GA 407 | Choosing an Approach to Lean and Six Sigma with John Knotts

Yeah, we have all these extra tools in the tool bag. But it's not like we're really trained to be all that smart. We're just trained to be methodical about it, to visualize it and then ask questions about, well, why is that happening.

Today? I'm excited to welcome John Knotts back to the show. Now John is a senior coach here at Gemba Academy and he's coaching a lot of our certification candidates, going through our green belt, black belt, master black belt courses and all that. And so John's been with us for, well, he mentions at the beginning of the podcast since around August of last year, so time flies. But it's been fun having John on board. He's a super, super smart guy. I've learned a lot and he's really helped our company move forward, really. And so today we have a really interesting topic on the difference between a kind of a project based environment. So like someone going through a green belt or a black belt or a master black belt project type environment, vers a process improvement environment or process management environment. And so we talk about kind of the differences between the two, but then also about how the two can and should really harmonize with one another one leading into the other. So really, really interesting episode. Again, John's a really, really smart guy. He's got a lot of experience and I think you're going to like the episode. And if you do want to learn more about our green belt, our black belt, master black belt, and then we have our, I would argue probably our most popular certific these days is our lean practitioner certification. And all of that's over@gembaacademy.com I suppose not to be a little bit of a commercial here, but sort of there's other people who do some good certification out there. So definitely not knocking anybody out there. But kind of what separates, I believe Gemba Academy from everybody else is the coaching that we provide. It's, it's weekly coaching and we invest hours and hours and hours of our time into each candidate. And really nobody else out there is doing that? Not that I'm aware of. And so yeah, go to Gemba and check out our certification programs if that's something that you're interested in. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. John, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

It's going really good. It's New year.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir, it is new Year. So, hey, I'm excited to have you back on the show. We were looking before we Hit record that you were last on. In episode 392, we talked about using lean on a horse farm, and that was a very fun episode. So folks haven't heard of that one. They should go back and, and hear about on and how he's using lean to. To improve his horse farm and all. All the work that we're doing. That was a fun one to. To record with you. So thanks for, for coming back on.

Thank you. It was an exciting topic to always talk about.

That's right. That's right. Well, hey, as you know, John, we do like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So do you have one?

So I thought it would be appropriate to have a quote for the new year. It's from Max Dupree. It's one of the ones that in my back pocket, we cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are.

What's that mean to you?

Well, obviously, if you don't, you know, you don't actively take effort to change what you're doing, you're never going to improve. And in process improvement, that's a major thing. People are like, we'll keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Yeah. So we get that theory of INSANITY Going.

Yeah, 100%. In fact, I just, I did it. But the episode before this one, episode 406, I think it was four or six, was I did a little solo show just sort of reflecting on 2021 and just all the different things that were on my mind. And it was sort of a, you know, lots of different topics touching on them. And one of them, I was just talking about the importance of being intentional. And to me, like, being intentional is sort of like quit wanting something to happen and actually do something. Right?

Yes, exactly. Well, a lot of people talk about the law of attraction and manifesting and all that kind of thing, but the key is, is that you have to also apply the law of action.

Yeah.

With the law of attraction, you can't just dream about something and hope it's going to happen. You have to take action to make it happen. Yes.

Preach. I love it. Hey, John, if case folks didn't Hear that, episode 390 with you. Tell us a little bit about your background. Tell us how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff, and then tell us what you're doing for. For Gemba Academy these days.

Well, I started in process improvement in 1990 with the Quality Air Force Program TQM back in the day. And I was a cop in the Air Force when cops did everything to the nines. So we made sure that we were always in our best dressed uniforms and spit polish boots. And when it came to the qual Air Force program, we worked really hard to do the best job in that program. In 1998 I retrained into manpower and quality, a career field specifically designed as industrial engineering and process improvement strategic planning for the Air Force. So it became a full time career. I started teaching at Ramstein Air Base in Germany and continued until I retired in 2008. Went to go work for Booz Allen Hamilton in process improvement, organizational change and then I did. I worked for them for three years, went to USA for seven, working on major transformational efforts in their organization. It's a United Services automobile association for those who don't know, but they're a Fortune 100 company here in San Antonio. And I went to go work for myself and started working with Gemba here in September, actually the end of August of last year as a senior coach working with Steve Cain and you helping coach the lean Six Sigma Black belt green belt, soon to be the Lean practitioner certification course and eventually the master black belt course.

Yeah, yeah. Gosh, it's time flies man. August, man. Yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, it's been.

