GA 433 | Being a Scientific Leader with Calvin Williams

In my opinion, every leader or anybody who wants to achieve something great needs a coach. No matter what your goal is, what you're trying to accomplish, the stats show that you're 800% more likely to be successful with a coach than you are without one.

Today I'm excited to welcome Calvin Williams back to the show. Now today, Calvin and I dive into a really interesting topic and one that I'm not sure we've really directly explored on the podcast before. And that is sort of the intersection between what we have talked about many times, scientific thinking and just leadership itself. And so Calvin is kind of using a phrase, scientific leadership, contrasting that with what we might consider more of a older school scientific management approach. And so we spent some time talking about what is the difference between, say, scientific leadership and scientific management. We dive into a little bit deeper on the underlying routine of scientific thinking and how that can play a really important role in, obviously in any organization's success, starting at the front line and working all the way back up to the top CEO of the organization. So a really interesting conversation and Calvin's full of knowledge and wisdom and I think you're going to enjoy this one. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 4:33. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 4:33. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Calvin, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I'm doing fantastic, Ron, how you doing?

Yeah, I'm doing well, man. Doing well. So, yeah, so let's see, we're episode 4 33. So last time you won was episode 318. So I guess we've had a few, few, few sleeps in between then and there. So how's everything been going since last time we chatted?

We've had a whole, we've had a whole pandemic in between last.

You know, I think we have, I think we have. Yeah, yeah, I think you were on in May of 2020. So. Yeah, the, the, the action was just getting started, man, you know, back then.

So, yeah, yeah, we were in, we were in the height of freakout mode, I think last time we talked probably.

Yeah, probably fun times. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, well, hey, man, I'm excited to have you back on. You know how we like the role. We do like to get things off to a start with our guests sharing a quote. So do you have one that you want to share?

I do, I do, actually. It's one that I came across recently and it struck me it's one from Albert Einstein and it says, don't listen to the person that has all the answers. Listen to the person that has the questions. And I thought that was profound because I could tell from my own personal experience. I think I suffer a little bit from too many advisors sometimes. And I think people under. Appreciate the fact that, you know, myself included sometimes, is that sometimes people kind of know, right. They have a wealth of life experience and there are patterns and sometimes people know the answers and it may, you know, it may not be necessary to tell them the answer, but ask the questions that help them find the answers from within. Right. Because nobody understands the context of their situation the way they do. Nobody's sitting in their seat. So the solutions they can come up with and live with, right? They're going to come up with solutions they can live with. Usually. Usually are more. More sustainable. Right. Can work. Can work better in the long run. So for them anyway.

Yeah, good stuff. Well, hey, Calvin, in case folks can't remember from 3:18, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm. I'm a. You know, I started out on the shop floor in manufacturing, manufacturing circuit breakers. My bare hands.

Nice.

This was. I was studying my undergrad industrial industrial engineering at Nebraska in Lincoln, and that's when I learned that, you know, I don't know, the feedback I got was, you better stay in school, you better keep studying. Because those breakers were coming a little too fast for my motor skills to keep up with. So. So I took that advice, got my IE degree in 2004, I believe, and went to go work as an IE at Tyson in Goodlettsville. The Goodlettsville facility, I think IBP was recently acquired by Tyson at the time. Spent a few years there, went to go work at Nasally as the CI engineer. Wanted to get into continuous improvement. Spent some time leading production teams at Mars. Worked as operations plant manager. Did some work as a management consultant with Military Industrial Base and some other smaller companies, and most recently worked as senior leader of global Continuous Improvement at clorox. They have 36 factories around the world. And, you know, I was flying around out every week just about, you know, helping them with strategy deployment and TPM and continuous improvement. Got into some Toyota Kata stuff and that's a few other things. Change management also. Yeah, a few other things. Trying to help them kind of create a more agile organization and. Yeah, about four years ago, it'd be. I guess it'd be four years in October. Decided to go. Go independent. Right. Follow the dream.

Yeah.

