GA 469 | Improving Lives with Lean with Steve Bell

The really big challenge is that we're all living in the world of vuca, which VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Who doesn't wake up with that every day when they listen to the news?

Today I'm excited to welcome Steve Bell back to the show. We talk about it right at the beginning of the episode, but Steve first came onto the podcast in episode 10. So yeah, been a little while since we connected, but boy, Steve is doing some powerful work. He's running an organization called Lean4Ngo and so basically supporting various types of NGOs or some nonprofits and that sort of thing. So today we just really kind of dive into before we start with like what is an ngo. And he does a really good job of sort of explaining the different types of NGOs out there. And then we did, we get into what's Lean got to do with it. Right, and how can LEAN help and how is it helping? And towards the end, Steve shares some super powerful stories and really right at the end he shares one of the most powerful stories of how a former MIT LEAN expert retired and went into and supported a community for some life changing work. And so you're going to want to kind of listen to the end for that story. So really good stuff. All the links to Steve's various websites and YouTube channels and so forth are going to be here linked up on the Show Notes page. So just scroll down on the app you're listening to and check all that out and take Steve up on his request. This Lean community of ours, we've got a lot to offer the world and sure we're helping our companies and trying to. Most of us are probably working for, for profit organizations and trying to help us be more profitable. And there's nothing wrong with that. But we can take those same gifts and those same talents and, and go out and help your local Habitat for Humanity group or you can go and work at the soup kitchen or whatever it is. I share a story towards the end of how I helped a battered women's shelter at one time, just pro bono and supporting the community. So maybe think about that as well as you're listening to this episode. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Steve, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I am fine, Ron, thank you you very much. I appreciate you having me back again.

Yeah, you know, well, we were chatting. It's. This is episode 469 and yeah, you were, you were last on in episode 10 like 10 10.

We both have a few more gray hairs to show for it too, right?

Yeah, yeah. Especially me. Yeah, yeah. No, man. Well, I'm so happy to have you back on. I didn't realize it had been that long. You know, it's just, it's crazy, you know how time flies. But anyhow, I appreciate you coming back on so well, Steve. I know you remember the drill. We like to get going with our, our guest sharing a quote. So what do you have?

Well, you know, I had forgotten about that and you reminded me of it just a moment ago, so please forgive the pithy one, but this, this is what came to mind. It's Gandhi's be the change. What could be more powerful than that? And I think anyone who does what we do for a living and believes in it the way we do, that's just who we are. So. Yeah.

Yeah, I love it.

So.

Who we are. So tell us about who you are, Steve. Tell us about your background and we'll get in. We're obviously going to get into your, your, your work in great detail here, but yeah, just maybe even pre Lean and all that. Who is, who is Steve?

Oh, boy, oh boy. Well, I'm not going to go back that far, but let me say I got, I got, I got my start in this, in the ERP business. I was an Apex guy manufacturing back in the early 90s, and I made my living inflicting ERP systems on people. And after a while I decided it was better to help them to continue to inflict pain. And it was about that time I first started hearing about this thing called Lean and I saw it from the ERP world and I was a graduate from Ann Arbor and Jeff Leiker was kind enough to take me under his wing, just enough to give me a push start and got my first book out the door, which was about trying to reconcile ERP and pull and push and all of that. And that got me started. Not a book I'd recommend to anyone, but after that I found myself straddling the Lean and the technology world. SWOT soon became known as Agile for years, and I'm proud to say I've known and worked with many of the original Lean guard. I was inducted as an Ellie Lean Enterprise Institute faculty years ago. I won a couple of Shingo prizes, but I've also come to know very well the folks on the Agile Scrum Kanban side of the world and have really worked hard to try and bring those together. Because the two sides of the coin, continuous operational excellence and continuous innovation, and the two are extremely Complementary. And that was, that was my former life. Just in the last year, I've retired from working with for profit companies and dedicated myself to working with non profits. And 12 years ago, I started this little thing called Lean for NGO. It was basically a website and a LinkedIn group. And that was Interview 10. And 12 years later, it's growing. And I've decided now is a good time to throw everything in on that and had a big new launch on January 1st. So thank you for inviting me along to tell you a little more about it. Yeah.