A lot of changes have happened since then.

Yeah, for sure man, for sure. Things are constantly evolving. The world and business and our little company, everything. So anyhow, well, hey, I'm excited for the topic today. I think it's going to be really interesting. What we're going to do is sort of talk about the differences between process improvement projects and process management. And so I thought what we could do, John, to sort of kick things off is maybe define those two terms, process improvement projects and then process management.

So I work obviously working with all these candidates. They are going through this process improvement certification effort. A lot of times people will come into an organization that are certified, they're you know, lean six Sigma, black belt or green belt or something like that. And then their supposed to stand up a program of process improvement for the business. And they often look at it from a perspective of projects. It's just a bunch of projects that I have to work on. Whereas when you think about what you're doing in a process improvement project, it doesn't really translate to improving an organization holistically. So there are a lot of things that you have to look at specifically. You have to look at the way that you run things, the tools that you use, leadership roles. Even the culture of the organization has to change. And that's not just running a bunch of process improvement projects. And when I'm talking to, when I'm coaching the people that are going through this course, we'll talk about some of the different tools that they just learned and how that differs when they're in a process management world and what would work really well to set you up for success for process improvement projects in the future.

So some people I know out there in the world, they're often even critical sometimes of these organizations who are doing a lot of process improvement projects are not critical. Maybe that's not the right word. But you know, if, if they're, if they feel like all you're trying to do, like the people who will make fun, oh, the belts, and they'll sort of mock, you know, oh, what color belt do you have? You know, so they're really being kind of ugly about it, right? Probably because they're jealous they don't have anything themselves. But anyhow, so it comes out as, as ugliness or they're attacking that, that, that sort of. Even in the lean side. Oh, all you do is Kaizen event. Kaizen event. Kaizen event, right. That's all you do is Kaiser's event. So, so what happens? How do they, what's the relationship between a process improvement projects like Kaizen event or green belt or black belt or something like, and process management? I mean, do we need both?

So I think you really do. Obviously organizations, they start with projects, they're like, oh, we need to run some projects here, we need to improve some things that are happening. But eventually you start to figure out that really we need to run an operation that is tight. It's, you know, run a good ship. And that means that you need to be doing a whole lot more than just one off projects to improve specific things that are going wrong. So the difference where that falls is that in a process management world, you're looking more at leaders that are owners of processes, that they're looking at data every day. So like we teach statistical process control as one of the tools in the measure phase of dmaic, although it can be used multiple places in a process improvement project. But in reality, if your organization is operating with statistical process control, you'll know the moment something goes out of whack. Oh, I have an out of control situation. It is common cause, it's not special cause. So we need to do something about it. Let's, let's look and see what's going on. You still need to have the process improvement expertise. And that's where A lot of people, they. What they'll do is they'll stand up this project and they have a bunch of special forces that they just deploy into an area, they fix a problem, and then they leave and they go on to the next firefight. The thing is, is the people that work in those areas, they might already known what the problem was and what the solutions were. But those guys, they don't come in and ask. They just do because they're experts at this. And when they leave, the people who own the process are like, yeah, whatever. I'm going to continue to do it the way I've always done it because I know what I'm doing. And it reverts back to the way it was. And six months later, you know, you have the old process back in place. Yeah. I was talking to somebody just last week. He's working on his process improvement project for a certification, and they were looking at this one machine, and they have three machines, and one of them is not able to run a certain type of product that they have through it. It's not rated for it. The other two machines had been upgraded, but this one hadn't. So he went to the engineering department. He's like, hey, what would it take to upgrade this machine so that we can get more throughput out of this? And they said, we upgraded that machine six months ago. So for six months, they had not been running the product through that machine, and they didn't know it. And this is what happens when you have somebody that just comes in and solves problems for you and you're not involved in that. So in reality, the role of a lean Six Sigma practitioner, a lean practitioner, whatever it is, it evolves into more of what they refer to as a sensei. They're a coach, they're a mentor, they're a trainer. And then when you have the big problems that are end to end and you need a big swim lane process map and you have all these handoffs, that's where they come in. And they help work through the silos of the organization.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I almost see it as, like, I know when I'm coaching people and, you know, they're all excited because they're about to finish and get certified as a black belt or master black belt, whatever it might be. And what I really, I reiterate to them is that this is not a one and done, you know, and so often it is, sadly, you know, a one and done kind of thing. They got their black belt or whatever, and they hang their. Their certificate up on the wall and. And then that's it. Well, no, I saw. Yes. It's actually one and just begun. It's kind of my cheesy saying, you know, that you're just. It's at the beginning. It's almost like when you graduate high school, you know, you're not done. You're just beginning really, your life, you know, or college or whatever it might be. And so I feel like it's the same thing. I feel like these people, these projects, these certification programs, I mean, obviously we have them, so we're a little bit biased. Of course we're not going to say they're bad. I feel like they're good in that they can really empower people and give people the ability then to then go in and as you say, really drive their organization's process management for the rest of their career. Right, right. But if they don't know how to use a control chart or they don't know what a process map is or whatever they're going to be, it's going to be really difficult to, you know, have a good process management program because you just don't have the ability. You're unconsciously incompetent. You don't even know what you don't know. Right.

