GA 498 | The Power of Improving Less with Chad Bareither

How do you continuously iterate on a shaky foundation? And that's really where I've seen in my years of practice one of the kind of frustrating parts about being a CI practitioner, right? You do a lot of work, you walk away and then things fall apart because someone let them fall apart.

Today I'm excited to welcome Chad Breather to the show. Now Chad has recently written a book called Improve Less like L E S S. And so that's what really talk about today is just the whole idea of how do you sustain gains. And Chad proposes that one of the major countermeasures to making sure things don't fall back apart is to focus and to improve less as the book entails. Now he's not proposing to not improve everything, he is, but maybe there's a way to focus and guide our steps to maximize our ability to succeed long term. So really good conversation and I really appreciated Chad's thought. So show notes can be found over@gemba podcast.com this is episode 498. Also as I've been preaching the last few episodes, thank you for everybody leaving those five star reviews. I really appreciate that. So if you don't mind, keep scrolling on your app, whether it's the Apple podcasts or Spotify, whatever you're on and, and, and and leave a review. We do. I read every one of them and I and it means the world to me to see that the show is having a positive impact on folks. So than okay enough for me. Let's get to the show. Chad, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It's going pretty well. It's a treat to be here.

Okay, well thank you man. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. So I think we got a cool topic today, something that all of us continuous improvement practitioners have, have battled over the day, over the years, I'm sure. But Chad, I know you've listened to the show before and as you know we like to get going with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you have?

Yeah, this is a quote that's floated around on a post it note on my desk for a couple of years now and it's no match was ever lit with maybe it's actually a song lyric from this band called Sister Sparrow and the Dirty Bird. So the lead singer, her name is Arlie Kinchelo, but that I remember hearing that in the car one day and it just struck a chord with me. And in this continuous improvement environment, nothing gets done without trying, without experimentation, without taking that first step. And so like, you can't just look at the match and like, well, I hope it starts on fire. You actually have to take some action.

Yeah, for sure, man. Yeah. When they say the hardest S&5s is start, you know, not really one of the Ss, but kind of a fun, fun Lean joke, kind of. Gee, my kids always accuse me of being nerdy with my jokes. So anyhow. Hey, Chad, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so my first exposure to anything in this continuous improvement stuff was in Six Sigma. So I was working for the US army at the time as a civilian engineer doing weapon system development, and they were piloting a new program called Six Sigma. So I got to be one of the first green belt classes that we're going through.

Nice.

It really resonated with me on structured problem solving based on statistics and data, and I just gravitated towards it. I mean, I feel very blessed that early in my career I kind of found my niche, and it was process and process improvement. From there, I spent time with suppliers, tried to resolve quality issues or productivity issues to supply munitions to the federal government, and then got trained and certified as a black belt, started teaching classes there, and then made a couple of different moves in different corporate spaces to med device and utilities, and some space, some time in pharma. And now what I've seen is through applying and different flavors along the way, Right. Sometimes Lean, sometimes Six Sigma, sometimes theory of constraints, but I've really seen a lot of what works, and in my experience, what works and what doesn't work in terms of the long run.

Yeah. Yeah. And what I appreciate about that background is just, you know, learn as much as you can. You mentioned Lean, you mentioned Six Sigma, you mentioned toc. So often in our movement, for whatever reason, people get just entrenched. You know, you get the Six Sigma crowd, you get the lean crowd, and they don't like each other. And the toc. What's that? It's just one book, you know. You know, but it's all good, you know, we should learn it all because it's all trying to do the same thing. Right. And not to make things better. So the more you have more arrows you have in your quiver, as they say, the better you're going to be. Right.

So totally agree. Yeah.

Yeah. Great. All right. Well, hey, so I guess what we're going to really sort of focus on today is thinking about as we're Starting up a continuous improvement program, you know, once we get it going, we make some things better. But then so often, for whatever reason, entropy or I don't know what's to blame, you know, things come undone. So, you know, sometimes in Six Sigma we'll talk about sustain, but you know, I don't actually like that. I like, you know, our control, you know, I like, I like continuously improve sort of thing, you know, because I feel like it's really hard to sustain or, or control anything. But, but what's your take on that? Like what have you seen? What's been your experience with, you know, making things better and then making sure they don't fall back apart?

