GA 518 | Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement with Jim Huntzinger

So if we're getting better products at a better price, at a better quality, it all becomes mutually beneficial. Organizations thrive, people thrive within the organizations. People thrive as individuals and people grow.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Jim Hunsinger back to the show. Now, Jim is with an organization called Lean Frontiers. So if you've been in a lean movement for a while, you've probably heard of Lean Frontiers. They're the ones who put on, on the TWI and Toyota Kata conferences and sort of the original lean accounting conferences, and just they do fantastic work. And so Jim is a longtime friend of mine and he's a great thinker and just a great practitioner of just all things continuous improvement. And so today, sort of talk about kind of foundational skills that he believes that all continuous improvement cultures require. And so we sort of walk through those and, and then just as typical, every time Jim and I get on and start talking, we sort of have a plan and next thing you know, the plan's out the window and we're just talking about random stuff and man, it was just a lot of fun talking about different things. Jim's a history buff kind of thing and so sort of dig into like, how does this sort of some of these foundational skills, how have they played a role in just history of humanity? And, and so we touch on that a little bit as well. So a lot of good stuff. I think you're going to enjoy this one. Now, show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episod 5 18. Also be sure to scroll down and, and check out Lean Frontiers and all the stuff that they got going on. And be sure to connect with Jim over on LinkedIn. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Jim, welcome back. How's it going?

Good, Ron. How, how are you doing? I'm doing well.

Yeah. Yeah, doing good, good, good. So well, where are you calling in from?

Calling in from Indiana, actually, at a, a different location. Usual since my WI Fi wasn't so good. So this should help out.

Yeah, this is take two, man. Well, I appreciate your, your perseverance and hey, man, you know, sometimes we gotta keep trying and don't, don't give up. Right?

Exactly.

Yeah. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, Jim, you know the drill. We like to get things going with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you have?

I guess initial, obviously once we get into what the subject matter we're talking about, this will make sense. But I use this quote a lot in, when I talk about the Subject the continuous improvement skills, the fundamental skills, because we'll talk about Toyota Kata and training within industries, but basically it's this, if you're not using Kata or TWI the same in three months, it's a problem. The second part is if you're using Kata and TWI the same in three years, it's a problem. So we will talk about that a little bit more, what that means as we, as we roll, roll with this.

Okay. Okay. Well, good stuff. Well, hey, Jim, just in case folks haven't heard you on before or don't know who you are, which most people in our, in our world probably do, but tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff.

Yeah, Jim Hunsinger of Lean Frontiers. And my background, actually, my background goes back to I took a position coming out of school with a Toyota company that was transplanting in North America to support the Toyota plants in North America, which at the time I took it was only the Canada plant, the joint venture with General Motors in California, which was the Newmi plant, and then the Georgetown, Kentucky plant, which was not online at the time I took the position. And we're supporting those plants with door frames and body moldings and then also brake components and oil pumps and water pumps. My responsibility was with machining it assembly of oil pumps, water pumps and brake components. So with that it was ICE and Seiki was the name of the company. They're a Toyota group company, so they practice Toyota production system. And I was sent to Japan for nine weeks to be trained on our products, the processes and tps. That's kind of how I got my initial initiation with it. I was there for a few years, but want to get more involved with the process development because that was done by the Japanese engineers. We did the kind of the ramp up to production and I was able to get involved with that at a company, Briggs and Stratton in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. At the time, they were trying to go through a lean transformation. So that ended up becoming a fabulous sandbox to play, learn and experiment in. And that's kind of how I got going on that a number of years later with Lean Frontiers that came about. I did my master's thesis on the subject of lean accounting because one of the things we had to do at Briggs was do an ROI on our implementation. We were doing. And with that I got involved in our accounting system and I found it to be a complete mess from my perspective. But I'm an engineer, not an accountant. But it didn't make sense to me. And over the course of time with that, I, working with one of the divisional accountants, we developed a different way to account for our product and our product costing, which basically, as a Fortune 500 company, made every business decision based on that. And our discovery was it was incorrect information. So that kind of got me going down the path. I did my master's thesis on what we call today lien accounting. And within doing that, the idea was actually presented to me actually by Doc hall is, hey, why don't you do it? Why don't you do a conference on. On that subject matter? Because it was new, no one knew much about it, and that, that's kind of how Lean Frontiers kind of took off back in 2005. And then just over the course of time, we added, I guess, community subject matter to that and evolved and eventually to what we call lean frontiers today. So we, like, say we build lean communities within lean community.