And started Improver. The main reason, you know, we went to start Improver was because in that experience, Right. In that, I guess, seven, you know, 17 plus or minus year experience, just kind of realize that everybody struggles with the same core things. Right. It's. It's what I call strategy execution that's keeping first things first, executing on those critically critical to improve things, and also driving that continuous improvement culture. You know, everybody talks continuous improvement, everybody wants it, but the execution of it and the sustainment of it is a challenge for just about everyone. And I guess the more mature I get in the space, the more I realize that the struggle is the whole thing. The struggle is the journey.

Yeah. The struggle is the way. Right.

The struggle is the way. And if you're not struggling, then, then that's. That's, you know, you're probably not doing something right.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, one thing I can't remember if I asked you this. I'm probably. I'm sure I did in that first episode. You spell improver with a U, I, M, P, R, U, V, E, R. What's the story there?

That's correct. Well, the U is, is. Is because at a philosophical, fundamental level, I think continuous improvement starts with you as an industry. You know, there's an outward focus, there's an external focus. You know, we can see other people's problems, we can see process inefficiencies, we can see waste and other people's processes. But as you. As I've matured within the continuous improvement space, I realized that it's not so much of a process problem, it manifests in the process, but it's a personal problem. Right. It's people. And continuous improvement is really a. It's really a mechanism or, you know, let's call it a mechanism to address the human condition and try to discipline people to behave in a more productive way, you know, and to see that what's happening now probably isn't going to work forever, you know, and lack of continuous improvement. Progress is a human condition. Right. And if you're going to make progress and continuous improvement, you got to address the human condition. Yeah. So, yeah, continuous improvement starts with you. Right. And started with you leading by example and improving upon yourself and whip yourself for the greater good of the community. Right. Kaizen. True meaning to Kaizen. Yeah. So I love it. Starts with you, ends with you, and. Yeah.

Good stuff.

There you go.

All right. Well, hey, let's jump in a little bit on. Interesting topic here. At least I feel it's interesting. Is this whole idea, this whole concept of what you're calling scientific leadership. I want to, I want to just talk, start there, like, what is scientific leadership? And you know, we've sometimes hear scientific management, you know, but. And perhaps they're different. So let's just begin there. What's this all about?

Okay. Thank you for asking. Scientific management is where we've been for the last hundred years. Scientific leadership is where we will be for the next thousand years. If you think of where scientific management came from, right? It's. It's Gilbert and Taylor, labor and work studies. You know, we kind of got off into the science of the psychology of work. All that stuff evolved into the management philosophies. We now have lean, six Sigma, you know, theory of constraints, tpm. All those things sort of were born out of scientific management. And we've sort of been in that cycle for the last hundred years, right? Trying to perfect that, trying to get that right. Making progress in places, you know, if you look at how many CI jobs or the demand for continuous improvement, talent and expertise is growing really, really nicely at a good pace. So the world is sort of embracing that whole body of work under scientific management. Still a lot of work to do, a ton of work to do. Where we haven't gone is into the space of scientific leadership. Up to now, leadership is really viewed as more of an art than a science. An art form, right? There's maybe some degree of science, but it's largely an art form. It's, it's stylistic, it's. It's an aesthetic. It's a very subjective, you know, thing. This person is a leader. They look like a leader, they talk like a leader, they dress like a leader, right? What scientific leadership is trying to do is apply the scientific approach to the leadership function to, you know, on the front lines, it's much easier to apply science, you know, scientific approach because the cause and effect relationship is very, very closely associated. Right? I did this to my machine and that happened to the product, right. It's very direct, right. Within minutes you can see cause and effect. Right? At the leadership function, it's a lot harder to see cause and effect. Right? You may choose a direction today, but you don't see the consequence of that choice for a year, typically, right. Or longer sometimes. So what scientific leadership is trying to do is shorten the wind, short, shorten that, that feedback loop to say, let's pick a direction today and let's see if we can get a feedback in a few, in a month or a quarter time versus, versus a whole year, right? Let's, let's become the lowest lead time producer, right? And let's get everybody aligned behind that and let's reduce lead time by X amount. And if that doesn't help our sales, then we have the, we have the information we need. Maybe lead time is, isn't really it. Maybe it's something else, right? Maybe it's cost or something else, or price. Price point. So if you take the function of leadership and you break it down into two key buckets, it's two things, right? One, it's setting the destination. Where are we going? Like a leader should be able to tell the rest of the folks on the bus where they're going, right? And hell, man, out of respect, if you don't want to go there, you shouldn't be on the bus. If you do want to go there, get on the bus, right? This is where we're going. The other bucket is mobilizing people, turning them on, turning on their engines of genius and creativity and effort and everything else that they can bring to help help move the organization in that direction. So if you break leadership into those two buckets, then, you know, and look at it as a process almost, then you can start to apply the pdca, you know, scientific thinking and to learn faster and produce better results. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. So you just, you just mentioned scientific thinking. So I guess my next, my natural question is when you, when you speak about scientific leadership, off. I believe you're, you're, you're talking about the underlying foundation of what we would call, within the cottage community, scientific thinking. Is that true?