All right, well, yeah, let's just jump in. So lean and then it's the number four, right? Yes, yeah, yeah, number four, ngo. All right, well, I want to ask them some real basic questions, not assuming anything, you know, of the audience if they're not familiar with, with this whole world. First of all, let's just start with ngo. What is ngo? And give us just a elevator pitch of an ngo.

Ngo. NGO is an acronym, a three letter acronym. We all love those. That stands for non governmental organization. Rather than saying what it's not, though, I like to say what it is. It's basically the globally recognized term for nonprofit. And I've named my group actually Lean and agile thinking for NGOs and nonprofits. So I'm trying to give at least a couple of recognizable words for everyone. And NGOs come in two flavors. They're the big, the large ones. International Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, which, you know, is funding and guiding many of the bigger ones and creating these global projects. And these are big corporate organizations with very big footprint all around the world. Some of them are adopting lean and agile to some degree. But where the rubber really meets the road, on the front lines are the smaller groups, the smaller NGOs. They might be local NGOs or they might be divisions or locations of the bigger ones. Community activists. And here's the thing, it's just like lean front. Front lines is where the action's happening. And if you have a big ngo, let's say they specialize in nutrition or hunger or poverty. Well, they may have eight or 10 locations around the world, but poverty looks different, agriculture looks different, women's health, women's rights, children's education. Pick any of the 17 United Nations Development Goals. They look different in each local community. And so the NGA at the corporate level has to standardize and push these things out. But the players at the front lines, they have to be very localized. And then what happens in the middle? How do NGOs standardize yet localize and become efficient. And anybody who's done lean in a corporate world knows exactly what I'm talking about. But on top of that, the really big challenge is that we're all living in the world of vuca, which VUCA stands for. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Who doesn't wake up with that every day when they listen to the news? Well, the NGOs of the world, I think, have a better chance of moving the needle forward on some of these big issues. Working with governments, working with private organizations, working with technology, working with research. Nobody can solve it alone. But often nowadays, it's the NGOs that are, like, in the wheelhouse. They're orchestrating the collaboration not just among multiple NGOs and other players in a particular domain, like hunger, but also agriculture and education. Because let's say you have an NGO focusing on education, okay? So you build schools, you teach teachers, you get them books and all and Internet connections. But if the kids can't come to school because they're hungry or they're sick or the boys and girls are carrying water all day, or they won't even let girls into the classroom, you know, education's not the only issue. And anyone with our background knows you have to look at the big picture. This is systems thinking. And typically in the world of private industry, you don't think that way. You're very siloed. So why I think there's tremendous potential here is the challenge of bringing what we've learned in the last 30 years in these practices and bring them not just accidentally and opportunistically into the NGO world, but bring it in a big way and quickly because I think there's a lot at stake, especially for the next generation coming up behind us.

So you've, you sort of touched on, on, I think, a response to this question I'm about to ask, but I, I want to, I want to know if there's more. You know, obviously, as lean thinkers, we're, you know, arguably the most commonly asked question we have is what problem are you trying to solve? Right. You know, when we're dealing with someone who's, who's dealing with some sort of situation. So as it relates to lean for ngo, your, your, your movement there, your, your organization, like, what problem are you trying to solve? You know, using, using all these skills and tools, thinking systems that we have.

