GA 517 | Becoming a Master Black Belt with Carlos Pereyra

When people start realizing that, huh, why do I have less shortages? Why is my output improving? Why is my overtime getting lower? Why is my kanban is not like depleting as fast as before, like, huh? So that change actually helped and then that's when things started moving and changing.

Today I'm excited to welcome Carlos Pereira to the show. Now, yeah, we share the same last name. He spells a little bit different. He's got a Y there instead of an eye. But great guy. He. So Carlos is actually finishing up Gemba Academy's master black belt program. And we asked him to, to come onto the show to sort of share his continuous improvement story. He's got a really strong background, grew up sort of learning from Toyota Sensei directly for many years and he tells a little bit about his background, but really, really sharp guy. And so we spent quite few a, a bit of time just talking about the whole idea of failing fast and being fearless as it relates to experimentation. And then we kind of get into some topics like for the leaders out there, like what can leaders do to foster this environment where if you want the people to do it, then what do you need to be doing in order to get them to do that? So really some good stuff in here. He's a really humble guy and kind of soft spoken, but super smart man and super proud of him. This was actually the last thing that he needed to do to, to realize his master black belt. So I want everybody to do me a special favor. I don't normally do this, but it's kind of. It's a big deal for, for Carlos. Make sure you this time you got to scroll down on your app and you're going to see his LinkedIn there. I need everybody that listens to this to go to that LinkedIn hit it and congratulate him for certifying as a Gemba academ master black belt. Because it's not an easy program. It's not get. There's some ones out there. I won't call it Get Rich Quick, but ours is not Get Rich Quick. And he, he did it, man. So I'm very proud of him and I want everybody to go congratulate him.

Okay.

All right. And so again, all the links are below. So go check out Carlos's LinkedIn account and yeah, appreciate it. All right, let's get to the show. Carlos, welcome to the show. How's it?

Good, good. What about your stuff, Ryan?

Yeah, I'm doing well, man. I'm doing well. We were talking before the show. I think you're the second besides me, obviously. Pereira or Pereira or however you want to say it there, Carlos, that's come on to the show. So that's kind of exciting, man. There's not enough of us in this lean movement. There's probably more out there just sort of lurking. We need to get them all, get them onto the podcast maybe.

I for sure hope so that there are more out there. Right. But then at the end of the day, it feels like a tongue twister, so.

Yeah, right. Yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, well, where. Where are you calling in from?

I'm calling from Kent, Washington.

Okay. All right. Washington. Got it.

Close to Seattle.

Yep. Okay. Yeah, my business partner, John Miller lives in Bay Brins island over there, so. Yeah, so he's. Yeah, he's real close there, so good stuff, man. All right, well, hey, man, I'm excited to have you onto the. Onto the show today, Carlos. And as you know, we like to get things rolling out of the gate with our guests sharing a quot. What do you have?

So my quote is going to be called and. And it's nothing that I read on the book, and it's something that I just learned throughout the years, but it's more about it will never be perfect, so just get it done. And it talks about don't be afraid of failure. So that type of thing and having the expectation of making change is a good thing. And don't be afraid of change.

Yeah. Yeah.

I love it. I love it.

Okay, well, hey, Carlos, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you got into this line of work, and, you know, what you're up to these days.

Perfect. Yeah. So I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I started off my career actually working in one of the companies that Toyota selected to be one of their lean. Lean principle type of benchmarking at the beginning. Right. So I was lucky enough that I was doing my internships and I was able. And I was lucky enough to follow one of the sensei's that they assigned to that company. And because I was an intern and I didn't have a lot. A lot of things to do, so they asked me, hey, why don't you Shadow is to get a sensei for six months. Right. Wow. And I was like, I don't know what that means, but that sounds. That sounds fun. And then once I got onto it, oh, boy, it totally changed my perspective of pretty much everything. Right. I mean, you know, as an engineer, I always thought about square circles. And if it's a Go, no go type of work. Right. It has to fit perfect. And with those learnings that I got from that experience, I was able to understand why Lean, why standard work, why culture is so important. And I was able to implement in a very, very, very early on in my career. And then that pretty much got stuck with me. And then I went into the world of quality engineering, new product development, and all those sort of things. But at the end of the day, it was always about problem solving. Like, yes, I was doing a lot of engineering work, but I always saw it as problem solving. And people will ask me, like, so why. So what do you think is better? What do you think is best? Lean or Six Sigma? I'm like, I can't give an answer. There is no better or worse than a different one. Right. It's depending on the problem, what you're trying or attempting to do. And so that's how I got into this line of work. Right now I'm working for the company. I'm actually doing my master black belt, you guys. And it's really interesting to see how this whole development has actually changed my perspective, not just professionally, but as well in my life.

