GA 530 | Keeping People Engaged with Ahmed Radwan

For myself. Because with this I can learn more and more. Right? But being stubborn, for example, or being. Or feeling pride only in my thinking, this does not help me. It does not help our organization.

Today I am very excited to welcome Ahmed Radwan to the show. Now, if you are on LinkedIn or YouTube or something like that, you've probably seen some of these Kaizen Made Easy videos. It's a sort of like a animated video with different people voicing over things. There's been a lot of them done with Jeff Leiker's books and. And anyhow, Ahmed is the guy behind this and does a great job with these videos. And he came up to me, oh, several months ago at the. The AME conference and introduced himself and we had a really nice chat and I said, hey, man, why don't you come onto the podcast and. And share your continuous improvement story? And he did. And so Ahmed's got kind of industrial engineering background, Lean Six Sigma. And so today we just spent some time talking about some of the things that he's experienced as a practitioner. In particular, we spent quite a bit of time talking about challenges that he's faced and then a lot of time on engagement, like how do you get people engaged? You know, we hear all about the Gallup polls and how so many people are actively disengaged. So that's a big problem. Right. And so what can we do to sort of counter some of those issues? And so spent quite a bit of time talking about that. I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode. I know. I enjoyed recording it. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 5, 30. Also, be sure to scroll down and connect with Ahmed on all the social media platforms. But definitely go check out these videos that he's doing because he does a fabulous job with them and I'm so happy that he does those. So again, gebapodcast.com, look for episode 5:30. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Ahmed, welcome to the show. How are you?

All good. Thank you for having me.

All right, all right. I. It was great connecting with you.

Wow.

Gosh, it's been a few months ago now, I guess, at the AME conference or so.

I think it's a.

Is that the first time we met? We may have met at other. Other conferences, but no, that was my first.

But.

All right. Yeah. So it was good to. Good to meet you and I'm glad that we finally can do the do the podcast now. So. Well, anyhow, Ahmed, as you know, we like to get things started with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you have?

There is a nice quote that I read in the book of sayings of Shigyo Shingu, which is the greatest waste is the waste that we don't see. And I like, I like it because in most of the cases, or in many, many cases, when you don't see the, the waist or you don't see the pain, or you don't see the gap, you're not motivated to start doing improvement or changing the status quo. So I think this is a big challenge and it's, it's an important thing to consider when doing continuous improvement or managing anything in your life, I would say.

Yeah, got it, got it. All right, well, hey, Ahmed, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background, how you got involved in continuous improvement. And then I think some people may know of some of the work that you do over there on YouTube and maybe LinkedIn with some videos and things like that. So maybe sneak peek on what that's all about as well.

Sure. So I graduated as an industrial engineer about 15 or 16 years ago. At that time, I knew what Six Sigma is about, but I did not apply anything. And at that time, I had no idea about what Lean is. I started learning about Lean as a production engineer in one of the companies at that company. That company was producing packaging material for Unilever, and Unilever was keen on implementing Lean at its major suppliers. So I got introduced to Lean and TPM by Unilever, and I started applying some of the tools that they taught us, such as 5s and visual management and so on and so forth, and also some tools that can improve productivity. And contrary to what my perception is, I found that it's easy to apply and also it's easy to digest by everybody in the company, even the workers. And I saw its impact in everybody. I would say people were capable of, or just the illiterate, literally illiterate employees were capable of identifying wastes and identifying gaps and suggesting improvements. And also some operators could calculate their own oee the overall operational efficiency on a daily basis and they could find. Find out where the gaps are. So I find I found out that this is something that I should focus more on rather than just working as a production engineer. And at the time, because I had that passion and I had like, I was motivated to do more and more in this area, I was also asked by the factory manager, take care of this Thing all over the factory, not only on your area. And like this, I saw myself doing this continuously. So I used to work as production engineer, then quality engineer, then planning engineer. But in my mind I was thinking or trying to apply as much as of the principles and tools of Lean in the different areas that I work for in order to improve productivity, quality, and so on and so forth. And later on I started like, I worked as a continuous improvement manager and process improvement manager in different companies and it went like this. And that's my passion. And you mentioned the engagement in social media because I saw the impact of Lean in myself and people around me. I saw, or I thought to myself, I should share this with more and more people. And therefore I started creating a page in Arabic in LinkedIn called Kaizen Arabic. And then I created the other page, Kaizen Made Easy, in which I tried to share whatever insightful things that I see or I read or I encounter. And, and then I had opportunity to work with, for example, Dr. Leiker to.

Jeff Liker. Yeah, he owes you royalties, man, for all of the videos you did for him. Yeah.