Yeah. And so some of my favorite conferences of all time are. Are. Well, you know, your, your, your conferences, obviously, you know, I, ame is the big monster, right, as far as number of people and all the rest of it. But the Katacon and you know, the TWI conferences that you guys put on, there's. They're just. I just love the community. Just the. It's almost like a tribal feel, you know, when you walk into those things, like, everybody wants to be there. Whereas sometimes at the bigger ones, you'll get maybe a little bit of industrial tourism, you know, like, oh, I get a free trip to Atlanta or whatever, you know, let's go. But yeah, well, you guys do a great job. So what's going on with. So we got Katacon coming in and in April. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

So April.

April 9th and 10th is 2024 here.

So.

Yes, 2024 this year, April 9th and 10th, we have Katacon 10. So the 10th anniversary for the Kata Summit and also the TWI Summit the same days, the 18th birthday for it. We started running them concurrently a few years ago just because the subject matter is related. But we also tried to set it up so if people want to come and all they want to do is kata, we've got them covered. If all they want to do is twi, we've got them covered. Or they can mix and match as much as they much as or little as they want.

Yeah.

So that's coming up in April. And then we also have related to the subject matter, a skills lab, which is a new thing that we started last October coming up at March, March 5th through 7th, which is done on the simulator. Actually, the, the manufacturing simulator is actually at the NUMMI plant in California originally, where on that people will learn the skills that we're going to talk about. The skills for continuous improvement, the skills of twi, the skills of kata and good coaching habits and even a framework on how you go about doing that.

Yeah, yeah. Love it, love it. And what, what we'll link to the, the website was there. What's the best website for people to go to to to see it? Because I'm pretty sure you got them all connected on one.

Yeah. If you go to the Lean Frontiers website, leanfrontiers.com you could find all the summits that we do, certainly the workshops we do, webinars, online learning and other information. We have articles and videos and things like that. So just a lot of information there to learn what we're doing that people could come to or just learn on their own. On their own learning as well.

Yeah. Good stuff, man. All right, well, hey, let's jump in. So. So you sort of hinted at it already and gave a little bit of a sneak peek, I think. But we talk about a continuous improvement culture, which that in and of itself is a maybe mysterious phrase like. So we're going to. I want to ask you ultimately about sort of maybe some foundational skills to build a continuous improvement culture. But I actually want to back one step up and just explore. In your opinion, Jim, like when we, when you say a continuous improvement culture, like, what does that look like? It's obviously a little different depending on each company and all that. But are there some general characteristics, attributes that, that you see?

Yeah, there are. And. Yeah. And obviously since, you know, I don't know, going, I guess maybe around 40 years now, the lean thing has been part of it. People have tried to want to get a culture of continuous improvement and have struggled with that, certainly. But what we've learned over time, there are some foundational skills and that's what we're going to talk about that really attribute to developing a culture like that. So you want to develop these particular skills, these behavioral patterns and ultimately different thinking in order for people. What we really want to get our organizations to do, and that's really the people in it and actually at every level is to behave and think in a scientific way way to use a scientific method for projects, problem solving, issues, objectives, and so on and so forth. So it's really getting a culture where everybody in different forms are using scientific thinking and more importantly behavior in order to Improve the organization overall again at every level.

Now you mentioned in there initially scientific method, and then you change the scientific thinking. What's the. What's. Let's differentiate between those two.