Nice, nice. How's that MBB going? How's that process going?

Is going awesome. I mean, I couldn't. I couldn't be happy to be given this opportunity on honestly being able to not just like getting the learning right. That's important, but then as well to implement. Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things where we were given the opportunity to make an impact. And it's not just one two people seeing the change. Is the whole organization seeing that difference.

John Knott's taking good care of you.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Those weekly, weekly coaching calls are. They do make a difference, man.

Yeah. Good, good, good. Awesome. Well, hey, man, let's talk about just do it. Fail fast and learn faster. Like, so maybe just to open up. Like, what's that all about?

What was all that about? Well, like I said at the beginning, as an engineer, right. I always thought about everything needed to be perfect, everything needed to be 100% in order to be deployed or redeployed. But then I did learn, and especially once you get into this line of work, which is Lean or culture, change and change management. Right. We are creature. Like, we need to. We need to see the change so we can feel more comfortable with it. Right. So. And it's something that you guys talk about during some of your videos, but it's about, like, we're adding the artifacts that the visuals are artifacts of change. And that is actually really, really true. So why am I saying to fail fast is because if you don't try something, you will never know if you actually got better or worse. And there is no worse feeling that not knowing if you are actually improving for better or for worse. Yeah. The only way to know is to actually do it. So one of the things that I have adopted over the years is a 1% improvement is better than 0%. And so on 1% every day. Eventually it will turn to make a difference and make a change.

Yeah. You know, and there's this weird mental tension as well when you, when you don't take action, you're left to plan or think or ponder longer and deeper and more and more and more planning, more thinking, more pondering. And then if it doesn't work out, because if you're in that mindset, you're probably not really approaching it like an experiment. You're approaching it like, this has to work. Right. And if it doesn't work, then it's crushing. Whereas you be like, hell, I don't know, like. But let's try this. And here's what I think is going to happen. And let's see. You know, like, if you just approach it like that, all the heaviness and the weight is gone. That's what really embracing scientific thinking is done, even for me. And I've been doing this a long time, you know, when I finally, you know, opened my heart to it, you know, it really changed the game. Right. And it's the secret, really, I think, to success and continuous improvement is having that, that experimenter's mind. And it's easy to talk about, but very, very hard to do. Right?

Absolutely. I mean, and, and it happens. Right. And especially, like, for example, if you're doing like a Six Sigma project and you're a design of experiments. Yeah, right. I mean, and I, I've done design of experiments that were really, really expensive because we needed to scrap the parts after we cut them up and we measured inside. Yeah. But then at the end of the day, you need to know if you're changing or not, and you need to know the answer. And a lot, a lot of this is an empirical approach with a scientific method type of thing. Right. I mean, either you do PDCA or you do the mayak. At the end of the day, you want to know the results and. Right. And if you're improving or not.

Right, right, exactly. So I'm wondering, like, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of experience. Carlos and you know, ran with the Toyota Sensei back in the day and so forth. So you've seen a lot over the years. What do you think, you know, we as lean practitioners can be doing to maybe encourage this culture of experimentation and learning within, you know, our span of control? Like what are some practical things that we should be doing?

Right. I mean, I for sure believe that it's a two way. It's a two way avenue. Right. A lot of it has, there has to. There has to be a lot of engagement and empowerment from leadership. But then it as well starts from within. Yeah. The willingness to try something new and then the willingness to go out there and literally just pick up the shovel and start shoveling. Right. Like you won't get to the point where you actually found the answer until you just keep going. You just need to start removing the dirt that is on top, all the variation, all the stuff that is cloud in that vision. Right. And I think it's really important as well to relay the message to, I mean, not just to yourself or your teammates, but then our peers, but then as well to the leadership and having a leadership that is well embedded and understanding that, hey, it might not be perfect, but oh yeah, we're going to make change. I think that takes you a really long way.