Oh, well, first I love that you pulled out the term entropy there. Because my grandfather, when he was still alive, he was an engineer by education as well, and he used to say his definition of entropy was things fall apart if you let them.

Yeah.

And so that's what happens in any process based business. So I don't think I'm going to be going too far. Divergent from what a lot of your listeners will agree with is that the key to continuous improvement is approaching the work as a process. And anything that can be more repeatable means I get more repeatable results. So less variability, more predictability, more stability. And it's hard to say to your point whether we're talking about control or standardize and sustain that it's hard to do that if it's not stable. Right. A shaky foundation for any process makes it very hard to make it stable in the long run. So then how do you continuously iterate on a shaky foundation? And that's really where I've seen in my years of practice, one of the kind of frustrating parts about being a CI practitioner, right? You do a lot of work, you walk away and then things fall apart because someone let them fall apart.

So why is it so hard? Like what, what's the, what's the root cause, if you will, of the, or potential root cause of, of things falling apart on us?

I can at least speak to the root cause that I'm trying to address. Right. So what I hypothesize the root cause to be, what I've seen is that we don't plan the improvement up front with the amount of effort it's going to take to sustain on the back end. So if I clarify that occasionally I see we start too many change initiatives, like, we can handle this much change, but if we don't start thinking with the end in mind of like, okay, once we get to the solution. Who's going to teach and coach that? Who's going to iteratively check that? Who's going to monitor the metrics? There is. There's work to implement a change. There's change management to get people on board to train and develop people to set up the monitoring metrics and review that on some cadence. You know, I advise daily, but. And if we don't think about that bolus of work on the back end, we start changing a lot of things and then we run out of bandwidth to sustain everything that we're changing.

So what's the countermeasure?

The countermeasure is improve less. And I don't mean like less in terms of performance, but less in terms of maybe we should focus on fewer things at a time. Especially a lot of where I'm focusing and the clients I serve is organizations that are making their first steps into a continuous improvement environment. So we want to start thinking about managing our business differently. And that's either because of proactive leadership or there's some sort of forcing function or crisis that makes them change their perspective. But when we're getting into that model of starting to think about the work differently, we shouldn't try to, you know, bite off more than we can metabolize at once. And so if we, if we improve fewer things, build that muscle memory, yes, eventually we will get better and we will get faster. We can maybe even do more at one time. But it seems nonsensical to me to try to change 12 things when we really only have the bandwidth for changing. And on the back end, that sustainment piece and sustaining three things. So let's move quickly, let's move surgically, let's improve less and get better results.

That's interesting. So, like, do you have any examples of, like, maybe an organization that was improving too much and then they improved less and were successful?

Yeah. There's actually a client I'm engaging with right now that we could talk about that is focused on. They're like, we need to improve our process management. Okay, so that's kind of just a very vague topic. Is first is like, yeah, well, well, why? So we had to anchor back towards, well, what organizational goal, what KPI, you know, what sort of metric are we driving at? So in this particular case, it was cost. Costs were above forecast for this particular function. Great. So what do you do to control costs? Okay, so let's start there. Since there's a lot of radio silence, like, let's start and say, well, what processes do you actually put fire people.

Yeah, exactly.

Not cost cutting. Right. We're not trying to cost cut, we're trying to manage our costs proactively. So let's look at the processes that you have in place that affects the cost on the back end and then how many of those processes exist today? And so we use pretty simple rating. Green, yellow and red. Right. Green, we have a standard, it's in place, no need to worry about it. Yellow, we have something in place, maybe not a good way to measure it. We don't enforce the standard. Something to that effect. Red, nothing, no control on it. Okay, now we have a pretty clear menu to look at and say, well, which of these processes should we focus on first? Again thinking about, let's pick a few. So if I go back to that, just that number as an example, 12 versus 3. We could start and say we have 12 gaps to fill. Great, let's do it all. Or we could do three, move really quickly, get it into the sustainment phase, actually prove out that we can monitor metrics on a daily basis and react to variations and then add another three, and then add another three, and then add another three. So rather than taking, just to make up some numbers a year to develop and deploy 12 corporate processes, why not take 60 days to develop three and start tracking them and then learn and iterate.

