And I'm sitting there feeding with my wife, and we're kind of walking through this process. I walk down to get flakes of hay, which are like, they break off, basically, hay Blake breaks off in these flakes. And I carried them back to the mule and put them in the back of the mule. And I'm sitting there looking at this. And then just like, there was no time study. There was no spaghetti diagram. It was just common sense. And I was like, could we just move the alfalfa and the hay and put it in the stalls that are directly across from the feed room so we don't have to walk anymore? He's like, that's probably not a bad idea. And we did it. And that's how simple process improvement can be. And it's something that I, you know, like, I can show you this is how you do it. Which I think is just, you know, when people come out here and I just demonstrate that and they see things and they're like, oh, what about this? And what about that? And suddenly it's like, you can do this anywhere. Yeah.

Oh, I love it. I love it. And so the next time I have you on, I'm going to bring my daughters on. And as I mentioned to you, I have daughters that are very passionate barrel racers. So if people don't know what barrel racing is, it's. You jump on a horse and you run around these barrels as fast as you, and you can't knock them over and all the rest of it. And I know nothing about horses, I know nothing about barrel racing short of going out and knowing, oh, they knocked it over, that's bad. I know that, right? But I'm studying them or watching them, and they're always filming their races and all the rest of it. And I gotta think that there's some science that we can be applying to this barrel racing process, because it's like, golly you always knock that one barrel over. What's going on here? So maybe next episode we can. Come on, we can talk bell racing and I'll bring my daughters on. How's that?

So my. My barn manager here, she is a top level barrel racer and she teaches barrel racing here. And we talk about this all the time because there is a science to this sport. All of it, English or Western, Whatever you're doing, there's definitely a science to everything. You've got physics going on and geometry and. Oh, yeah. Well, you're not paying attention.

I didn't even know this is a thing. The chiropractor comes over and works on the horse, and all of a sudden the horse is happy. I'm like, what, are you kidding me?

Like, who knew, you know, that horses throw a rib out, like, almost all the time? No, they'll just throw a rib out. Oh, wow. And it takes a chiropractor to put that rib back in. And all the time that a horse is dealing with some kind of a back or a bone problem, they're struggling. And they. It's not like a horse can just tell you, hey, Ron, I'm hurting. Yeah. So they. They act up in different ways. They might pin their ears, they might try to buck, they might rear that. But, you know, it's. They're trying to tell you something in the only way that they know how. Most sources are, they just want. They want you in your pack. I mean, I don't know if you know this, but we do equitherapy for veterans here at the farm.

I didn't know that.

And any veteran that's struggling with post traumatic stress for the last five years, we've been doing free equitherapy for them for as long as they want.

Wow.

And I see, like, these amazing changes, and it's all a process. Like, everything is a process. Everything in the world is a process. And we go through these processes, this process of teaching them, getting them comfortable, teaching them safety, making it safe, to the point where they're like, okay, I can do this. And then we change out the horse and they think, oh, not a big deal. You know, it's another horse. So horses are all the same and. Nope. They all have a different personality, just like people. Yeah. But it's. It's really interesting to learn how horses communicate to people and how even your emotion when you're getting on a horse, if you're upset, you're angry, something's bothering you, the horse knows it.

That's so funny.

It's like the ultimate lie detector.

Here we are on this lean Six Sigma and we're talking about horses. But so if people are listening, it's a good story, but I actually told my daughter Brenna the other day because she's my oldest daughter and she's getting pretty good and races for the high school team and all the rest of it. But I told her, I was like. Because she's been a soccer player growing up. Right. And she didn't play any. Well, she plays a little bit recreationally now, but used to play more competitively. But she's a real kind of like, intense girl, you know, and she wants to win. Right. She's a real tough soccer player, that sort of thing. And real aggressive and all that. And I said, you know, is there like a thing like when you're getting on that horse, getting ready to run through that deal to, you know, go attack those barrels, like, are you relaxed? Are you feeling. You know? And she talks a little bit about it, but yeah, that's. It's super interesting on how not just horses, but you think about process improvement in business world. When we walk in and we're tight, we're feeling bad or whatever, we got our cameras on and a zoom call every morning, and then it's like, oh, such and such doesn't look happy. These signals are being sent off and it really impacts the way we work with one another. So I think there's so much to be learned with just the way that we're feeling and the energy that we're giving off. And our, you know, our, our, our. I don't know, just our, our behavior and our attitude has such a huge role in, in really how things are going to go.