Yeah, well, the, the, there, there's kind of two, two embedded questions in that. One is, what am I doing? You know, as far as myself with Lean for NGO and what I'm going to be doing in the near future beyond just creating a community and putting content out there for people to work with. I'll talk, we'll talk about that later. But the problem I think I solve. You're right. I've touched it briefly. The NGOs are in the best space to help orchestrate going forward, but the impediments that are keeping them from that. It's interesting. I've been running a five, maybe six year now Google, Google Alerts experiment. Every week I see a list of articles published on the Internet with the words NGO, nonprofit and lean, and I usually get back 10 or 15 responses every week. And they usually. I wrote a few down here. We've just had a lean quarter. We need to lean on fundraising to fill the gaps. Various uses of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean in were popular for a while. We've been running with a lean staff or a lean budget or this or that. And all you have to do is look at hundred of these and say the word lean and what it means out there in the world of NGOs and nonprofits. It's not getting out there and you just have to ask yourself why. And I think you've got to follow the money. Lean has been industrial, started in manufacturing and supply chain, moved into healthcare, finance, you name it. There's no domain of commercial activity in this world where Lean and Six Sigma and Agile haven't proven extremely effective. But only occasionally and often accidentally do they make it in the NGO world. And there's a couple of reasons for that. You know, consulting firms don't go after it. There's not a lot of money in it. You know, folks even like yourselves, you build a huge community, people that need and want your services to pay for education and training. But that takes money. And a lot of these organizations are running on shoestrings from grant to grant. And when they do hire an executive that comes in with some Lean or Six Sigma background and they try to sprinkle some of that through the organization, they might do some localized things, but with a few notable examples, they're not very successful in creating it sustainably. And so what I'm trying to do is my original intent with creating Lean for NGO is simply I was always a fan of Malcolm Gladwell and his notion of the tipping point, the connector. If you build it, they'll come. You create a platform, in this case a website with some content and a LinkedIn group and start introducing people who can start dialoguing sharing their ideas and build a community. And for the last 12 years it's been growing steadily and have had a tremendous number of amazing stories. Like I'll give you an example. Just last week or two weeks ago, I saw a New York Times article about this enormous distribution hub in Dubai that was proclaimed to be the largest humanitarian aid distribution center in the world. And you know, so serving right now Ukraine and what's happening in Turkey and Syria. And right away I thought, wow, that could be an amazingly good thing or it could be the world's worst nightmare. And I wonder which it is. And it's probably a little of both. So I reached out to, to one of my longtime Lean Frangio partners who's been doing this with NGOs now for about 15 years. He's a lean six sigma black belt PhD who's been doing some teaching in the humanitarian supply chain. And there's actually quite a domain of expertise in humanitarian supply chain. And we just. What is it today? Friday, it was Wednesday, two days ago, on the phone with a woman, a university professor in Zurich and my friend Andrew Paris. Thank you, Andrew. We had a fascinating hour long conversation and Andrew just in the last few years had introduced this professor to Lean. She'd been in consulting for years, tremendous, bright, active, successful, and knew about Lane. But it took Andrew to reach out to her and help her understand. And now she couldn't say enough about how Lean is really the only answer to doing what needs to be done in humanitarian supply chain operations to feed the logistics of an international Red Cross or a Doctors Without Borders or someone like Mercy Corps who's on the ground, first responder when an earthquake hits or a tsunami hits. And this it, you know, just a few years ago here was a leading organization in this domain of knowledge and they barely understood Lean. And I'm not saying that to their fault. I'm just saying we're not doing a good enough job getting it out there beyond the domain of who's willing to pay for it. And I think it's up to all of us to step up and take what we've learned, especially those of us in the sunset of our careers and really roll up our sleeves and do something. So did I answer the question? What's the problem?

No, I think you did. I just have some follow up thoughts on it. So obviously these organizations, not all of them like I gotta imagine, like the Red Cross is decently staffed. Right. You know, but to your point, some of the smaller ones are for sure going to be resource constrained and which is just going to put all the more pressure on that, that individual or group of individuals who are going to feel like, I only have so many hours in the day. I don't have time for this lean stuff.

Right?

When obviously, if they would just take a breath and allow it to sort of cooperate with it, their days, they would, they would gain time in their day.

Right?

So, like, how do you, how do you handle the change management side, convincing someone in the NGO community that, hey, listen, take a breath, you know, listen, this will help you, you know, but it's going to be hard. It's not get rich quick. Like, what do you, what's your strategy there?