Well, certainly there's a scientific method that goes back, I suppose to Socrates really. So it goes back several thousand years, the scientific method. So one thing that people may be more familiar with at one version of today is the Deming cycle, which is really the Walter Schuertz cycle. Plan, do, check, act. So that's really the scientific method which is related to the behavioral pattern of looking at problems, issues or things you want to investigate using the four steps of the scientific method, I.e. plan, do, check, act from the Deming. Sure. Cycle. Now the scientific thinking means in a sense they are interrelated. Is everything you look at, you kind of look through that lens of the scientific method and use some form of that behavioral pattern, but your mind just goes there automatically. And that's where we want to get to people. A. A lean culture, culture of continuous improvement. So everything they look at, they look at through that lens, they think through through that lens, they actuate through that lens.

Yeah. Even like when you. I just quickly googled it to remember the scholastic answer. Like when we think about like there's seven steps, you know, historically attributed to scientific methods and things like questioning, research, hypothesis, experiment, analyze, you know, conclude and communicate. So but really the heart of it, and this is where scientific thinking and really sort of synthesizes with it, is the whole idea of. Of a hypotheses. Like, well, I have this idea, right? And here's what I think may actually happen. Then we play it out. We run the experiment, so to speak, analyze and see what we learn. Right, Exactly. And that's what's beautiful. And for whatever reason, almost feel like our lean movement sort of lost that way. Even though plan, do, check, act sort of has it built into it. Yeah, it was just for whatever. I don't. I've often struggled with, like, why didn't PDCA work as well as it could have, arguably should have. You know, some people might be critical of that. So it does work, Ron. You just gotta, you know. But. But it wasn't until we really stepped back and Mike and the Rather and the team sort of synthesized this whole framework of plan, make a prediction. To me, that was what I had never done, you know, as a young engineer. I mean, I had a lot of plans and I was like, just get out of my way and let me go. But I never made a prediction on what I thought would happen. Like did you in your early days of practicing?

At times, yes, but not, not in a very disciplined way. And at times, no. Certainly.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well, okay, so jump in then. You know, I, I think we know part of the answer already. What do you think the foundational skills are to building a continuous improvement culture?

Yeah, it's building up these skills. So the skills are the skills of twi, job instruction, job methods and job relations. Now it's not exclusively obviously these things, but from a lean perspective it's those utilizing those skills. So job instructions is how do you train people and effective, safe and effective manner job methods, how do you make improvements actually without having to have an engineering background or things like that? But how do you get your people to be able to make improvements? And then job relations is around how do you solve people problems? Ideally, how do you head them off before they become a problem or if they do become a problem, how do you solve the problem? Now, all three of these J programs, as they were called, are based on a scientific method, a four step process methodology, the scientific method, which is why they've been so successful. So if you add on those. So those are some of the skills. And these are the skills actually Toyota began using when they struggled back Post World War II trying to implement flow production based off the early Ford model. They struggled with it for about 8 or 10 years. Ono did, until twi came through their training with department and that's when he really started making hay to what we would call the Toyota production system today. Now taking a look at the research Mike did, Mike went out and researched companies that were successful in using some type of behavior and now they use it in different forms. In order for Mike articulate to us, he had to make it a little more prescriptive in order to, you know, you can't say, well, you know, how do you use it? Well, all these different ways companies use it, he had to make it more prescriptive. So he looked through all these different things that organizations are doing successfully. Toyota Group, Toyota Group companies are emulating that. And that's what we have with Toyota Kata. So the improvement kata is in order to go through a methodology and the katas, the improvement katas, based on a scientific method of course, to go through that. So they all align. And a lot of the behavioral patterns from Toyota Kata, the improvement kata in particular are based on some of the patterns of behavior that derived out of TWI being used for decades. And same with thing with the coaching kata, using again a pattern of helping People to utilize the improvement kata in a successful, repeatable manner. So these things give these skills. And I think this is where we missed it. In the, in the lean community, we weren't really aware of these skills, so we were a bit haphazard. So when you get the, when you're aware of these skills, you practice these skills and practice it, practice them deliberately with intention. Then you start having success. The other tie in which is important with all these is you're just not. You know, one thing we say is we remove waste. We'll be quite honest, I would say, well, you don't go out to remove waste. You go out and use these skills to meet business objectives. And that's where Hoshin comes in, business objectives. So as a default, as you use these skills to meet business objectives by default, you'll remove a heck of a lot of waste. So the waste, waste removal is really resultant. It's not a purpose or a reason. The business objectives and needs are the reason. And you use these skills to do that effectively and the result is you'll move all kinds a waste.