Of course, of course, yeah. He was kind enough to, to, to support this initiative, to review the content and also to record by his voice summaries. So he was kind enough. So I try to make use of this page in order to share the knowledge that I know, share the knowledge that I, that, that, that I find, and also help to share anything insightful on the, on the page. So it's not my page, but I would say, like, everybody is welcome to share the insightful content on it.

Yeah, got it, got it. All right, well, hey, so you've got a really strong background, Ahmed, like, lots of experience, different jobs. I'm wondering if we could just maybe explore maybe some of the challenges that you have faced as it relates to, you know, practicing continuous improvement, building a strong culture. What are some of the things that you have seen along the way?

Yeah, so when I started, like, Lean would look very nice and tidy in books. Okay. And continuous improvement tools, same Six Sigma, same. But the challenge would be always to like the ecosystem in which those tools would operate. So I would say, like, Lean is perceived in different companies that I worked for. I would say, unfortunately, most of the companies that I worked for as a cost cutting tool. And when people are saying that we are a lean organization, that means we have less number of people than like, and we are optimizing our organization by firing people every now and then. So it's. If it's perceived that cost cutting Tool like the implementation of anything will be very, very, very challenging because in this case it will be a self defeating methodology. Because if people are not motivated to do continuous improvement and they cannot see the benefit for the benefit that they will get or the benefit on the organization, eventually they will not participate. And if they are not participating or not engaging, I would say it will not work. Okay. So if this is one of the challenges that people would consider lean couple of tools in order to cut costs, okay. And unfortunately this is I would say at least from my experience is very common in many organizations. And also one of one of the challenges is the short term outlook by for example, okay, we are not interested in anything that would not result give us result in the next quarter. For example, okay. And so the what what Dr. Leiker called in his book the ROI mentality. So in the lean leadership to it away to a lean leadership book he was saying like the single focus on cost and the layoffs and all only short term scope would not would prohibit lean or eliminate restrict lean from getting its full potential. So in this case the challenge here would be like no, not, not sufficient people development, not sufficient training, not sufficient research and development and no longer term strategy to keep things moving. Right. And also I would say like this is one mistake that I used to or I used to make quite often in the beginning is the point improvement. Sometimes when you focus in one area, regardless of how this will impact the other parts of the organization or other parts of the production floor, even in some cases the point improvement just like try to fix this, do mood hunting and try to fix whatever is in front of you. Sometimes this backfires by for example just shifting the waste from one area to another. So I would say you should have like in the beginning you should, you can do that like the point improvement to keep things moving, to motivate people and so on and so forth. But eventually you should have your strategy door to door the value stream strategy in order to improve further.

Yeah, I really appreciate that one the whole idea of point Kaizen versus System Kaizen. I don't know if Mike Rother, whoever is the first one to sort of introduce this here to, to the west. But yeah, man, it's so easy to just run around and do simple point Kaizen improvements which is not necessarily bad. But you know, even in a theory constraints approach, if you aren't focusing on the constraint, you're not really helping the system. Right. And so, so I feel like there's a, there's a need to you know, understand the Whole value stream, maybe a value stream map or something like that to really understand how the whole thing is working. And then we use our point gu and to go chip away at those constraints and at those, those bottlenecks and that sort of thing.

Definitely, definitely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you have to, you have to make some of those mistakes in order to learn.

Oh yeah.

The hard way. Yeah.

Yep. Well, and also, I think Point Kaizen is also very powerful when, you know, if you go to a conference or a workshop or watch Gemba Academy video on some topic and you want to go practice it, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Right. Because you're practicing to learn long term. Right. Long term view. I need to get better at this. So I need some repetition at practicing 5s. I need a repetition at identifying the waste of motion. Right. Okay, great. Go after emotion for the next 30 days. Get good at seeing it, get good at countering it and then understand now. Okay, now I gotta step back. Now. Let's look at the whole system and identify how we can help the whole system now that I'm better at these, these, these point events, these Point Kaizen events.

And just, just to add, in order to make sure that like the, the. The effort is going to be sustained and the improvement is going to be sustained. It's always helpful if you like, as, as you said, the systems Kaizen is to link whatever you do in order to the business ambitions. Right. So you should, you should ask yourself like after you do the key, the starting points, but you should ask yourself, what is that problem, the problem that we are trying to solve. Right. If you're not able to answer that question or to identify what is the problem or what is the challenge that we are facing, either like you will do ad hoc improvements or it will be like, like just the, the flavor of the month and then it will fade out.

Yeah.

So it's, it's. And also to keep the management motivated and engaged in the journey of continuous improvement.