Yeah, yeah. Do you have some favorite examples maybe of. Of how you've personally experimented, you know, through a situation?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's actually one of the learning experiences that we had actually during our MBB program and even prior to that. But the, the best thing that we could have done it was to actually do a value stream transformation. For years the company didn't have any, not much, not a lot to be related with Kaizen or that culture. There were some spikes and ideas of that culture 5s and that type of thing. But then there never been a kaizen for 20 years. And just the word Kaizen, it imposed such a big war and kind of a block mentality where a lot of people were like, this is really hard to do. And then part of the planning was, okay, so we're going to do some planning, right. We're going to go through the value stream transformation type of secret sauce. Right? We're going to make it work. Then at the moment where we say, hey, let's flip the switch, let's go and make the change and turn this on, let's change the layout, let's improve the flow, let's implement Kanban, let's implement flow in pull. A lot of the organization was not ready for it because that had never been done. So the best thing that could have happened was to actually implement it. Because we realized and uncover a lot of things that we knew. I mean that we realized that we were not ready for it. But then for the second time, for the second round for sure, we made sure that all those gaps would actually close. So at the beginning, I mean, once we implemented that change, I mean, it's part of the change management. Right. It's like it creates such a. Such a, such a change that it might feel like it's too much or it could be too little, but then in this case it was too much. And people felt like, oh no, we cannot keep doing this. And we went, oh yeah, we're going to keep doing this because we need to keep improving. Right. But then when people start realizing that huh, why do I have less shortages? Why is my output improving? Why is my overtime getting lower? Why is my Kanban rate getting is not like depleting as fast as before, like. Huh. So that change actually helped.

Yeah.

And then that's when things start moving and changing.

So you mentioned the value stream. So was it just your traditional let's create up a current state map and a future state map and just start bridging the gap and start chipping away?

Yeah, start chipping away. And then we. So we use four different phases in about the strength transformation that I think they are really valuable and that they help a lot. Then basically is around creating a standard work. Right. And then once you create that standard work and you know what is going on, how everything repeats. Now you can which is kind of stabilization. You have to have a stable process so you can improve. Then you move on to flow manufacturing. So how do you create flowing within your work cell value stream or whatever you name it. Right. And then the other one is now that you have flow, now you can implement pool, whatever it can be implemented.

Yeah.

And then once you implement the pool is all about level loading of the production.

Yeah.

So we were able to do that in all those different phases and even making changes that improve the economics of the assembly of the process. And those are the things that I was trying to refer as artifacts of change. When you go from doing an operation that used to take 200 repetitions manually, and then you have an ergonomic solution or an engineer solution that improves people's life and process, that's when, huh. Okay, now we're willing to invest and make it safer, better and faster. Yeah, it does make a difference.

Yeah. Now you've mentioned changed a lot. I'm curious, what are some of your techniques or strategies for when you deal. You deal with folks who aren't maybe excited about lean or discontinuous improvement. Maybe they're resistant for whatever reason. You don't even know the reason. Like, do you have a. A strategy that you like to deploy?

So the strategy that I like it might be to. I feel like my guardrails are always a project charter. So there are two sides of the coin on this one. Number one is really important to have the acceptance of the idea or the improvement for, for whoever is going to be the value stream owner or the champion.

Yeah.

Like you see the. You see the champion as how it used to be before. Like is someone who is going to champion you and shield you from whatever resources are going to be needed. Right. So that. Relaying the message of the importance of, hey, I would like you to be the subject matter expert to be part of this kaizen. It does bring a lot of value. Right. And it's not just like I'm telling you to be part of this because I. Because just that. And because you have to change it. There is a lot of value on explaining the why and how we're gonna do things so we can actually create more of that synergy that people are craving. Right, Right. It's like I learned this before, but then like when you go in a kaizen, I mean, or when you're in a kaizen mode, how we call it, it's not just a one plus one equals two. It's kind of a synergy. Right. So one plus one equals three. So where all of the skills and ideas and different backgrounds are bringing a lot to the table. And those are some of the things that I try to relate to those individuals so we can make a change and an impact.

