GA 463 | Academics vs. Application with Phil Ranck

Military industry doesn't matter. So the parallels are extremely similar. There are some nuances to military. You know, like I said, it's the difference between filling out a 401k and qualifying on your weapon. But there's still a process. You still have to go somewhere, do something, talk to somebody, and execute a task.

Today I'm excited to welcome Phil Rank to the show. Now, Phil has a background from the military. He was in the army for many, many years. And while he was serving, he was to practice a lot of Lean and Six Sigma. In fact, he was certified all the way up to master black belt and did lots of projects, lots of training, lots of good stuff. And so today on the show, we sort of begin by after we talked a little bit about his background, talking about just how military and industry, what are the similarities as it relates to process improvement, and then maybe what are any differences, if any. Then Phil, again, he's done a lot of teaching over the years and he still does. And so we spent some time talking about the difference between academic learning and then actually application and sort of how those two things play together and harmonize with one another. And then towards the end, we had a really cool conversation on some of the barriers that folks might face as they're getting started with their continuous improvement journey. So whether you're in the military or working in industry, even if you've been at it for a little bit, practicing Lean and Six Sigma, anytime we're trying to make things better, we're going to hit some struggles from time to time. And so Phil shed some pretty interesting insight into that whole topic. So show notes can be found over@gembellpodcast.com this is episode 463. Also, if you don't mind, scroll down on the app that you're listening to this on and leave us a review. We're really trying to build that part of the show up a little bit and get a little bit more momentum. The more feedback we get. And five stars if you think we're great, would be fantastic. It does help the show kind of get found in the algorithms and whatnot. So our goal with this podcast is to. Is to really just spread the good news that is Lean and Six Sigma to folks who may not even know what Lean and Six Sigma are all about. So, yeah, I appreciate that. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Hey, Phil, welcome to the show. How are you?

Good, good. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man. So where are you calling in from?

So I am in Alaska, closest city I Can give to you is Anchorage, Alaska, South Central. So I live just a little north of that.

Okay. What's your weather like today? Temperature, environment?

Today is actually kind of a weird day. It's about 32 degrees for us, is extremely warm for January, so it's like a light drizzle. So instead of nice white, fluffy snow, like you would think, it's more like a giant ice sheet.

Okay, well, here I'm in Keller, Texas, which in the Dallas Fort Worth area, and we also have ice everywhere. My wife, God bless her, she had to drive my daughter to school. Normally, I drive my daughter to school in the morning and then I come into the office. But today I had an early meeting that I couldn't bring her. So my wife drove and she called. My daughter texts me, and she's like, mom's spinning on the road because we just don't have any ice or infrastructure. No salt, no nothing. Throw a little lousy sand down or something. But I don't know what that's supposed to do, but, yeah. What a mess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ice is not fun. I love the snow. You know, the ice is on top of 3 foot of snow that I like to play in, but I need.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. All right, well, hey, Phil, I'm excited to have you on the. On the podcast. I don't know if we've actually had anybody from Alaska. Apologies if we have. We've done 400 some episodes, so. Yeah. But how about we start, you know, I know you've listened to the show, Phil. We like to get going out of the gate with our guest showing a quote. So what do you got?

So the quote I like is from Albert Einstein, and it talks about clarity and conciseness of presenting information. So if I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.

What's that mean to you?

So for me, it resonates so well, because, again, as we'll cover, I spent a lot of time in the military, and it doesn't matter whether it's military or industry. Meetings consume a lot of our time. And when we leave meetings, the question is, what did I take away from that? Did I get clear guidance as to what I'm supposed to do or execute? So we often leave there, you know, with some general guidance, and then everybody kind of goes their ways and we start asking each other questions like, well, what did the Boss really mean what exactly we were supposed to do. So it's almost like a post planning session to figure out what we're supposed to do. But if we follow what he's saying, you know, spend that time in the meeting clarifying the question, being clear and concise about your message, when we leave, we won't spend five hours looking for the solution. We're only going to spend five minutes because it's defined with boundaries, with metrics, with attainable goals, with, you know, measures of success. So that's, that's where it lands for me. I feel if, if I would have followed this more while I was on active duty or just working with other industry years and years and years ago, I could have saved a lot of time.