Absolutely. In Silicon Valley. We're a software company. Software and cert. We're, we're a success as a service company, I like to think.

Look at you, man, always coming up with these new terms, man.

Yeah, yeah, you know, success, you know, but in Silicon Valley, there's an expression that says software is eating the world. Right. I don't know if you've ever heard that expression before. The other thing that's eating the world is science. Science is also eating the world. Science has been eating the world before. Software has. Right. And science has infiltrated just about every discipline and almost everything can be explained mathematically. Right. And that's, you know, the discipline of science has not infiltrated as much as leadership. We still look at that as something nebulous. Some people got it and some people don't. More of an art than A science. So I think that's where we're going next. And I think actually by going that way we can bring scientific management to the ideals that we would prefer to see.

Got it. So when you're thinking about a scientific leader, let's just come up with that term, a scientific leader. What are the, some of the key attributes, key abilities of, of he or she, like what, what are they able to do that may a non scientific leader couldn't do?

Yeah, I think ultimately when you, when you, you know in science, right, you got to get to experimentation as a means to learn. Now a leader also needs to execute. So you're learning in the direction of, you know, what you want to execute and you know, in order to execute you need some type of direction. So there's two sides, right? When it comes to like talked about the two buckets, which once one is setting direction, the other one is mobilizing people. When it comes to setting direction, less is more, right? What most leaders do is they come up with a plan, like a strategic plan and it's usually three to five key initiatives. And really essentially what that is is three to five different directions that they're trying to pull the organization in. And that's a form of dilution, right? You're almost pulling the organization in five different directions. You're going to pull the organization apart. And unfortunately you do see that inside companies. So when it comes to setting destination or setting direction, less is more, right. So really again getting back to like the scientific approach where that we learned in grade school where you know, you control all factors and you change one factor, change one variable and you observe the outcome, right? And that's essentially what PDCA is doing. Also you can sort of apply that to direction setting two where don't set five directions at once. Set one direction and set and set a hypothesis for that direction. If we move in the direction of lowest lead time, we should see our sales go up by Y percent, right? Make that hypothesis, run that experiment at organizational scale and check the outcome. Right. And don't take a whole year to do that, do that in a few weeks, do that in a quarter. And then once you've done that now you're smarter, you're smarter about your business and the environment within which the business operates. Then you set your next experiment so you're getting to one piece flow of targets, one piece flow of target conditions like when you think of kata. And then once you achieve the first one, then you set the next one based on the latest and greatest knowledge. You have at that moment. And in a time where the world is changing as quickly as it is, where disruption. Right. You can go down the list. Right. You got the great resignation or the great reshuffling, you've got supply chain disruptions, you got global pandemics, you got. The list goes on and on. Inflation is a thing too. So in a time where you don't know what's coming around the corner and it's not over. Right. There's going to be another thing come next week, two weeks. So government regulation, just a whole bunch, it goes on and on. So when you have that much volatility, you need to be able to adapt quickly. And the traditional model is we're going to go off site as a leadership team, we're going to have a strategy creation session, we're going to come back with the plan, we're going to roll the plan out and we're going to get everybody working on it. And then we're going to find out in a year who did well and who didn't do well. And those who didn't do well, there may be some consequences. Right. That doesn't really work when you're seeing four or five disruptive changes every year. Maybe more than that. Because it's like Mike Tyson says, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face.