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Do you have any advice for leaders out there who are bought into the idea of, you know, rap experimentation? Just lean in general. And maybe they're trying to sort of lead and, and, and bring up their workforce to. To behave more like that. Do you. Do you maybe speak to them? Speak to the leader now, like, what advice do you have for them?

So I will say that the advice is don't be afraid of letting your people experiment. There is a lot of power on creating that independence. And being more of a coach, if that makes sense, is the sort of thing where you want people to experiment. But you know that you're not going to let them fail. Right? I mean, you're going to be there to kind of coach and direct them and some inputs, I mean that, that leadership can, can help a lot. But then giving that time, giving that opportunity, giving, giving that is safe space. And that's one of the things that I will tell to those leaders is making people safe and assuring them that there is no, nothing wrong from experimenting and not getting the expected results. Right. Because this is all about continuous improvement. And the main thing to understand as well is that there is no perfection in any process. There is no perfect process out there. So we need to understand that. But just having that expectation where, hey, we can try and we're safe and relaying that message to their teams is it brings a lot of value to the company.

Talk more about safety though, because I mean, I think that's a, That's a key element. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of books now it's popular to say psychological safety and, and it's. It's becoming a buzzword now, I fear. And I don't. I don't see a lot of companies truly doing it. That's why I think it's a buzzword now. No offense to the people who have created the phrase that they mean well and they're trying, but it's for whatever reason it's not taking as well as I think it should. Like why do you think it's so difficult for leaders to really do it and to really mean it and really demonstrate it?

Right. And I think it has to do with the alignment and the expectation of things. Like to your point, it became kind of a buzzword for hey kaizen or just improve just for the sake of improving. But then there has to be an intention and purpose of why are you doing things. Right. And if organizations don't understand the purpose of why the change is needed. Right. It's really hard and complicated to. To have your teams be aligned to that. Right. And one of the things, I mean, to be honest, I couldn't be more. I mean it couldn't be happier to be part of this organization. But then about is like how an organization like this one that I'm at is people making people safe. Like there is. There is no wrong on trying is worse not to try.

Yeah.

Is like that experimentation piece is what gives you an. Opens up a lot of different doors that you didn't know that they were even either open or close at the beginning.

Yeah. Yeah. What about some key performance indicators or something like that that we might be able to use as. As practitioners to sort of measure our success perhaps even on experimentation and things like that. Like do you have anything that you guys are doing that or that you've seen other companies do?

Yeah, I was going to suggest like for example on that one. I think it's important to understand how, how deep, if how deep is your bench of lean knowledge. Right. So there is an aspect of how, of how many people are you training? Like either whatever method, system, type of trainings.

Again, the academy of course, I mean, come on academy.

Right, right. But then you can track, track like how many white belts, how many yellow bells, how many green bells, black belts, master back belts. But then as well like how, how those, all of those different learning programs are interconnecting within each other. Yeah, but then as well there is a value on seeing how much of an impact those programs are making to your organization. And a lot of the things is maybe you're not going to see it like the direct impact, hey, two black belts equal $500,000 of savings in the P and L, right? It could not be like that. But then a lot of it is around the part of the culture. So what part of the culture do you want to be changed in your organization? And part of it is going to be hey, are things, are people getting, are people getting happier at work? Right? Are things getting easier? Am I getting less disruptions to the production? Is actually my output getting better? So it's kind of those secondary type of benefits that will make a difference.