Right? Or maybe put another way is that we have these business objectives or these goals or these target conditions or challenges, whichever, however you want to frame it. And these obstacles in, in. In our way. Right. And so when we approach an obstacle, then we, then we've got to go to our cart full of all of our tools and then use the correct tool to remove that obstacle, which may involve removing waste, may not, but oftentimes it does, right?

Or not. Even these tools, I said go back to not tools, but these skills using these skills. And if you look at the tools, the tools were somewhat developed out of utilizing these skills to develop countermeasures right through the. The opposite, as you said, obstacles we have or to try to meet a challenge or a targeting addition. And all those are ideally related. And if you look at Toyota, that's what they're trying to do. They had business objectives they were trying to reach and they would transcend those down. What do those things mean at different levels? What do the people need to be working on in order to meet the business objectives? And we need to give them the skills so they can do it effectively and efficiently. And basically these skills are things that are based on scientific method to the point, scientific thinking. Actually this is, I guess another, it could be another quote, but you would, I would say is you don't. And this is common. We kind of knew this even before this stuff came about. But this articulates better. You don't think your way to a particular practice or behavior, you practice your way to a different way of thinking. And that's why the skills are so important. They give you that practice, that actualizing on needs and objectives, and eventually you get yourself to where you approach, your approach to obstacles becomes different and you have this scientific thinking in your head. How do we go through this? Like you were saying earlier, make a hypothesis, you know, observe, make hypothesis, run experiment that analyze against what your hypothesis was, did or didn't we meet the hypothesis? If we did, great, let's move on. If not, let's rethink it and go through the cycle again. Yeah, and that's what, that's what Toyota Cottage does a really good job of helping people behave in that manner.

Yeah, yeah. Now, like analogy that I like to use, I like to run it past you and, and see what you think. When I'm explaining sort of the relationship between, say, scientific thinking and just 5s or identifying the waste or quick changeover or any the, the, the things that we do often in, in lean. Lean activities is I like to use the analogy of a horse pulling a cartoon. And the horse in this example is akin to scientific thinking. Toyota Cotter, whatever you want to call it. Okay. And there's a cart. And the cart has things like, you know, the, the various things that we might do. 5s, value stream mapping, quick changeover, 3P, whatever, yada, yada yada. Right? All that stuff's in the. Just do it. Maybe he's in there. Project management's in there. Dmayx in there if you want to go into Six Sigma. Okay? So all that stuff's in the cart. So we say, hey, horse, you see that beacon way out there in the distance? And the horses, the horse can talk. In this example, horse says, yeah, I see it. Let's go. Bring me there. Now that's our, that's our, our destination, our challenge, whatever you want to call it. Right? And so the horse starts moving and then the horse stops. Why'd you stop? And he said, well, there's this obstacle in front of me. So you jump off, you assess the obstacle, and you say, ah, I know exactly what I need to do to clear this obstacle. You go to the car, get the appropriate thing that is needed, whatever that might be, clear the obstacle, reset the horse, get his bearings again and continue on. What do you think of that analogy?