Yeah, it reminds me then, you know, more in the, I don't know if it's lean or six Sigma, I don't, I can't remember now it's in both in my opinion, but you know, the old, sometimes we'll call it the XY matrix or C and E matrix or whatever it might be where we're listing inputs and process steps and inputs and then we'll rank them against, you know, some two or three output variables and then we sort of sort them to help you get, maybe identify some of the, some of the ones that you want to start focusing on. Oftentimes we then take those and put those in an FMEA or something like that. But is that something that, that you've experimented with or seen work successfully to try to sort of improve less in a way.

Exactly. So the tool we use, it's called effort versus impact matrix. Right. So we say impact on whatever we establish as that top goal. Right. So let me get to that in a second. So we impact on how much is this going to influence achieving, stabilizing, predicting our top line goal and then effort, how hard is this going to be to put in place? Like maybe we should start with a Couple of quick wins, build some consensus and some buy in behind this whole continuous improvement lingo. That may be a change for people in the business. And so let's look at those quick wins, those lower, lower effort but higher impact on the, the top line objective. The other nice thing about this approach is that when I'm asking you now, Ron, that okay, I want you to have daily meetings. It's not just everyone needs daily meetings because I said that's daily meetings. I went on a Gemba tour of some factory and they were doing daily meetings. So we're going to do daily meetings. I'm going to give you one or two metrics to start with and I can show you how that metric is linked up to the process performance, to the requirement to the KPI. And I can say it's important for us to keep track of this every day. And now I'm not asking you to have daily meetings for the sake of having daily meetings. I'm asking you to have this meeting and monitor that metric that you own because it affects the top line goal.

Yeah. What's interesting about that is start with one metric, you know, one item to just study and focus because they understand the reason, the purpose, why they're doing it. So they could maybe even be intrinsically motivated eventually, right. To want to make it better.

Well, it's an interesting challenge to hold in your mind of just like, well, if I can't the organization. So if the organization, if I can't do this with one goal, what makes me think I can do it with 10? So even if I. Let's use another adage, right. Fail fast, fail often. Well, what if we try it with just one goal and we don't ramp up a huge initiative that we're sucking up, you know, 10% of our headcount to try to do this and we were either successful or we iterate and then we're successful the next time. Fantastic. But you know what? We those loops of learning are faster when we're trying to do less at one time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know where you are in the whole Toyota Kata scientific thinking framework, but the one thing I love about it is just the whole idea of identifying some obstacles or whatever that are in your way towards where you want to be, even short term goals and you know, just pick one obstacle and just experiment against it. Right. So it brings great clarity to what we're trying to do because yeah, we might have 10 or 12 potential obstacles. They're just guesses really, their opinions on potential Obstacles. So you might be wrong, they might not be an obstacle. But you know, if you, if you're able to focus, if you will. My business partner Kevin, he says he often, he'll, sometimes we'll get, you know, a lot of squirrels running around and you're trying to, ah, you know, he's like, let me drop the F word, focus, you know, and it's so true because it's so easy to lose focus, right? And, but bringing it back to what you're talking about here and pick one thing, experiment against it rapidly, experiment to get, see what you learn. I feel like that's, that's a much more sustainable, no pun intended, way of approaching continuous improvement.

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Yeah. And you mentioned Kata. Love the mindset, right? And especially the coaching side of it is I think what is very important is like, so who is asking you that from a third party perspective, those critical questions about like what are you going to try next and what do you expect to happen? So until that's a discipline in your own mindset, who's asking those questions? It's the leader. So Kata and that mindset I think works when you have the bandwidth of leadership to do that coaching. If there's not someone to do that coaching, how do you develop the muscle memory, right? The form, the repetitive form that is problem solving. And I see the same challenge for sustainability of any strategy deployment and process improvements that ultimately, at the end of the day, it comes down to leadership sustaining that because it's a process change. They need to reinforce that standard with their folks. That's the role of leadership, right. Whether or not you knew that was your job, responsibility when you took the role, they have to help their organization develop and understand the standards and know and measure the outputs of it. And if we don't have the bandwidth of leadership to do that with 12 things, let's start with three. Let's start with one. As you. As you.