Yeah, yeah. Even like in the age of sort of scientific thinking or experimenting our way forward, I feel like even that 55 minutes, you know, so, so often you see people just like debating on who's got the right answer. Yeah, well, at the end of the day, nobody really knows until we actually go try some things. So maybe spend that time debating on what experiment we're going to run first and second and third and see what we're going to learn as we go forward. Because that sort of takes the pressure off of knowing the right answer. Right? So. Yeah, good stuff, man. Well, hey, you mentioned the military in Alaska. So tell us about, about your, your background and, and how you got into all this lean activity that we're up to these days and, and tell us what, what lean Alaska is all about.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

It's a weird little path. So I did retire. August of 2021 was when I retired from the military. I had been active duty for 24 years and I was a warrant officer. So very specific to logistics. That was my field. You know, joined the army as a mechanic working on vehicles. Loved logistics. So I grew into being a warrant officer. And along the way of being a warrant officer, again, my focus was on logistics, which exceeded past maintenance and also dealt with supply transportation. So it was all three of the facets of logistics. And we would go to exercises or we would go on deployments, and I was always with the infantry. That's where, where my talents lied was jumping out of airplanes and, you know, supporting the infantry. And you would watch these infantry would be given an operation to do, something to execute, and it was like poetry in motion. They were amazing to watch them work. And then it came to the logisticians. Yes, we can take that city in, in the next 24 hours. Hey, logistics yeah, it's going to take 72 hours to get you the items you need, though. Right. Logistics always lag behind our tactical edge. And just like with a lot of things, we typically blame a person instead of a process. But I knew that the process was what was broken. We weren't bad logisticians. We had bad processes to use because, you know, global multimodal transportation is extremely hard to manage. So I said there had to be a better way, and that's why I bumped in the lean six sigma. So it was back in 2005 and six, where the army was really bringing the program into its fold, and I had a chance to get exposed to that, and. And it was the answer. It was the answer to how do we do better to close the gap between operations and logistics. So. So I did. I became a black belt in the army, practiced that for years, had an opportunity to work at a higher headquarters that offered me a chance to be an army master black belt through their program. So. So I took it. After that, I started standing up programs in our brigade, elements, elements of about 3,000 personnel that were, you know, tactical in nature. And I just kept training and training and training. Came to Alaska. Absolutely fell in love with it. Lean Alaska came about because I was at Barnes and Noble one day, and this was right around when Covid was just starting to kick off. And it was. It was probably about six months prior to Covid, I really kind of locking everybody down. And I was in Barnes and Noble and I was buying, you know, the. The Michael George LSS Pocket Toolbook. Right, the famous Toolbook, because we used it for class. And I started getting asked questions why I was buying, you know, five copies of this book. So I explained what it was, what process improvement was. Just so happens there were a couple of local business owners and they said, well, how, you know, can this Lean Six Sigma stuff help me? I'm only, you know, two or three people deep. And I say process improvement is process improvement. Whether it's, you know, Fortune 500 company or a mom and pop bakery, it's a process. So after speaking with them, I kind of talked to my wife, and I was like, I think we got something here. So Lean Alaska started as a consulting firm, and we consulted with organizations in Alaska, and that kind of expanded out. And then I retired, and I kept getting calls from soldiers for training. So what we did was just extended Lean Alaska's reach from just consulting into the training realm, working with some of their programs like credentialing assistance and GI Bill and. And that's kind of how Lina Alaska grew. So when I transitioned out of the military, that's kind of what I stuck with, and that's how Lean Alaska came to be. So, you know, Bumpy Road from 24 years of doing stuff in the army and then hopping out and just kind of sticking with, you know, what I'm passionate about, which is process improvement.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's only so much you can say here, but I'm curious if there's any. Any stories you can share from your time in the military as far as maybe a cool project or cool event or something like that. You guys did that. That was, you know, where you used your. Your continuous improvement.