In the military, we used to have a term called Jeep. So whenever you were the new person in anything, you were called the Jeep. Jeep means just educated enough to pass. And that's exactly what we're producing in these certification programs is somebody who's a Jeep. Yep. They've gone through one project.

Yep.

They've taken a course. They've passed a test. They're dangerous.

Yeah.

Now it's time for them to refine their abilities and work on them.

Yep.

But it's. This is one of the things that, you know, when we teach these tools, one of the things I like to explain to them is when do you use these tools? So process mapping is perfect example of this. A SIPOC is a wonderful tool to use in all situations because it gives you so much information. You have the suppliers, the customers, and the people in the process. Lane, you could take that P and call it people that. That will fill a stakeholder analysis really well. And if you're worried about change management on your project, those are the people that are vested interest in what you're doing. So you better understand if they're going to derail your project. The inputs, process and outputs section of the SIPOC is a specific tool in process improvement called ipo. And it's the things that you can measure in process improvement. You can measure the inputs, you can measure what's going on in the process steps, and you can measure the outputs. If you're looking for voice of the customer, you look, well, who are my customers? What are the outputs? And then I go ask them, what do you expect out of these things? And I get the voice of the customer, I get the critical, the quality from that. But this tool also, if you're sitting in an organization and every one of the different silos in your organization have a side POC of what comes in, what they do with it, and what goes out, and who it goes to, then you now know exactly how your organization runs holistically at a very high level. And you can put people in charge of owning that side POC and everything that operates underneath that, that creates ownership. But the difference, then we get below that, the differences between like a flow chart which just shows the flow of anything. It really doesn't give us a lot of detail to a swim lane flowchart because now we see handoffs. And anywhere there's a handoff, I guarantee there's going to be some kind of defect or queue time. It's going to sit in somebody's inbox. They're going to be kicking it back because it's not right. Because in reality, it's an input to their process. And if it's not right, they're kicking it back. And then you have the value stream map. And the value stream map is a totally different environment. This is a process management tool. It goes on the wall, it's written in pencil, it's got Kaizen bursts all over it, and it's used every day. You create a swim lane process map. You're creating it to put it up in a conference room so that people can see it and go, I didn't realize that you handed off that to me. I didn't know that. I didn't know you needed it like that. And then the, the minute that you're done with your process improvement, that map is useless. Because it's obsolete.

Yeah.

Because it's not something you keep. And I, I love when people who are practitioners who learn swim lane process mapping think that process management is all about creating a bunch of swim lane ma and storing them and looking at them once a year and calling that standard work, because it's not standard work is click here, open this cut and paste here, put it here. That's standard work. It's step by step work. Instructions of how this is how I get it. Done.

Yeah, yeah.

And so it's, it's interesting how these tools that we teach, they have different purposes. If you're going to do a one off process improvement, you just need a flowchart. If you plan on improving this process long term. This is a manufacturing environment and we're going to constantly look at this and make it better and better and better. You definitely need a value stream map on the wall.

Yeah, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about leadership because obviously leadership is critical in any situation. But when we're thinking about a project based environment versus a process management environment, is there any difference in the, in the leadership approaches for those two?

Well, typically leaders, managers, they become sponsors of projects and a lot of times those sponsors aren't necessarily over. They don't own the actual process. It's given to somebody who has some bandwidth to lead that. And then the process improvement practitioner fights to get on their calendar to give them updates on what's happening in this process improvement. Yeah, I've seen this way too much. They're kind of disconnected and they're like, yeah, it's just a project, we're just running it. Whereas process management all boils down to what I was saying about ownership. Now you have like in the agile world, a business owner. That business owner knows everything that's going on with what they own, what they run. They know the technology capabilities, they know the process capabilities, they know the risks that are involved, they know everything about it. And they're the ones that are going to drive standard work, they're going to drive continual data analysis. They're going to be looking at that control chart, a statistical process. They're going to be paretoing out their defects, the different things that they produce. What do I produce the most of, when do I produce it, what day of the week am I busiest or not busy so that I can tell people when they can go to training or something like that. That's where you start thinking in a process mindset instead of I'm just here to make sure that this project gets done and I'm the one who has the checkbook who can approve the spending on something because I'm at that level. And that's where suddenly continuous improvement starts really happening. And your black belts and your green belts, your, they, they can start to step back and just mentor and coach people and guide them.