Yeah, yeah. You know, yeah, the whole cost savings thing is boy, it's been a, it's a topic and back when I before gambling academy and I was working in industry, I remember the companies that I worked at, you know, we were, it was sort of how we justified our existence. You know what I mean? Because I was, you know, some, not always but in sometimes in some positions where I was the continuous improvement person or team or whatever and boy it was, you know, it was motivating as far as making sure that we were moving forward and making things better. But also, you know, some, there was times where I spent more time calculating the benefits than I did the actual project. You know what I mean? It was like what am I doing here? You know, so I think there's this balance, right? You know, I, I think my, my buddy Paul, Paul Akers, you know, two second lean and all that fast Cap, he, he, he, he's always said, you know, just fix what bugs you, right? And when you fix what bugs you or you remove the struggle, you know, the, you know, then allows when you remove struggle and just nonsense around you, then you can elevate to higher level thinking and the results are just going to come, right? The money will come, the success will come. All the just focus on the struggle. And, and I think there's a lot of truth to that as well. But, but it's like anything, it's a balance. You know, we can't just go all Paul Acres and don't worry about anything else. But you also can't get crazy about savings. You got to have a, got to have a balance. Because if you can't, if you're a for profit company, because you know, in Paul's case, it's a very successful company, but it's small, you know, 100 people or whatever, you know, it's like, okay, Boeing right now, as we record this, is going through some difficulties, right, with their airplanes and you know, they got more than 100 people, right? And so, you know, everyone's in a different battle, right? And so, so I do think it's important to tie our, our, our activities, you know, to the, to the success of the company. Right. And if you're a for profit company, you know, you do want to see how these, these are like you said, you noticing that you're, your overtime is going down and you're tracking these things. Right? And it's, it's, it's obvious, right, that these things are getting better and your leadership is, it doesn't take a genius, right, to notice that these key things that are, we're trying to do as a company are getting better and. Well, why is that?

You know, and the other thing to add is, I mean, now that we're talking about it is, and you're saying it is like, oh, the continuous improvement, improvement department or person. And it's not just a couple of. Yeah, right, exactly. You want everyone, yes. In the organization to be the continuous improvement. You want everyone to be the quality. You want everyone like. And that's the level of culture that you want to change where, where the organization owns the change and the continuous improvement aspect. Right?

Yeah, I mean, that's why, I mean, okay, Captain Obvious here, Ron likes Gemba Academy, but that, that's why I love our platform and that's why I think we're the best. And it's not even close. I mean, I don't really say that very often. Maybe I've never said that. But you know, we've got guys like you who are going through our highest level certification. Not many people in your company are going to go through that, I would guess, you know, maybe a few more.

Right.

But everyone in your company could go through a. Like a white belt curriculum or whatever. Whatever. Don't. Even if you don't like belts, don't call it belts. Just call it Lean Intro or whatever you want to call. I don't care what you call it. Right. But give everybody the ability and some basic knowledge and, and allow them to learn and grow as human beings. Forget about lean. Just trying to make them a better human being, happier so they go home and they're nicer to their spouse because they had a good day, because they made things better and they felt motivated. You know? How about that? Right? You know what I mean? And. And so that's why you need. You need vehicles. I mean, if it's not Gemba Academy, find something. Go watch YouTube videos or something like that to. To pour into people. So if everybody is. Everybody's learning and growing and then they have people like you who are going turbocharged training kind of thing, right? And you're going to be leading the charge.

Right.

As you should.

So. And I love that. Right. Because he's. And I think that Lean. The purpose, Yes. I mean, is to improve. Is to improve the process. Right. Or reduce variation, improve the output, whatever you want to name it. Right. Then at the end of the day, is on the principles of creating better individuals.

Yeah.

And to your point, if people are unhappy at home because they're not able to do whatever. Right. But lean is a way to make people understand that there is a way to make things different or to try different things to improve. Yeah. I mean, that just is. Is. It's a cycle, Right.

And yeah, I mean, I'm convinced that it will change the world. Right. Like in a. In a positive way. Right. If we, if we all learn how to this even just a little bit. Right. And then you can teach somebody else who teaches somebody else, and you just teach one person and that person teaches one person. You know, it doesn't take long and it's spread across the whole world, you.

Know, and that's amazing. And honestly, I mean that those were one of the key things that we did in our organization for this year where. And it was actually part of the Master Black program where we realized that the army of people that we had with Lean knowledge and culture and willingness to try was really small. And we say, okay, so we have two or three different black belts that can go in and do whatever you want. Right?

Yeah.