You know, there are some, you know, and we could probably be here for three or four more podcasts, going through the details of each of them. Some of them that were pretty interesting, and they really span the range of what you can really do. One of them was for a staff headquarters of a very high echelon in the military. It's our core echelons, so very large, you know, wide responsibility. And they were having trouble with staff integration. So it was a core headquarters that not only operated on the continental US but also in the European theater. And they had, you know, players on both sides of the pond of the. Of the ocean. And the question became, how do we do staff integration and prepare inbound personnel, just like onboarding at a company at a rapid rate, and then get them forward to Europe to operate? You know, it's different than industry. That's fill out your 401k, fill out your personnel information, right? So add on to that. Now you got to qualify on your weapon and go get all of your. Your. Your gear, you know, to be in harm's way kind of things. So we did a project with them to reduce staff integration and readiness from two months down to about a week and a half. That was one project. We did one with an organization that was overseas. They were having issues with fuel for aviation elements. So we did a project where we increased a. What we call a bag farm, which is where we store these fuel pods by 150,000 gallons, and that was in Syria. So, again, shows how you can work from a distance, right, really reach and put something in play. But the problems that we were dealing with was resources, location, timing, availability. It's one of those perfect examples where they said, you know what? We want to put this bag farm in place. Let's just throw stuff at it. Well, as much as we'd like to Throw stuff at the problem. It's a little hard to throw it at Syria. That's a pretty long toss. So we had to be creative and work in a space where we remove the waste that's already in place, remove the variation that's already in place to allow us to expand. So those are two, there's a bunch of day to day, you know, range operations, PT tests. We see those, you know, regularly. But yeah, that's nice.

So I mean, obviously you got a lot, a long background and experience in the military and now in working in the industry, I'm curious to, to kind of hear your, your perspective on, you know, where do they meet, you know, as it relates to process improvement.

Yeah, you know, and that's such a great question because it's interesting, depending on what side of the fence you're on, when you're in the military, you're like, oh, the military does these this way and an industry so different. And then, you know, industry looks at the military again as a different entity and operates differently. But when you, when you take away those titles of military and industry and you just look at the processes, it is amazing how similar they really are. So I kind of felt when I can, when I transitioned from military to industry, that I was going to struggle to understand process improvement as it related to a large headquarters of a company. So I've been doing very different things for a long time. But at the end of the day, just as the project with that core element, staffing is staffing, and I found that how I addressed staffing in the military and staffing in industry from process improvement were exactly the same. The hurdles were the same too. You know, the things that we experience from culture, from implementation, from leadership, buy in, every last one of those exists in industry as well. So the, the parallels are much more common and prevalent than we think, you know, but, but when you only operate in one or two of those spaces, everything looks different, right? It doesn't feel the same until you actually get there. So the, the processes themselves don't change. It's just the boss changes, you know, military, industry, it doesn't matter. So the parallels are extremely similar. There, there are some nuances to military. You know, like I said, it's the difference between filling out a 401k and, you know, qualifying on your weapon. But there's still a process. You still have to go somewhere, do something, talk to somebody and execute a task.

Now in the military, when you're, let's say you're running a, some, some event or some project and your team is made up of other military members, you know, soldiers or whoever it is. Is there any difference? Compare that to say you go into some, some company and it's just some random people in the company and like, far as, like, I don't know, like respect or like they're going to listen to their superior, you know, is there a difference there?