And you think about, you think about what your daughter does. Like, everything that she does is she. I know she follows a process. She may not have thought about that, but from the getting on that horse, tacking, just tacking the horse up and getting it ready, that's a process. Yeah. That you follow. You do it the same way every time. Because if you don't.

Yep.

You could get hurt or you could hurt the horse.

Yeah.

And you definitely could lose. And you don't want to, you know, you don't want to do that. So, like, if you think about everything, you know, like how, how. What has her behavior, like when she gets on the horse, how does she motivate herself and get herself excited? Because she knows that the minute I get on the horse when I'm excited, that's going to make that horse hot.

Yeah.

And it's going to be excited, too, because it's like, oh, yeah, we're going.

Yeah.

And you know, generally, barrel racing, horses, they're like, let me at it. Yeah, I want to go.

Yeah, exactly. Good stuff.

Why?

Didn't mean for us to talk about horses for the last 10 minutes. But that was fun, John.

But I, that's what, that's why I mentioned that. Because people often say, you can't do this here. Yeah, no, we, you know, we're different. We're unique. Like, no, you're not. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen people do this with making wine. I've seen this in. I. I'd love to take leaders. This is one of the things that I think that this is where they struggle. Leaders will often say, oh, yeah, we need that. Oh, yeah, I've read about that. We need to do that. The problem is they've never seen it. They don't know what it looks like. And we tell all these practitioners, go to Gemba, go see where the work is done. We need to tell our leaders, go see where improvement is being done. I was watching the in the ditch videos on Gemba on the, on the School of Lean, and I'm like, this is what every leader needs to watch. Yeah, they need to watch. This is a case study, watching Paul Akers talk about fast cap. Because otherwise, you don't know what it's like. When I'm here in San Antonio and there are people like, I don't really understand what this looks like. Like, let's go to Toyota, let's go to the Toyota plant. We're not going there as a. This is a fun thing. We're going to go there and we're going to learn. We're going to watch what they're doing and we're going to understand it. We'll go to Heb. I know you know H E B here in Texas, but they have a central pharmacy right here in San Antonio. And it's just amazing to see the thought that went into that and how they operate and how they are constantly approved improving things in their. In that little operation, which is a huge operation, but it's in one room. Yeah, it's. You got to go see it. And too often we have leaders that will say, this, this one quote, I'll know it when I see it. And I just say, no, you won't, because you've never seen it. And you'll never know it when you see it, because you've never seen it. You have no frame of Reference.

Yeah.

So you gotta go see it. You gotta understand what it's like. And then you can be like, wow, that's actually pretty easy.

Yeah.

And I can apply that to everything. And, you know, you. You've been doing this long enough. We turn people into, you know, to people that, like, have a curse. Because you'll be standing in line at McDonald's and be like, what's going on here?

Right, right.

Like, man, your process is all screwed up. Let me get behind that register. Yeah, but it's like everywhere we see process opportunities because we learn to see. Yeah. And that is probably the most powerful thing that we can do for our leaders, is teach them to see. What is it? What should it look like?

Yep, exactly. Ah, good stuff, John. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I know we'll have you back on again down the road and we'll. I'm sure we have all kinds of stories that we could dig out of you, but maybe to wrap things up, why don't you tell folks how they can best connect with you?

Well, the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. I'm very active. I post every day and I engage with people all the time. And I love talking about this stuff. Just providing value and having a conversation around improving your organizations and improving yourself. So connect with me on LinkedIn.

Got it. And we're gonna link to that in the show notes. So this is episode 392. So just go to gembapodcast.com look for episode 392 and we'll link to John's LinkedIn there. And yeah, well, thanks again for coming. Coming on, John. Now I know you got some coaching calls coming up here, so get off this podcast and go do some, some work now.

All right. Thank you very much for inviting me out. Appreciate it.

No problem. Take care, John. 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 6 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.