Yeah, Love it. Hey, I want to kind of change directions for a little bit. I'm curious, like with Your military background and obviously lots of corporate world background now, you know, so oftentimes continuous improvement, especially in an organization that's sort of just trying to get it going. But not always. Even experienced companies can struggle with this. They see continuous improvement as like extra work. Or you might have a department, you know, the. The lean team or something like that, you know, and it's their job, you know, to make things better. Like, how do we sort of get away from that and how do we make it to where it's just how we do our work. It's kind of like the water, the fish story, right. Of this fish swimming through the water. This is water, right? Like, it's all around us. Like, how do we get to that point? It's where it's not extra work.

Yeah, we're how I believe we. We move in that direction is that we have to tie. Integrate the improvement work with our daily work. And this is what I mean by that. I applaud the notion of improvement. Say, like everyone, every day, everywhere. Right. Or whatever. I do applaud that mindset of we need to be thinking about improvement, but actually making changes more than we can metabolize. It's like, but why are we improving that? I can 5s the mailroom. Okay. Does that help me get more product out the door? Don't know. So whether you look at value stream mapping or back to. We mentioned theories of constraints before, if I'm optimizing something that is not a constraint on my goal, it's a lot of motion, but not a lot of action. So I can make this process that is already outperforming its peers up and down the product flow better. But I don't necessarily get better results out of the plant.

That's super interesting. I remember back in my corporate days, I had a job and I was pretty senior guy in the continuous improvement department. And this is a big company, $5 billion company. And I was talking to one of the financial controllers and he said, hey, he was having a bad day. I don't know, he's grumpy or something, but he's like, you know, you. You lean people or you continue to improvement people, you off. You just deal with Monopoly money. I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, and. And I'm ashamed to say at this company, there was some crazy stuff going on. Like, there was like, there was some insane stuff going on. I didn't, I couldn't. You know, I tried to stop as much as of it as I could, but they had deals where like if you improve the 5s audit score from this point to this point, it's this much money you can calculate and you know, I'm like what? You know, like because you tidied up the mail room that now all of a sudden our operating income is going to see a bump. You know, so, so I get it. You know, I get what you're talking about. On the, on the flip side, like the, the two second lean proponent folks out there, Paul Akers movement, you know, and all this kind of stuff, which is all great stuff, like they are going to be more on like just make things better every day and eventually you'll have this movement, if you will that wrong that you can't stop it and that, you know, the real problems are going to sort of get fixed. But to begin it might just be tidy up some little area in your, in your work cell that yeah, it's not going to make us more productive. But I feel good because I made that better, made my job easier or whatever it might be. So what's, what are your thoughts on that? Because it's sort of the flip side to your, your argument.

Yeah, I believe like any, any theory, any philosophy, right. To say it's black and white is a little bit too. We're trying to oversimplify it. I am trying to oversimplify it by saying focus on less. So if we go down the three components of the approach that I have, the elements of a business management system are strategy, deployment, process improvement and daily management. To your point, should we be doing PDCA on daily management? And if we're missing targets like iteratively improving. Sure we should be. But I'm talking about like if we're starting from the top down and we're trying to make changes to shop floor layouts and processes and equipment utilization, like big changes, like trying to do a lot of that all at the same time.

Yeah.

Is just hard because if I show up to my job and something is changing every day, there's also a little bit of emotional safety that has to come with that of like my 5 things changed on my job this week. Can I keep up with that? Can my leader keep up with helping coach me through that process? So I'm not anti the small incremental improvements. I think that does need to happen over time. Let me be clear that most of the clients that I'm trying to engage with are fresh on this journey and saying if I don't need to start and where I'm really trying to prevent failure modes down the road is saying, let's build a system first that helps out with sustainment. Then we can worry about the improvements. Because I've seen where, you know, we deploy 5s plant wide. We, we are going to roll out systematic problem solving plant wide. We're going to institute Kanban cards and material order. And then like inherently it isn't sustained in 50% of the plant. So I'm just like. But that was. So that was a lot of effort that we put into it. And I also see just the behavior of if I have a 5s standard within my work cell and I don't adhere to it for whatever reason, I don't put the cart back. Right. I don't put things in a certain location and no one cares. What, what have I done about the existence of standards? So I've created a standard that I can't sustain. Now what I've created is this mindset of is it important to follow the standard?