There is a little, a little bit. And it could be good and it can be bad at the same time. It really depends on just like anything else, the dynamic of the group. When I, when I do consulting with industry and it typically is comprised of a team with little to no military background. They are, they're comfortable with each other if they know each other in the space. If I'm bringing together a team, a cross functional team, even in the same organization that has not worked together previously, there's a lot of ice breaking that has to go on. There's a lot of team building that has to go on before we even get into process improvement. Because there, there's, there's a thing in the military when you move from unit to unit. If I go from Alaska to you know, North Carolina or to Florida or to Europe, when I show up at my new unit because I'm in uniform in the military, I'm already on the team, I'm already accepted as one of them and, and that's, that's almost instant in the military. It's not so much that way in industry. I typically find when teams come together they have to learn each other. So getting to be a team, it takes a lot longer to establish. As opposed to me walking into a military unit with 10 guys or gals that have never worked together and in five minutes they already have a common understanding of each other. So it moves along a little quicker. That can be a good thing and a bad thing, you know, kind of where you're at. The difference with the military though is there is a hierarchy, you know, a little bit more of a discipline command chain. So as facilitators and what I, what I teach, a lot of the, of the senior leaders and the junior leaders that come through the courses are, that's part of the trick of facilitation, put together the right team. If you put together a team where the hierarchy is already semi toxic or known to be combative, you might want to pick a different team, you know, pay attention to who you're selecting. That's going to have an impact on that. Past that we typically try to take them off site as much as possible. If they're in uniform, you can see the rank on somebody's chest. So that, that, and you know, that puts you in that mindset. But if you can get them off site in civilian clothes, introducing everybody as Ron and Phil and Jeff and Sarah and Gina, it tends to break that, break that down a little bit. So I mean, there, there definitely is some tactics involved with the military team side of the house that, you know, is related to their, their structure, their current hierarchy. Structure, command structures.

Yeah, yeah. So as we were preparing for the podcast, we, we were chatting a little bit about difference between academics and, and how they go about, you know, application and that sort of things. Like go ahead and expand on that a little bit more and what you, what, what, what you meant by that.

Yeah, so process improvement, you know, I, it's, everybody sees it a little differently. Whether you've only heard of it or you've been in the field practicing it and you know, moving away from the practical side of the house, you know, actually doing there. There's just a sea of those out there that provide training or certification. You know, we already, we've all seen conversations about the different bodies of knowledge and what's accepted and what's not. But again, when you strip away all these titles and you come back to application versus Academics, Academics do well. It's kind of the startup, you know, we have to learn the vocabulary, we have to learn the techniques. But then the, the application side of the house is what comes after there. And it's, it's, it's kind of hard sometimes to hear it and then put it in play. So I get a lot of questions like, hey, you know, when I finish the course, will I be certified? Will I be, you know, and as I tell everybody, you will have been through the academic training portion. That's really just a honeymoon. That's just us getting to know each other and me teaching you some words that'll get you the inter, you getting you hired. That's where application comes into play. You have to have some experience using the tools. One of the examples I gave somebody the other day when they were asking about, you know, Elena Laska's program versus some of the other self paced programs that are around. And they said, well, what's the difference? Yours, you know, yours does this, this one does that. And I said, well, let me ask you, would you, would you take a self paced course on being a pilot without ever talking to anybody, hop in the airplane and fly it? Right. I don't think the commercial jet people are going to Let you in the door. It's the same premise, you know, once you learn the vocabulary, you have to learn how to put it into play.

Yeah.

And sometimes we have to explain academics versus application. Not to say the academics isn't important. Yeah. But we really learn from the application.

Yeah. They go hand in hand. Yeah. I mean, even at Gimba Academy, we tell people we got thousands of videos now, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, it's kind of weird. It's not about the video. I mean, the video is important. You need the information or you don't know how to do anything, but you got to go practice it deliberately, preferably with a coach or somebody beside you to kind of help you and guide you as you go. But yeah, 100 man. Again. 100.

Oh, yeah, yeah, Absolutely agree.

What are your thoughts, Phil, on. I know again, in your military and Lean Alaska guys, you know, running projects and events and different things like that, but is that, what are your, what's your thoughts on, you know, that being the only way to sort of gain experience or, or there are other ways outside of projects.