Well, first of all, I'm not doing this. It's not. My goal with LeanFrangio isn't to get out there. I've lived on airplanes my whole life and, you know, I'll still travel around and do things from time to time to help, but my goal is to build the framework, build a platform, because they're there. I mean, just your audience alone, Ron. Astonishing. And if even 5% of the people who hear this say, boy, we should do something, or I should do something, or my company should, we've got coaches, we've got a local ngo, nonprofit. We could, you know, do something like the Lean Portland group has been doing for a few years, where they, they keep just a bunch of lean, you know, coaches from various companies out in Portland, Oregon, anything by intel and others who come together for, you know, drinks at a local beer pub. And they, they help the Habitat for Humanity store whatever, you know, whatever it is you need to do, you know, get engaged. But I'm not here to tell anybody how to transform. Having worked with a number of big NGOs who have launched things like this, you know the drill. Any big corporation decides they want to do something like this, you find a pilot, you train up some coaches, you help them along, see one, do one, teach one. They spread it, and somehow it spreads and hopefully soon it becomes less of a push and more of a pull. And the question is, ultimately, how do you sustain it? Sometimes you see those things happen from the grassroots, where somebody out lower in the food chain gets a grand idea and has the budget and does something locally and does an amazing job, and then they create this interest that kind of inspires it to happen. So we've seen various patterns of this, but in the NGO world, you don't often see that so much, but you do. You do. There are big NGOs that, that believe in lean, but at the front lines, you just don't see much of that. So I've been putting a lot of my effort lately into. I find I, I was getting ready to write another book about four years ago and I said I'm too old for that. It's too hard. And nobody reads many books anymore. They any. I contend that most of the learning that will happen out there in the front lines in the next years, like it or not, is going to happen through people's phones or whatever mobile device they're carrying. And so we need to get better at delivering to them at the front lines. Now I'm not. We need to write books, we need to write papers, we need to do all of that. But if we're going to reach the front lines, you know, just take what Khan Academy has done. That's kind of who I'm modeling against. Extremely modest way. So just in the last, since January 1st, I've cut four videos and I have an ambitious program to do more. And the last one I just released last week, I call the Quick Start Kanban. It's about an hour and 10 minutes. There's about 25 minutes of orientation up front when I explain what Kanban is, why it works, the problems we're trying to solve and then hand off to about 35 or 40 minutes of literally, I think it's a seven step exercise with breaks. They press the pause key, they go do an exercise, they come back at it again and at the end I do some reflections. And going forward and having done this I don't know how many dozens or a hundred times I've facilitated Kanban exercises in small groups and large groups and conference rooms and in one case a large auditorium where everybody's got sheets of paper and sticky notes and pens. You get them going and you get them to connect this thing called Kanban with the work they do. And I said I can do this. And it took a lot longer than I thought it would, but I just pushed out a video and we'll wait and see what happens, but already the people who reviewed it and do this for a living also said, you know, they'd never seen anything quite like this before. And what I'm hoping to do is prove that you give people things like this with enough instruction and help them through an exercise, a real exercise, and then give them plenty of coaching tips and pointers and links in the video that they can go, go back and learn more as their journey progresses. That we don't need full time coaches, paid coaches or anything that costs money. If they can get to YouTube, they can get to this training. Now, eventually some of them might rise to the point where they need more, and they can probably justify getting more at that point. But I'm just trying to start, plant the seed to get this going. And my next video I'm hoping to have out in two or three weeks is a deep dive on problem solving. Again, the quick start for frontline teams. So that's what I would call an intervention that I am doing for them. But everything else I'm doing is building a platform to enable the rest of this amazing global community to come together.

So you've mentioned the Gemba Academy audience and there. So, you know, what can the lean community just that large do to support, you know, this, this work or aside from, you know, promoting YouTube videos and so forth? But there's, I'm guessing there's more, you know, things that, that could be done.