Exactly. Going to say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you come out with this beautiful plan, it's supposed to be good for a year, but a month later you get punched in the face by the next big thing.

Yeah.

And your whole plan is now obsolete, but you still got a whole organization working against that old obsolete plan. Yeah. It just creates an incredible amount of waste. So if you apply the principles of pdca, rapid experimentation, agile, you know, it's. Again, like I say, these concepts are eating the world. Right. But they just haven't gotten to leadership. So, you know, if you can pull those same concepts into the leadership function, then, then you've, you've got a company that's more fit to deal with the realities of, of operating a business in today's world.

Yeah. Now, so do you feel like it's. Before you can worry about becoming a scientific leader, it would seem that you better be pretty good at scientific thinking as an organization.

Right.

So.

Absolutely.

So I'm curious to get your, your thoughts on maybe some changes in mindset or whatever it might be that leaders need to make in order to become better at scientific thinking at the organizational level and perhaps even at their individual level. Right.

Absolutely. Okay. All right. So there's two ways I want to make sure I don't forget this, right? Because I want to get this out. The first way is, ideally, that leader will grow up in an environment that already is attuned for scientific thinking, right? So just think about that where you've got an organization that's got six, seven layers in the cake, right? From CEO to front line. And if you're doing daily improvement at the shop floor level, you already learning that, building the muscle for that scientific thinking pattern, right? You're building the muscle. It's become second nature. You get promoted up, right? And you're still thinking that way, maybe at less frequent intervals, but you're still. You're still driving.

It's in your blood. It's in your blood.

Yeah, it's in your blood. So by the time you reach that leadership level, experience or position, it's already baked. The cake is baked. Right. It's already in you. Right. You don't have to be taught. You don't have to develop a new discipline at that point, right? It's experience in kind of reworking the brain and rewiring the brain to think and behave that way. All right? That's ideal for most people that they didn't get that they didn't get that privilege. So for them, how do you get there? The other way to get there is to. You got to develop the discipline because scientific thinking and scientific acting is a discipline. And we all have different disciplines that we've developed over the years, right? We all put our shoes on one foot at a time and tie them and go get in the car and drive to work. And, you know, we have developed those disciplines, those routines there.

Yeah, yeah.

They're baked into the way we. We operate. Right. Scientific thinking is another discipline that needs to be built in. You know, hardwired in, right? Coded. Coded in, right? So repetition is the key. So repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. Unfortunately, as a leader, you're not going to get as many reps as the guy on the front line. So now it's very difficult to build discipline into yourself. So in my opinion, every leader or anybody who wants to achieve something great needs a coach. Because no matter what your goal is or what you're trying to accomplish, the stats show that you're 800% more likely to be successful with a coach than you are without one. So just like, you know, working out, I used to lift weights when I was younger. I used to do sports. I used to run track and play basketball and that kind of Thing and I, you know, after every track workout, I used to go to the weight room and lift. Right. That was just a, that was just a routine. Right. Here I am 20 years later, I still feel compelled to go to the weight room and lift every once in a while. Right. On some cadence. And sometimes, you know, I have periods where I do better than other periods. But because I had developed such a strong discipline for it much younger, you know, my body just calls for it. Like that's the power of a discipline. Right. It kind of creates a flywheel effect where, you know, so scientific thinking is a similar thing where as you, as you develop that discipline it. Yeah. You know, your mind just calls for it. Right. You develop a craving for it as opposed to. Yeah. Defaulting to other, you know, other non scientific approaches.