Yeah, yeah. No. Good stuff, man. Yeah, you're right. Nothing's black and white. Right. Kind of there's some gray in, in everything. But. But I get what you're saying because it's so easy, especially for folks that are brand new, to go to the conference or you know, learn some new tool and then all the like value stream mapping. I go to a workshop on value stream mapping and now I gotta map everything, you know, and it's like, well, really, do you really need to map that one over there? Because you know, we haven't had an issue over there in.

Right.

But this one over here, yeah, that, that's where you might want to focus. Right? So yeah, good stuff. Hey, so if someone is listening right now, Chad, that's maybe they are newer on the journey and they aren't sure. Kind of like how to get going or how to get started. Aside from improve less and focus, like, are there some other practical tips and ideas that you could throw out to those folks?

Yeah. So I mean, even before improving anything. Right. Of understanding your why. So when we say I'm going to move on this continuous improvement journey, I'm going to, I'm going to fundamentally change the way that we want to manage the business. It's a logical question, why? What are we dissatisfied in terms of our results? And we use a SWOT analysis in my approach. So there's either a strength that we want to hone and leverage, there's a weakness that we need to shore up for future competitiveness. There's some opportunity in the market. We're trying to take advantage of or a future threat that we're trying to hedge against. This could be a regulatory pressure, a cost pressure, a shift in customer demand. All three of which kind of happened during COVID Right. And so whatever the forcing function is of getting clear on your leadership team before we do any changes of like, why are we actually doing this?

Yeah.

Why do we feel we need to change the way that we're running the business on a daily basis?

Yeah.

And if we can't get alignment there first. Right. So that the subtitle of my book is the Focus and Align Framework. If we can't get focused on one thing to fix and we're not aligned as a leadership team, like it's not going to be sustained. So there's a lot of the soft skills, I'm not sure that I really like that term, but the change management skills at the top level saying is everyone on board with where we're going and how we're going to get there?

Yeah, yeah. So good. So good. So we've, we've mentioned that Improve Less. I think it's a subtle, you know, programming that we're doing here for folks. But so, so yeah, talk about your, your book a little bit, Chad.

Yeah, So I started out writing this more for myself, which is kind of funny, right. I'm like document my process of what have I seen worked, what has not worked. And being in the middle of a couple engagements two years ago saying like, what if I could start this all over, what would I do? And, and now having gone through with a couple of clients and taking them through this process and saying clearly up front, I want you to start with the end in mind that you're going to have to sustain whatever you change and this is the way that we're going to get there. So the Focus and Align framework takes my 18 years of experience and some recent engagements to say this is a pretty simple five step process we can go through that's going to build you the startings of a foundation for a management system where then you can continuously improve and sustain the results in the future.

Yeah.

Good.

And the name of it again is what's the name and the subtitle?

Yeah, it's Improve Less the Focus and Align Framework for Sustainable continuous Improvement. And if anyone wants to find out more about it, I tested this this morning. So just in any search engine, if you type in Improve Less book, I think I show up as the first result. So nice.

Okay, well all I got to do is scroll down on their app because we're going to have it linked up here, so.

Fantastic.

Yeah. So Noah, hey, that's great. I look forward to to checking it out. I haven't read it myself, so it sounds like a good one. So hey folks, do you want to connect with you? I mean you threw out the book website, but social media, what's the best way to connect with you?

Chad, I'm Most active on LinkedIn, so you can follow me here. A little bit of how I talk about this stuff, you know, even beyond what we covered in the podcast there. And if you like what you hear, you know, reach out to me, we'd have initial conversation.

Yeah, great. All right, Chad, well, hey, thanks for coming on. It's been a lot of fun and.

Keep up the great work. Thanks a lot. It was a pleasure.

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