Yes. So, so, and this may be an unpopular opinion among some, but I do believe projects. Projects bring everything together.

Right.

Projects are very important. So again with our program at Lean Alaska, you know, even after you're done the training, we do a project or offer a project to every single student that comes through. So you get the training and then we stick with them for the coaching and we tell them it's a, it's a train coach, mentor cycle. We train you, vocabulary coach you guide you through it, mentor you, you guide us through it. So it's progression. So from that perspective, projects are very important. But, and I've seen this in the military more than anything and a little more in industry lately, full blown projects can be very daunting. When you start laying out a DC and you start laying out road maps and timelines, like we live in a tick tock world, you know, two to three minutes, that's all the attention span you really get. Projects take few more than two to three minutes. But there's also a learning curve that's associated with that. So what I started seeing that kind of brought me to this. You know, we. While projects are needed and hopefully we culminate in a project, the individual tools, in my opinion, are almost more powerful than the collective project in terms of understanding, learning and really getting a hold of something. So when I would teach these classes, this is while I was on active duty, you know, everybody wanted to do a project but nobody really had the time and there was always the leadership buy in issue. You know, I want to solve world hunger versus I just want to eat at the defect, right? We can, we can fit. I want to eat at the defect in our span of control. So as I would train, I would, I would start going around to see all the students after they graduated. The soldiers and I would walk into team rooms or operation centers and you see process maps everywhere. You'd see this eight waist diagram. Somebody had printed out downtime and had a battle rhythm where everybody knew what downtime was and they would write down what they saw in that space and then they would address it on a regular basis. So these, over time you'd hear the vocabulary coming out of these soldiers, you know, talking about, well, we need to do a swim lane map on this or hey, let's get together and do a value stream map and relate it to what our, our other products are. Or let's, let's do some root cause analysis to this. Or you know, we'll use a solution selection matrix to really zero down and make sure that we're doing what the boss wants.

So.

But these were people and soldiers that never completed full blown projects. So they didn't receive the recognition of a project. But they understood the tools very well. And there were a couple of them where you'd see as they learned independent tools, they also started to understand better how they could link together to support each other. So my perception of that became, you know, we talk about projects, projects are very important. But I feel like there's a step to the project, you know, as the learning master the tools, then you can master the project. And that path seems to help compartmentalize learning for, for a lot of folks where they, instead of saying, oh my God, I have to remember all, you know, 50 tools for my project, they say, okay, I'm going to address this one area, affect it with this tool, and then I want to try a new tool and see where they meet together down the road. So that's kind of where my perspective on that one is.

Yeah, I'm with you, man. I even, I tell our black belts and green belts are going through our program is like, you know, sometimes I sense that they put the weight of the project on their shoulder. This is my one chance project. I'm like, man, this is your one chance. This is the beginning, you know, and, and if you think about like, you know, a commencement ceremony, it's like, what does that mean? It begins now, right?

Yeah, you're now.

Let's go. You know, now it really gets fun, right? So that's absolutely agree to look at it.

Yeah. That's why I've loved Gemba Academy for so long. Like I've watched even back when I was on active duty, you know, we had access to Gemba Academy through the military and, and I grew up, you know, in my career watching your guys videos and watching you guys speak. You know, it's, we're meeting for the first time, but I've known you for years at this point, so.

Thanks.

I totally agree.

Yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. So if somebody's listening to this right now, Phil, maybe they're in the military, maybe the industry doesn't matter. And you know, they're, they're thinking about, maybe they've dabbled with, with Lane and Six Sigma, but they want to really go. They, you know, it's 20, 23. Everybody's worried about this recession that we're either in or going to be in or something in between. It's like, and so they're like, you know, maybe they believe we gotta, let's go and control what we can control. Let's try to get better. What do you think are some of the obstacles, some of the barriers, some of the things that are going to be hard for that, that organization, that individual, as they kind of get going with, with Lean and Six Sigma, you.