Well, yeah. One of the famous phrases, you know, we use in the car community, have a coach be a coach. Right. And so, you know, sometimes it's even just, you know, finding a colleague if you don't have the opportunity of hiring someone or from the outside and we want to figure it out, you know, go, go buy Mike's book or whatever it is and, and start practicing with one another, you know, and, and because that's the only way it's going to happen. Right. Is through that deliberate practice. And typically the deliberate happens when you do have a, an expert, you know, bystander, if you will, monitoring what's going on between that conversation. Right. But, but even if it's.

You want to call it an accountability partner. Yep. You know. Yep. Or I know my wife is my accountability partner in a lot of ways. Yeah. A lot of things. Oh yeah, yeah. But yeah. Just having that second set of eyes who can keep you honest.

Yeah.

Is. Is usually a good thing.

I like it. I like it. I'm wondering, you know, Calvin, over your experience, you've seen a lot of companies on this journey. I'm wondering if there's any, I don't know, like myths, you know, some, some things, some are half truths or perhaps even that that are keeping leaders and their companies from, from being their best. Like what have you seen out there?

Yeah. You know, I think a lot of leaders grew up from, from management. You know, you kind of just kind of like the natural order of things. You be, you know, you're an individual contributor for a while, then you become a manager, then you become a leader. And one of the things you learn as a manager is the importance of balance. Right. You know, you probably heard a balance scorecard or, you know, KPIs where you, you've got safety, quality, costs, deliveries, you know, morale, et cetera, service. And a manager thinks balance, right? They want to keep all accounts in good standing. You know, that's the thinking process of a manager. But a leader, the thought process is a little different actually. Leader's job is not to maintain balance so much as to set direction, set a destination, you know. So one of the myths sometimes leaders have is that they, they need multiple targets, they need multiple destinations so that you can maintain balance. Where the reality is, for a leader, maintaining balance also means diluting focus. That's not to say focus on one thing and let everything else go to crap. That's saying maintain all the other important things. But when it comes to improvement, the little time we have to invest in making things better, improving the way we work, we need to focus on the thing that's going to bring the greatest impact to the business. Right. So that's a huge one. Another one is if you assign many targets to people, you'll get more work out of them. But the reality is the more targets you assign at the same time in parallel, the more waste you're going to get.

Yeah.

So yeah, you may get more work out of people, but you, it's almost disrespectful in a way because you're, you're creating churn from those people. They're taking away from their energies that they could be investing in their families, their own dreams and goals and all that stuff. And you're sort of churning as a way to keep them busy or maybe get more out of them. More that ends up not, not necessarily helping the business. Right. In fact, some of that more can be creating more chaos in the business, which only adds to that doom loop, so to say. So those are a couple, there's a few more out there that we could hit.

But yeah, the interesting one is when you're thinking about those multiple targets, we're real big on the whole aspect of what we always say. Don't make me drop the F word. And the F word for us is focus.

I like it, you know, because it.

Is very easy to get distracted. But in the, you know, in the reality, even Gamba Academy, we're not like a, you know, 5,000 person company or anything like that. But, you know, got a lot going on, man, got a lot of customers and all the rest of it. And so, you know, for us, we do have more than one, you know, thing that we've got to accomplish. If, you know, if we only focused on one, we would cease to exist 12 months from now. Right. So, you know, but I think perhaps what you're saying is, you know, if you get, if you're, if you're chaotic in your, in your, in your visioning, that's when I feel like. Or when you change constantly, you know, like. Cause people value certainty, right? Like your employees, Clarity and certainty. Right. And that's what's been so difficult, right, about the pandemic and all the rest of it, because nobody knew, man, you know, what was going to happen. We had no idea, right. Are we going to be working together? Are we going to all be at home forever or, you know, you know what I mean? And trying to navigate those times was extremely difficult for leaders because there was no certainty. So, yeah, maybe we could just kind of wrap that up or wrap up there like, like on your thoughts on those, you know, we call them vuca, you know, volatile and certain. You know, those types of situations and how you can bring focus into those completely almost impossible to focus times because you've got so many moving pieces in front of you. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think to simplify it, thinking, just think in terms of destination, right? Getting clear on where you want to be. Right. There's an expression from Stephen covey in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I believe it's in that book, actually, that says that a pilot in flight makes a thousand micro adjustments in between takeoff and destination, right. They know where they want to go, they don't know what's going to happen in route, right. You're going to get turbulence, you're going to get weather, you're going to get wind, you know, whatever it is, right. A flock of geese, who knows, right. All these things are impossible to predict. But the thing that doesn't, that never changes is the destination, right? So, and often, even though they're making so many micro adjustments, you know, they're off course 90% of the time. Right. And even so, because they have a control panel, because they have the displays, they have the dashboards in front of them, they're making these adjustments and they're able to land on target, you know, very often. Right. More often than not. Right. So as leaders, you got to have, you know, you kind of develop a similar mindset, right? The specific projects you work on, the specific deliverables you bring throughout the course of the year, they may be, you know, widely varying, right. But the destination doesn't change.