Yeah. You know, another thing I was just thinking about while you were talking, there was, you know, one of the things that drives me nuts about Domic and you know, in our and we, we teach to make traditionally seize control, blah, blah, blah. But like, I hate control, right. I know. You know, I've talked about this before, like I don't believe you can control anything. Right. Because of entropy. Right. It's either going to get a little bit better or it's going to get a little bit worse. It's really never ever going to go perfectly sideways. Right. Like the stock market, it's either going up or down. I mean, very rarely does it go perfectly sideways. Right. And so I almost like to tell my candidates, you know, hey, think about when we're getting in that final phase. We're sort of wrapping the project up, you know, in the traditional control plan and this and that. Okay, great, have a control plan. That's awesome. But what's your continuous improvement plan? That's how I like all my candidates to finish up their presentation. Like, hey, what are we going to do to make it a little bit better every day forever? Right. And when you do that, you have that mindset, let's just keep making this a little bit better every day. You never have to worry about entropy pulling it back. So I'm wondering if there's that relationship, if there's maybe that harmony between a project rolling into process management because the project got you to a certain point and then process management kicks in and allows you to keep making it a little bit better, two second lean, whatever you want to call it. Right. Forever. What do you think?

Well, you know, so it's one of the things that I'm sure you've seen this with the candidates that you coach all the time, is that most of the projects that they end up working on or getting, they don't have any data. And that's like the first thing. It's like, well, you can't really improve it if you don't know what you're doing. If you don't have any baselines, you can't measure it. You know, I don't need to quote a Drucker quote here, but you know, basically if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

Right.

So once you get those measures in place, suddenly it's like a light has just shined on this. And if you can teach, if the owner, the process owner really cares, you can teach them how to look at this with very simple tools. Pareto control chart, box plot. That's all you need, maybe a check sheet and you just pay attention.

Yeah.

And that's what really the control plan in the control part is all about. It's A Pay attention guide. Yeah. If. If the, if this number goes above this line.

Yep.

This is what you need to do about it. If this number drops below this line, you need to call me. Yep. So it's, it's what if analysis of what's going on in your process? I. It's always amazing when I'm working with a team and I teach them how to start looking at, say, their defects, which they consider to be exceptions in their process. There's nothing wrong. It's just I do something different with that one because it's not the way I expect it when it comes in. But I teach them to start counting those on a trip check sheet, and then I have them put it into an Excel spreadsheet. That's it. And they can see because it automatically populates into a control chart what's going on. And I remember working with this document management team. They had eight processes. They were printing checks. That's what they did. Checks and letters for Lean Perfection. And I go in there and for three months they, I taught them how to do this, and they were checking it off. And I came in and I looked at the data three months later, and I saw all these numbers were dropping practically zeros. And of course, you know, immediately I'm thinking they quit. They quit doing. Using the check sheet. So I was like, all right. Sat down with the guy who's in charge. Hey, what happened? You know, oh, no, we just fixed the problems. We picked up the phone and we called people and said, hey, this is what you're doing. And because they saw, they visualize the problem, when you can see the problem problem, anybody can solve it. Yeah, we're not, it's not like we're. Yeah, we have all these extra tools in the tool bag, but it's not like we're really trained to be all that smart. We're just trained to be methodical about it. Yeah. To visualize it and then ask questions about, well, why is that happening?

Yeah.

But when you do it every day and you can see that you have a problem, you're naturally just going to go, well, I don't, I don't want to have to do this twice. Let me make a phone call and figure this out.

Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about leadership and, you know, really just the difference between these two approaches. But we talk a lot also within our community of a culture. Right. Everybody wants this culture. Right. In fact, your blog article today is about culture.

Right.

And, well, what about, what do you think From a Culture perspective. When you contrast an improvement based approach with a process management based approach, like what's the cultural perspective differences, if any?