We felt pretty comfortable that we could do and implement whatever Kaisens but then because we failed fast in that value stream transformation, or we learn from those experiences, we realize that we just don't need two or three black belts. We actually need the army of people. We need the organization to be able to implement change. So that's when we went on. And right now we are wrapping up one of the biggest lean leader development programs that we have ever done. And we did over seven different Kaizens in seven months.

Wow.

And we are certifying six different Kaizen facilitators.

Wonderful.

Because we understand that the only way that we can make a dent and a huge impact is by sharing the knowledge.

Yep.

Right.

Well, even back. And you looked at the whole TWI movement back in World War II, I mean, the War Commission guys, they had that multiplier effect. They had the whole idea of, you know, just, you know, you teach some people and they teach some people. This is not new things that we are developing today. It's been. Been around for a long, long time. So I just think sometimes we forget we gotta be reminded of what actually works here.

I mean, and that's true. And. And then, for example, as well, I mean, we're doing things around how to reward people and then how to recognize. So we have our version of like we call the CIA walkthroughs, but then we're doing our version of Gemba Live. So where we want people to explain and do a show and tell of a CIA, and CIA means Continuous Improvement Activity and do the show and tell of that feature idea. And then let's go to the show floor. And it's just basically me and my partner Jason. With a camera.

Yeah.

With a microphone. And then just nice, please show us. And tell what?

Hey, man, I'll tell you what. That person that's being videoed, you know, their body is being flooded with, you know, positive hormones like serotonin and oxytocin. They're feeling incredible. Right. I mean, just that, that. I mean, I really mean it. I mean, that's such a. Yeah. And then you can share the video forever and it'll be great. But the impact you're having on that individual, you just don't even know. You know, I mean, sure, they might be a little bit nervous, but they're feeling good. And. Or if they're not feeling good in that moment because they're nervous as soon as you hit stop and you say, great job, now they're really floating and feeling great, you know, so.

That is very true. And you can see that. Right? And it's like you can see it in people's faces, people's reactions and people's engagement. At the end of the day, what.

Do you do with the videos you put like on the Internet or.

Yeah, we put it in, in our version of kind of SharePoint and then kind of a report out accomplishments and then we say thank you. But then as well, like it's the two sides of the coin. Right. Where we want people to feel that recognition. But then as well, we want people to see from not just from our location, but from anywhere else what we're doing so we can share those experiences and learnings. And most of the times it's being like, wow, I had no idea that you guys were doing that. I'm going to benchmark anything.

How many different facilities do you guys have?

So right now we have three main manufacturing facilities, but then we have a lot of other offices all around the world.

Yeah. Do you have like, sort of like friendly competition a little bit between the sites and maybe as a. As it relates to Lean and that sort of thing?

I mean, not yet, but then that's what I. But what I will hope to.

Yeah, man.

For the coming year. Yeah.

Kaizen competition or whatever it might be. Those can be a lot of fun, you know, I mean, and you know, a lot of value too, for the, for the company too. Because everybody wins.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, to that point, I mean there is, I mean, within the company, we host a continuous improvement expo where all of the ideas that are being submitted kind of participate and are voted as to be the best ideas. And this year for the one location that we are doing the whole value stream transformation, we pretty much gain or got a lot of those awards, whereas before there were zero. Okay, so those are the type of artifact of changes. Yeah, we can see where you're seeing people's commitment, commitments, engagement and things are changing. Right. Great.

Wonderful man. Hey man, super proud of you. And keep going. And I'll tell John to, you know, continue being nice and everything to you and all. No, he speaks very highly of you so. Well, hey, man, this has been a lot of fun. If, if people want to connect with you, Carlos, directly, what's the best way?

The best way is going to be on my LinkedIn. So my LinkedIn. LinkedIn is up there. You can look for me as Carlos Bara. Sorry.

Okay. Yeah, and. And it's with a Y, everyone.

That is true.

P E R E Y Y R A. And yeah, we're going to link it up here on the. So just scroll down in your show notes there on your app, people. And and please go connect with with with Carlos and tell them they did a great job on the podcast.

So.

All right, man. Hey, I really appreciate you coming on, man.

Thank you so much for having me and it was a really fun experience. I really appreciate it.

All right, you take care.

Thank you.

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