Well, there's one thing, two things, actually, that have already been done. We're having this podcast again after 12 years or 10 years. So thank you. I mean, just spreading the word alone to your amazing global community of people who really trust each other is amazing. And you're kind enough to say, you know any of my publicly available content that's already up on the LeanFangio sites, that was one of the first free training series I, I posted up there. I put some of Jeff Liker's Lean Management up there, too, because there's so much good content out there that is free, that delivers something. Not infomercials that sell you the sizzle, but they ask you to pay for the value. You guys put value out there, but then of course, there's a revenue model behind it, and that's great, and so thank you for that. But what can people who are listening to this do? Well, individually, you're probably already practicing lean at home or in the school or church or whatever your family or whatever your community is. And step that up a bit. Teach, coach. And if you're an organization and you have a coaching team once a year, get out there and adopt a local nonprofit. The best example? Well, there was in Saskatchewan. Years ago. I came across the province of Saskatchewan, actually funded a contest where you had to. Had to do an application, and you won the right to get a lean coach for a year in the province of Saskatchewan, paid that lean coach to do it. Now big brothers, big sisters in Edmonton won it, and they were at an association of manufacturing excellence and told an amazing story. And so those kind of things. The best example I Can think nobody else has topped. This is Toyota, Toyota's supplier service center. Who, you know, they, decades ago they stood up to create a solid supplier infrastructure to feed the Toyota food chain, the supply chain. And then years ago they turned TSSC into, into helping nonprofits. And they've been going at that for, I don't know, 15 years now. And they put out videos how they helped Sandy recovery after the Sandy hurricane. They're helping food banks, they're helping this and that. And every time they do one of these, or at least not every time, but they do a video on it. And I've got all those video links in the lean Frangio libraries. If anybody could even start to come close to what Toyota has been doing in a sustained way for over 10 years, that'd be great. And here's the thing. If you're trying to build your coaches and they're all inwardly focused on your company and your politics and your culture, get them out in the world where things look different and give them a good feeling, community service, and then bring them back in and you have more worldly coaches who think differently than if you just kept them in the bubble of your own culture and your own organization. Any number of things you can do, if you're doing in house training and you can get the rights to distribute it, send me a YouTube link and I'll get it up on Lean for NGO. I'm sure there are other ideas I haven't thought of yet that somebody out there right now might be saying, hey, we can do that too. Send us a story. We love posting stories because nothing helps people understand what this is about more than good storytelling.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Fantastic. Yeah. I remember one of the most fulfilling, I suppose you could maybe call it a Kaizen event. It wasn't a formal event, but I went and spent maybe four, it was nearly a week, maybe three, four days. And it was actually, it was like a battered women's shelter and was actually, it was a store that collected clothes and then they resold the clothes, you know, to make money to support these women. And I remember walking in, deliberately burned my brain. I walked in and they said, oh yeah, there's the clothes. And I looked and it was just mountain of clothes. And so anyhow, we, I, I taught him 5s and you know, this and that and you know, we, we got after it. And that was arguably, you know, I didn't make a, a penny obviously, but I, I did it to help them. But that was one of the most fulfilling weeks of my life. You know, supporting that, that that organization.