Yeah, actually, I like that analogy and it's actually very similar. For years I've seen John Shook use. He has a little cartoon that he uses which is very similar to what you're describing with the horse analogy, but it shows a guy kind of going up a slope, and he's facing down the slope, and with. He has a rope, and a couple guys below him have a hold of the rope, and he's kind of helping pull them up. That's kind of the. The supervisor type of role on how do you help your people do kind of what you just described with the horse analogy to make these improvements. That's the other thing with these, with this whole thing is you learn these skills by working on actual real projects, like you did with the horse analogy. Things that come up, and the supervisor is in like a. A coaching role, a mentor role to help people do it, not do it for them, just help them think it through, help them stick with the. In this case, the scientific method, which it could be utilizing twi, utilizing kata. That's why they have the coaching kata to help people through that. But it's.

We.

So like in Toyota, you don't go, hey, I want you to learn these. These methods, these skills or whatever. Let me go put you in a workshop or in something like that. It's. No, let's go out and work on projects, and I'll. And I'll teach you this through a mentoring process on real work. So you. You learn it in real time on real work. And that's how you get. That's how they get so good at it. That's how they propagate it throughout the organization. So then everybody kind of has this scientific thinking mind, plus these skills and these patterns, behavioral patterns on everything they do. And you make them into habits. You want to make them into habits. Which one thing with the, with the, in the Toyota kata, the analogy that's used a lot is the movie Karate Kid.

Yeah.

So in that one, in order to get habits, Mr. Miyagi, as Daniel, you know, wax his car, you know, wax on, wax off, wax on, wax off. Same thing with painting the fence. It's to teach these behavioral patterns. So when he gets into the more complex thing, I guess in this case the martial art competition, these basic patterns, movements he does not have to think about, he just does them. Now his mind's freed up to think about the more complexities of the match instead of. Instead of the. Instead of the. The basic movement patterns.

Yeah.

Wax on, wax off. It's the same thing's true with your horse analogy. And then that little cartoon that I've seen John Shook use over the years.

Yeah.

Learn by doing, which actually came out of twi.

Yeah. So. So why do you. I mean, obviously you're passionate about this as as many people listening to this are passionate about it. But why do you think it's important that we sort of teach the world this?

Well, in order to. In order to make. I guess I'd say this in order to make everybody more productive. More productive. Which is. Which is important to making a society more prosperous, in order to make people with their. Whatever job they do, more interesting, exciting, more passionate about it. Teaching these skills so people can be successful at all levels is just good. So it's good for people within their. Within their work. It's also good for all of us who also work. We're also customers. So if we're getting. If we're getting better products at a better price, at a better quality, it's all becomes mutually beneficial. Organizations thrive. People thrive within the organizations. People thrive as individuals and people grow.

One of the things I've always appreciated about you, Jim, is your knowledge of history. And you've written a lot over the years, you know, and sometimes it's like over my head and I'm like, what is Jim talking about here, man? You know, that's like. But, but like, where do you see this way of thinking in history? Like long ago, like, were people ever experimenting with this type of thinking and then it fell away and for good or for bad?

Yeah, it certainly ebbs and flows. Certainly ebbs and flows over the years and all that. I guess the thing to look at, and I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, there's a couple of people who've done research on this. One's an American economist, Jerry Boyer. Another one's an American historian, economist Deirdre McCluskey. And then another one is Hans Rosling, who's passed away a number of years ago, that have looked into the data of health and wealth globally and historically, and as you look at. And all their data correlates, because in a sense, they're kind of taken from the same thing. As you look at things, basically humanity going back all through history, we're all pretty much poor and destitute for the most part, across the board, no matter what continent or society or whatever you're in, until you get really into about 200 years ago, 200, 250 years ago. And all of a sudden you see this significant upswing in health and wealth globally, certainly in Western civilization, and certainly more so in the United States. But as people practice these types of patterns and become more productive, their health and wealth increases substantially. And when you look at the data that those folks present, it's stunning. It's stunning how much it's gone up. And from the lean community or those of us you including, have been involved in industry in the last number of years, we realize just how much more work we can successfully do. So if we can do this work and do it successfully, help spread it, that means everybody can benefit from it anywhere, everywhere on the planet. So that's, you know, we improve productivity, you improve. Improving productivity improves the ultimately health and wealth that people have. And also too, even if you look into third world countries in the last century, it's improved dramatically. This is one, this is one piece of data I'm actually not from those people I saw from somewhere else. If you look in the last 100 years, the number of people killed due to natural catastrophes, hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons, fires, whatever it is, has decreased. The number of people killed by those has decreased 98% in the last century. And that's including third world countries. We still have death from things like that, but the magnitude it's decreased is substantial. And that's due to the improvements we had in technology. And all that comes from productivity, ideas, ideas manifesting communication techniques, tools, methods in the last 100 years. And we still have a lot more we can do.