Yeah.

And you know, you're going to complete things, you're going to bring in new things and all that stuff along the way, but you're still going for the same destination. So.

Yeah, that's a great analogy.

That's the way to think about it.

I like that one.

Yeah. And, and where you work, it is, you know, at the, at the executive level, you probably want to have a single target at a time and perhaps that's going to be three to six months in scope. At the management level, you're going to have one target at a time. Every single person has one target at any given point in time, target condition. And it sort of cascades into the lines as you kind of come down from CEO to front lines. Right. At the management level, you might be looking at monthly or quarterly scope. Then at the front line level, you're talking daily or weekly in scope. Right. So as you get closer to the value stream, your frequency increases. But it's still the same general concept of, you know, set a target, form a hypothesis.

Yeah.

Experiment your way from current to target conditions.

Well, and that's why, like you mentioned earlier, that the, the frontline associate is going to get a lot more practice. There are more reps because it is that shorter cycle and it's common, constantly turning. Right. Whereas as you said, the higher you go, hey, you know, I'm a software company. ARR is my key metric. And we got it. You know, here's what we're aiming for. ARR of this number. Right. And that's it. And you know, that's what we're focused on right there. And then everybody breaks that down. Hey, sales, your job is here. Customer success. Your, you know, this is how you play into ARR. Annual recurring revenue for folks who don't know. But you know, like in a software business. Right. That's, that's a key metric. Right. That might be a key focus, you know, the main.

And maybe that, maybe that's your, that's your North Star, right? Yeah. Get clear on that North Star. And then, and then like you said, it branches and cascades as you.

Yes.

As you go down into the organization. Right. Yes. You got sales, customer success. Yes. Got your development team, you got your, you know, market, you know, whoever else is on the bus. Yep. Right. But. Yep. The key thing is to kind of get to that one target at a time, that one piece flow of targets. Right? Yes. Think of all the bad things that come from batching, you know, from coming from a manufacturing background.

Yep.

You know how that works?

Oh yeah. Where got a bunch of scratches and over there, you know.

Bingo. Right. You Got scrap, you got obsolescence, you got quality issues, you got lack of agility, you got, you know, poor customer satisfaction. All those things come from batching environments. Yeah, well, when you think as leaders, we still, we the world still batches when it comes to setting and employing priorities.

Yeah, 100%. So good stuff, man. Well, hey, Calvin, this has been super fun, man. I knew it would be. If folks want to learn more about you, what you got going on, or where they want to connect with you, what's the best way?

Well, best way is probably either on LinkedIn. Calvin L. Williams I'm pretty active, so it'd be a great way to connect. Another great way would be to Visit our website, improver.com I m p r u v e r.com and we actually just released a webinar on scientific leadership that's a really fascinating webinar and it kind of goes a step deeper into some of the stuff we just talked about and provides some good visuals, case studies and that kind of stuff too. So yeah, check that out. Yeah. And if you know there's anything I can help you with, I'm happy to do it. Or any questions I can answer, I'm more than happy to do it.

So awesome.

Thanks for having me on, Ryan.

Appreciate it, man. Appreciate you. Keep up the great work.

You too. You too. Take care.

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