So stuff like that doesn't get any better than that. Thank you. I'm sure they. Thank you. And now that you've shared that story, I can't help but, but share two, two more really quickly that, you know, the Lean Frangio, I call them members, but they're partners. We're all partners in this. A fellow, Brian Hurley, who's been, who's on his podcast. Yeah, good. Lean Six Sigma for good. Well, he told me such a good story about something he did for a Habitat for Humanity that he and I are working on. Well, he's doing the work, I'm doing the editing. So he's got the hard part. A video of just so anybody who's doing anything in a Habitat Restore or a Goodwill or anything can see this go, oh, yeah, we've got a mess just like that in our receiving area. And that's great. But the best story I've come up with recently, and I hope Earl doesn't mind me sharing this, a fellow named Earl Merman who was at MIT in the lean aerospace for years, his career, amazing fellow. I Met Earl in 2012 when I went to Cincinnati to get my first shingle prize. And there I am sitting at this table with Jeff Leiker, Mike Rother and Earl Merman. We're all going to get our Shingo prizes. That was a moment. And, and I haven't spoken with Earl for years. Well, Earl retired and he moved to a beautiful community outside of Seattle. And he met a guy almost, almost by accident who was also a lean guy. And the two of them decided in their local community to start doing some lean workshops. And they got with the Chamber of Commerce and they set that up and they started doing a series of workshops. I don't know how many cycles of this now, but they do seven weeks, two hours a week workshop. And they would have small businesses, local government agencies and nonprofits attend. And just seven weeks, two hours a week. And they would walk them through this curriculum and then these people are coming to this workshop, would go back to their office and practice and then come back the next week. And I was talking to Earl just, I don't know, a month ago he told me a story that recently he had heard from one of the agencies who went through their class. He said it was a mental health agency. And you know how under overburdened right now mental health is pandemic and everything we have going on. And this mental health clinic, small one, I think 14 or 15 people, they sent three people to the seven week workshop. And every, every time after the workshop, they go home into the lunchroom, get all the employees in the lunchroom together, and they'd go through their own internal workshop. Seven weeks. And then when it was done, they were done. And Earl didn't hear from him for a while, so no additional coaching. They just kind of carried this on themselves. And so Earl ends up getting a call from them a little while later and they said, you know, we decided we were going to work out the whole initial point of contact value stream. And so the state requires that from first point of contact, when somebody calls and requests mental health assistance, they have 14 days to set up a first appointment. Not a treatment, just their first appointment to talk about setting up a treatment. Now anybody in a mental health crisis, 14 days might as well be 14 months. And after seven weeks and doing this on their own, they said, oh, and they were, they were missing the 14 day target 30% of the time. Think about that. This is a small office. After seven weeks of workshop and a few weeks of putting this in place, they had it down to one day, which ended up being too fast because most people had childcare or a day off of work or whatever. So they set their target at two days and they're hitting that consistently. They didn't do it by adding any additional staff or any new software. They just had to start thinking differently about the way they worked. Now if you can think about the difference they made just with the coaching and the exercises and without any follow on guidance and the changes they made in the lives of those people and the community they live in, if that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what does.

Wow. Yeah, because you think about, you know, we, we throw the P word around a lot in the lean community purpose, you know, or your why or something like that. And, you know, aligning to a purpose like that, goodness gracious, I don't know what could be, what could be more powerful. Wow. What a story.

Yeah.

I need to, you need to introduce me to, to Earl and have him come on the podcast.

I, I think he's already committed. He just doesn't. I love it. I love it. Wow. So good.

Wow. Well, Steve, man, it's been great chatting with you again. Let's not wait, you know, 400 episodes, you know, again to reconnect. I'm sure we could find lots of things to talk about, but thank you for all the work that you're doing. And yeah, we're going to link to, to, to your website and social media. And your YouTube and all that. So folks, just scroll down there on the app that you're listening to this on and we'll, we'll have everything linked.

Up.

Is there, aside from your website, your social media and YouTube, is there any other way for folks to, to reach out to you?

Steve? Well, www.leanferangio.org L E A N for ngo.org Steve B@laneforngio.org and go to LinkedIn and join the Lean and Agile Thinking for NGOs and Nonprofits group. You'll be among friends there someday. I may have to bite the bullet and create a Facebook group because the people I want to meet on the front lines, all 4 billion of them have a Facebook account. So I'm gonna have to figure that out one of these days. One step at a time, one hypothesis, one experiment at a time. And here we go.

Yeah. Fantastic. Oh, so good. All right, Steve, well, hey again, thank you for everything that you're doing for the world and for the communities around the world. It's powerful work. So I'm glad to know you and I'm so happy that you came back onto the show.

The feeling is mutual to you and Kevin and your whole staff. You guys have, you're on a good mission and I appreciate the opportunity. All right.

Okay. Take care, Steve.

Thanks, Ron.

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