Yeah, yeah, man, for sure. It's exciting. So where do you see the next, I don't know, 10 years from now? We're talking on a podcast episode, whatever, be a lot, a lot more episodes by then. What do you think will have happened if we were to make a prediction, right, in scientific thinking ways? Like, what's your prediction for the next 10 years of our continuous improvement movement?

I guess my, my prediction and hope would be that, and that's why I'm, that's why we're talking about these fundamental skills. We can propagate these fundamental skills across the board. You know, not just, obviously not even just the lean community, but the community overall. Because it isn't just an industry. These skills, these skills, anywhere you have people and processes, which is basically anything and everything, you can make substantial improvements. So my hope is 10 years down the road we've made substantial improvements not only within the lean community, outside a lean community, and people are using these skills to just make their work, their businesses, their prosperity overall much better. So I'm hoping we'll see it in a point of boy, we've made a lot of ground and it won't feel like it over the next 10 years because it's a lot of hard work, but when we reflect, that's why reflection is so important. When we reflect back, we go, wow, we have made a lot of substantial progress. Things are much better. Still more work to do, but we've made good progress.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, even just as you were answering it, I was thinking about. Even the way I framed the question. I said, you know, on our lean community. And, like, no offense to our lean community, but who cares about our lean community? You know what I mean? It's like, it's the worst world, right? And that's why I'm excited. You know, see Mike rather, like on LinkedIn now, I know he was sort of resistant to social media over the years, and. And so we gotta get the word out to people who don't know what we're talking about. Right. We got to be careful with our jargon and all that, but we were like, hey, would you like to make things better? Like, that's what I appreciate about, like, Paul Akers, fix what bugs you. Everybody can get behind that. You got stuff that bugs you. Yeah. Now let's fix it. Right? Like, so we gotta get better at marketing in our. And I'm talking about Gemba Academy as well. Like, what the heck's Gemba? You know, like, nobody knows what Gemba is outside of the lean world, you know, so it's like, we gotta do better at that. All of us, everybody listening. You know, you need to go out and talk to people and explain what you do and why it's important, because I really feel passionate that it can heal this broken, divided world. Our world's always probably going to be divided. It has been over the centuries, Right? You had Pharaoh and the Israelites, you know, I mean, it's from the very beginning. Right? But. But we can. Even though we are divided, we can all sort of align towards. We want things to be better.

Yeah, right, absolutely.

So, I don't know. But, yeah, it's. It's. It's going to be a lot of fun. I know, I know, I know. You'll be in it, and we will as well. So we'll just keep marching forward and do the best we can. So.

Yeah, yeah. Looking forward.

Yeah.

Like I said, just, we want to. We want things to get better. And I think that with the skills is. And. And we have the skills available to help people do it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, man. Hey, Jim, thanks a lot, man, for coming back on. It's always, always a blessing to talk to you and reconnect. Let's let's do it again down the road. And again, what's the best way for folks to connect with you? Just LinkedIn or where you.

Yeah, on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, find me Jim Hunter on LinkedIn or even the Lean Lean Frontier on LinkedIn or go to our website leanfrontiers.com and find, find stuff there. And it's always a pleasure and a lot of fun chatting with you, Ron. We always have great discussions on, on, on here as well as with just when we, when we meet up in places as well.

So I always enjoy it for sure, man. All right, well, hey, thanks again, Jim. Take care.

All right. Thank you. You too.

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