So speaking of engagement, you know, obviously we've all seen the various Gallup polls. They don't really change much year over year. It's always the same huge amount of the workplace and pretty much any industry, there's a large percentage that are what they call actively disengaged. Right. They don't like their job, they don't like being there. They're just literally there to, you know, collect a paycheck and then go home. Thank God it's Friday. You know, like, what have you seen as a Best practice or maybe just some techniques that we can potentially experiment with to sort of help with this engagement problem.

Yeah. As I just said, like having this vision that people are attached to would. And how. And how this is linked to what they do every day is really an important thing. So that they know what is the impact of what they do. And when people are, they know that whatever I am going to do or engage with in this exercise or in solving this problem, how this would relate to the overall performance of the organization, they will start to see why I should keep doing this. And the second thing is a proper communication. Because people, if you, if you don't communicate specifically what are you trying to achieve? People can start. And they have the right to start wondering and thinking and speculating and making theories of what you're. What are you trying to achieve? So for example, people could go the wrong way of thinking, okay, this is all about getting us fired, for example, right?

Yeah.

And so proper communication I think is a, is a, an essential thing to consider so that people are aware what is going on. They feel a little bit in the driving seat. They are not just feeling that they are dragged into this. And also when you. Another, another thing to consider is like when we talk about engagement, you should, you should. And also I learned this the hard way. You should always engage people as you go through the journey and to get their input sincerely in every. Like in the relevant steps or in the steps that are relevant to their scope. So if they feel that they are heard and their input is valuable, they will be interested and engaged and motivated to bring more to the table. Right?

Yeah.

So it's, it's important to keep, keep people, keep people engaged in this. So sometimes I would think like, let's all only consult people with like for example, masters or the. Only the engineers. And then you learn the hard way that some people in the shop floor with zero education would come up with ideas or challenges, real challenges that you did not see at all. Yeah, and as I said, like sometimes you, you learn this the hard way. And also the other thing is that leading by example, so people should not perceive or we should make sure that people don't do not perceive that this continuous improvement or kaizen or whatever we call it is, is it. It is for specific people, specific layer of the organization. It's the other way around. The management should lead by example and you should coach management to lead by example. They should see management exercising the continuous improvement principles and also the key aspects of it so that they believe that this is Something that we all interested in achieving. And one other thing that is all. I think it's almost in every book but it's all. I think also it's a very good practice in order to have this engagement is by building a pilot or lighthouse in which people can see by themselves that this worked here in our company. And therefore we can. And we are seeing its benefits. So therefore it can be implemented in the whole organization or we can explore implementing it in the whole organization. So I think also this pilot concept is also important. Don't start slowly but surely and let people see the real impact in the. In their own organization.

Yeah, yeah, got it. So I'm curious, you know, you're obviously very passionate about this Ahmed and got YouTube videos and all the rest of it. So you're. It's. It's clearly very important to you. This, our. Our lean movement and. But how's it impacted you personally?

Yeah, first thing that I would say, like it really taught me and I think I have gave some examples on this so far is that it teaches me or I learned the hard way how to be humble, how to exercise humility and be open to learn from anyone and always come listen with the. Always listen with the intention to understand just to respond or to find a way to respond. So this is one thing that I personally learned. Another thing is the long term thinking. Don't just look for the improvement that will give a direct impact today and forget about tomorrow the other way around because I learned the hard way, sometimes you improve something today that will make a negative impact in total. So the long term thinking in terms of time and also geography. So in the, by geography, I mean the whole organization, if you think of improving, you should see or you should see how this will impact the organization also whatever we do today, how it will impact us in the future continuously learn. I would confess that I did not, I did not used to be a book reader at all. And I had to. I have a big list of books already finished, big list of books to read. Also one thing that it is I would say like I did not see myself at all doing like in my early years of career I'm a little bit introvert. So I did not see myself at all like in the position of e.g. teaching or delivering training or coaching others other way around I saw myself that someone who is working by himself and trying to like think and give that perfect answer in the end. But I learned that by, by. By experience, by exercise that I'm really enjoying this like delivering training or Coaching others is something that is, like, it's, it's not, not something that I would not like. No, no, It's. It became my passion. Right.

Yeah.

And also the, I would say also the scientific way of thinking by, for example, trying to think, what is, what are we trying to solve? How should we plan properly for this improvement to happen? And as you, as you, as you, as we, as we all know, like, going through this BDC A cycle and doing an A3 or going through an A3, you can see that it's mostly focusing on the plan. The whole work is in the planning phase and the rest comes later. But you should. I learned that I should be thinking scientifically and that scientific thinking is not exclusive for, as I said earlier, for engineers or for white collar. No. Like, everybody can learn to be a scientific thinker in the organization if they are motivated and if they are coached.