Know, I almost would say it's three things. And the first one goes back to just what we were talking about. A lot of the times I'll see the barrier to entry is the fear of a project itself. So two things. They either start the training and they start hearing projects. And as you're going along the dmaic, they become, you know, overwhelmed, crossed under their own weight of learning, if you will. And they're like, oh my God, I can't do a full blown project. I'm learning so much, I'll never be able to get this done. So it backs them down. Fear of the project. Sometimes it's fear of availability of time. You know, they feel, well, if I can't commit myself 1000% to this today, that it, that I, I just, I can't do it. I either want to be all in or all out, you know, and, and process improvement is a lifetime learning event. Right? You don't learn again, go back to airplanes. You don't learn how to fly an airplane overnight. It builds. So I think a barrier to entry for some is, is the fear of, of the commitment to the time there. There are also a group and I think this may be a little more specific to the military where they're like, well, I've got so much time left in the military, so I can, I'll wait till I get a little closer to the time till I get out. And that's a barrier to entry for them. And my message to them is there's a, there's some goodness about doing process improvement in the military. If you do a project that doesn't come to fruition, you're not going to get fired. Right. The military doesn't fire you. This is the best practice and training ground you can possibly find. Target rich environment for process improvement. No worries about getting fired because you still have a day job that you have to execute. So those are some of the, you know, the barriers. But projects and project charters, interestingly enough, are, are what I find to be the barrier to entry. You know that. Well, what project do I work on? What actually is a project? You know, we, we try to tell them all often, you know, you learn a little to do or you learn a lot to do a little. Right. You learn a lot to do a little. And projects are very simple. It's a known problem with an unknown solution. And then if you can come to that perspective on three things. Why does it cost so much, why does it take so long? And why do we do it differently every time that we do it? You can pretty much just fill in the title at that point and come up with a project. But again, that's, that's hard to see people, when they come to courses or they haven't spent the time as, as you've seen over your, your career as well, they're very good at explaining why the problem is happening or what they think the solution is. They're not the best at defining the problem that drives the solution and, and everything that lives in their head.

Yep.

So, you know, it's that psychological inertia that they got across to move into crafting a charter to do a project.

Yep. Oh, man. Gosh. That probably is one of the biggest issues, you know. No, don't. It's okay to have ideas, but put those ideas in your back pocket for right now. Yeah. The problem. How do you know it's a problem? You know, what are the facts? Right. So, yeah, good stuff. Awesome. Well, hey, man, this has been fun, Phil, I appreciate you coming on. If folks want to connect with you and learn more about Lean Alaska or what's the best way. LinkedIn, website, what do you got?

Yeah, so website and LinkedIn probably, I think LinkedIn is probably my most, you know, platform I spend the most time on. It's just phil rank on LinkedIn or lean Alaska on LinkedIn. Same thing for Facebook. We have a Lean Alaska page there as well. Other than that, it's. Our website is leanalaska.com and my email is phil leanalaska.com all very simple, right? Efficiency.

I can't believe you got Lean Alaska man as your domain. That's pretty sweet, man.

I know it as there. Yeah. I mean, not a lot going on in Alaska. So anything with Alaska in the title, you know, you're. You're pretty safe.

Yeah. Yeah. And just so. And folks are just listening. Rank is R A N C K. Yeah.

Yes. R A N C K. Yeah, that. That's silency. It's like I was mentioning earlier, you know, the army tried to convince me for a long time my last name was Ranch. So, you know, third rank. I only has so many certificates. Phil Ranch man. That guy's a war hero.

Gotcha. Awesome. Well, we're going to link to everything in the Show Notes so Gembo podcast.com this episode 463 so. Hey man. Well, thanks for coming on again, Phil. Keep up the great work and maybe we'll connect again down the road.

Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. It was great to talk.

All right, take care. 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.