So. Well, the biggest one is change. In a project world, we manage change, the project kicks off, we have a change manager or we do change management activities, we manage that change and then, you know, like we kick it off when we start doing things like, oh, we've got to set the burning platform, we've got to, you know, create the felt need for change. I can quote all of those things all day long. But in reality, in a process management world where continuous improvement is happening, it's all about change readiness. Are your people actually ready to make the changes that they see need to be done? Are they empowered to make the change? Are they excited to make the change? Do they have the desire, do they have the knowledge of why they should do it and do they have the skills? And it's not like we have to, although, you know, hey, Gamba can train all your people and be green belts and black belts and yellow belts, but it's not like you have to have a deep skill set in process improvement to just improve things. Yeah. And that's. So that's one of the biggest things in culture. But I think also that role of the practitioner, you move out of the role of the doer and more of the teacher, mentor, coach, and the practitioner ends up solving the bigger end to end problems and they start thinking more strategically about the organization and what's the right thing for me to work on versus sub optimizing one small little process and not doing anything to the overall.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. Wow, this has been fun, John. So maybe let's wrap things up with if you just have any tactical, maybe one or two tips for folks that are going through a green belt or a black belt, whether with Gemba Academy or somebody else, it doesn't matter. Just maybe a few tips for them. Let's just start there. Tips for them and then we'll go. Tips for the process management folks as well. But what are some practical tips for folks going through a certification program?

So the first thing is you got to figure out how long this is going to take with our program. It's self paced. So you, you're watching videos, you're taking quizzes, you're reading materials and you're meeting with a coach on a regular basis. Some people get through it really quickly. You know, they're, they're moving really fast. Some people struggle. But one of the things that we always recommend is that you Sit down and you actually think about what does it take? Think about the data is 40 hours worth of training here. How am I going to get that done in a reasonable amount of time and still be able to have enough time to do a project? The other thing is, and it's, it's always interesting that we talk about sometimes green belts and black belts and the size of the project that they can deal with. But in reality, in a process improvement certification, what we really care about is that they know the methodology, they understand how to use scientific thinking to step through it versus just go and solve something because they're jumping at a symptom, they're proving it out. So and the, the most important thing on that is that the problem identification, to understand that more than anything else. And we don't get that right. That often in process improvement, we throw some stuff on a charter, if we even use a charter. Often it's, you know, the boss says go do, and we go do it it without thinking about like, what's really the expectation of this.

Yeah.

But really taking the time and we spend from the moment that the students go through process identification, the problem identification piece of our training, we start talking about, okay, now let's start looking for a problem. And you know, what are you measuring today that you're not happy with? How can you go out to the floor and use the oh no circle and stand and watch a process? Because I guarantee you there's going to be some errors. But actually making sure that you are clear in the very beginning of what I'm going to work on because otherwise the scope just blows up and the next thing, six months later, you're a quarter of the way through a project and you're like, what the heck?

Right? Exactly, Exactly. Now what about to wrap things up, the process management side of things? Is there some tactical tips you can provide there?

Well, so process management first off has to start at the, at the top of the organization. The senior leadership have to understand the importance of this. They have to say, we want to change, we want to improve, we want to operate more efficiently and effectively. That has to happen. You can, small pockets of an organization can drive this. But you know, like watching the End in the ditch videos in our Lean Practitioner course, and you can see the CEO of the company is all 100% bought in. He believes in it and thus everybody else follows suit because they're going to emulate the leadership. If that leader doesn't care, they won't hold people below them accountable. And then the accountability will just be lost throughout the entire program and people will do whatever the they want. So if you really want to change your organization, the leaders need to understand it. Which is my last blog article was really about getting the leadership involved and they're the ones who are going to drive the change. Yeah.

Love it. Hey John, I know you are a very prolific and I mean it's sincerely LinkedIn user. I'm like my gosh, John, where every day. Every day man. So if folks want to connect with you, I guess that's the best way, right?

It is, it is the best way. They can always contact us againba.

Yeah yeah. Gembacademy.com But John Knotts.

So our phones are always online.

There it is, there it is. K, N, O T T S. That's how we spell knots. John Knotts and we'll have, we'll link to your, your LinkedIn and you. Yeah. Folks want to work with you directly. Call us up folks and we'll get you into our programs and we'll train you up on a project so then you can transition into full time process management. How's that sound?

Excellent. Sounds great. Awesome. All right. I'm looking forward to the phone calls.

Yes, me too. All right, well, thanks John. Appreciate it. Take care.

All right. You have an awesome day.

All right. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, GEMBA Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 Lean and Six Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching 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.