Yeah. Hey, I want to circle back early on. You just, you mentioned the importance of humility. And you, I think, I believe you even said you struggled with this a little in the beginning. So am I correct to assume maybe you had the opposite of humility really is pride. Right. And so did you have some pride issues or stubbornness or something like this that was getting in the way? And so, so where were you struggling with humility, if you don't mind me asking? Kind of a personal question.

So, see, I was coming from a good place. Okay. I didn't have any bad intentions. But when I started working, for example, as a production engineer, I came with a mindset that I'm here to solve your problems. Right? Zero experience, nothing just out of college. But I'm here to solve your problems. I am educated enough.

Yeah.

And I was one of few engineers in the organization, so I'm educated enough to solve your problems, find your mistakes, and, and so on and so forth. And like, I was coming from a good place because I thought, like, I should, I should, I should. I'm not sure if this is the right phrasing, but I should earn my, my, my salary.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. So however I, I like and that, and this happened because I, I came to know other people know stuff. And the experience is like, you should, you should appreciate the experience of other people and also the perspective of other people. And so with time, I came to know that listening to others, learning from them, being open to learn from them and to be corrected when necessary is something that is beneficial for the organization. This is the first thing. And also for myself, because with this I can learn more and more Right. But being stubborn, for example, or being. Or feeling pride in. Only in my thinking, this does not help me. It does not help our organization.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard somebody explain this one time. They say, like, one plus one is three. I was like, wait a minute, is this some crazy communist thing? You know, And. But. But really what they were saying was, you know, like, okay, I. Ron, I have idea. I got one idea. Ahmed, you're. And we come together. You have an idea. That's two. Yeah, there's two ideas. Yeah. Okay. But together we merge our ideas or we brainstorm together and we come up with a third idea. So this is where this one plus one equals three. You know, sometimes can. Can make a lot of sense, right? Like, because I, again, I can have an idea, you have an idea. But together, maybe we come up with a third idea. Yeah. So I think there's lots of. In there, right? And I totally get where you're coming from. You know, as a young engineer, that's the same thing. You know, it's like. And, hey, let's be honest. If you were like me, I was. I'm not gonna lie. I'd be again, with as much humility. I was pretty good, you know, Like, I come in, especially when I learned a little about Six Sigma, a little bit of lean, and I was very energetic and good with people. I mean, I could solve a lot of problems. But, man, when I finally learned that, hey, if I bring these other people in and see what they think, I can get even more done. But, yeah, it's. It's kind of. It's a growth journey, right, that we all have to go through.

So. Yeah. Yeah.

Good stuff. Well, hey. Oh, man, this has been a lot of fun, man. I'm so glad. And thank you. By the way, I did want to thank you for those Kaiser Made Easy videos. They're fantastic. You do such a great job with them. And again, if he hasn't already, Mr. Liker, he owes you some. Maybe some. He's in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Right. And there's this place in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's called Zingerman's. They're big Toyota Kata guys as well. Great people.

Okay.

But they've got this thing as Zingerman's. And Mike Rather, you're listening, too, so you can be in on this, too. They both. They're all in. Ellie's guys are in Ann Arbor. Okay. Michigan guys. I'm a Iowa State guy, but whatever. And they. Zingerman's got these gifts packages, these big giant things full of candy and brownies and all that. So I feel like Dr. Liker owes you a big Zingerman's gift basket, so I'll just put that out on the podcast and maybe we could work that out. We'll get him to send you a gift basket.

Thank you. Thank you both.

Or maybe you owe him one because he gave you his voice and all that. I don't know.

Of course, of course.

No, but he's a great guy and, and him and Mike rather, my gosh, they've done so much for, for our movement, so we owe a lot to those, those two gentlemen. So. Yeah. All right, well, hey, if people want to connect with you, aside from Kaizen Made Easy videos, what's the best way, Ahmed? LinkedIn or how can they get a hold of you?

I'm on LinkedIn. Ahmad Radwan. And also you can, as I, as Ron said, you can check out the kaizen made easy LinkedIn page. Also welcoming your feedback anytime. And. Yeah, that's it.

Okay, Good.

Easy on YouTube. Yeah. Yep.

And we'll get everything linked up in the show notes. Everybody scroll down on your show notes there and we'll have everything linked up. So, hey, thank you so much, Ahmed, for coming on. This has been a lot of fun.

Same for me. Thank you so much.

All right, take care. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years, or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 lean and 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.