GA 549 | Toyota Kata at Jack Henry with April Bell

They may have been burned by trying to make change in the past and people tend to carry that kind of thing with them. People are just afraid of things sometimes. Learning to meet people where they are and try to be understanding of that has really been beneficial because you start to build those relationships with people and then they're more trusting.

Today I am excited to welcome April Bell back to the show. Now, April works for a company called Jack Henry and she heads up the continuous improvement efforts there at Jack Henry. And I've known April for many, many years and she's a fantastic continuous improvement practitioner. And most recently, just over the last few years, April and her team have really engaged with Toyota Kata or scientific thinking and have used it as their sort of their primary vehicle towards continuous improvement. And so today we sort of talk about that building on April came on. Oh, was it? Oh, it was a few months ago. And we sort of introd at how Jack Henry's using Kada, but we just sort of build on that conversation today in particular, they're mostly virtual, they're mostly, well, they're all office oriented situations. And so she sort of talks through how they go about that. You know, they, they don't meet at a physical board. They have virtual tools that they use. So she kind of spells that out and explains how she goes about that. And we also get into some change management discussions. So namely like when, when April and her team sort of meet someone maybe not completely on board, like what do they do, how do they try to overcome that and what's their strategy? And I thought, I thought their strategy is very wise actually. And finally towards the end we, we got into this topic again. April's a deep thinker in scientific thinking. And so I was bouncing the whole idea of how we set predictions when we make a. And kata. When we plan an experiment, we always make a prediction of what we think is going to. And I shared my thoughts on that whole prediction side of it and I was curious to get April's thoughts on what she thought of whether that's a really important part of the whole equation or not. And so that's towards the end and I thought that was a really valuable part of the conversation. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 549 and be sure to scroll down on whatever app you're listening to and go connect with April over on LinkedIn and thank her for coming on. And then if you want to keep scrolling down and, and give us a review on whatever platform you're listening on, that would. That would sure help the show sort of reach more people. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. April, welcome back to the show. How are you?

I'm good, Ron. How are you?

Yeah, I'm doing well. Doing well. All right. Well, where are you calling in from?

I'm actually at home. I'm in my Louisville, Kentucky office.

Okay. Yeah. Last time we did this interview, I looked it up right before we came on was episode 522. You were here. Yeah. If I remember, that was a lot of fun doing it in person, so. But good to connect this way as well. So, April, you remember the drill. We like to get things going with our guests sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Yeah, so I actually read this in a book this summer. I was at our beach condo reading a book on the beach and read this. Can't believe it's the first time I ever actually read it or heard it, but just fell in love with it when I did. So do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better by Maya Angela.

Wow. Easy to say. Hard to do, right? Right. Why do you think it's so hard to change when we've done it for something for so long? What is that? Just a human.

It's fear. I mean, it's. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just fear. Right. I mean, even in. And we see that so much in continuous improvement. Right. People realize that something isn't working the way that it should, or it's hard, and they know that it needs to be different. They know this. And we call it, you know, kind of living in your. The misery that you know. But it's. It's. You become comfortable in that space, and you don't know what it looks like on the other side. And it's just that fear of the unknown, I think, is really what causes people a lot of times to be hesitant to change.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That threshold of knowledge, as we call it in kata. Right. All right, well, so, April, in case folks didn't hear the last time you were off, tell us a little bit about. About yourself. Tell us about your background, how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff, and then what you're up to over at Jack Henry these days.

Sure. So I. I do work at Jack Henry. Been there for 13 and a half years. I do lead our continuous improvement division over at Jack Henry. You know my background, I started in banking, so I worked for a local bank for about eight and a half years. Before transitioning over to Jack Henry, started in payments realm, doing return transactions and things like that. And, and really was in that space where I got involved in continuous improvement in a formal manner. I had actually been doing that kind of work most of my career. Just didn't realize that there was a name for it. And then my leader, Mark Hampton came on and had a background in continuous improvement and really started teaching us more of the approaches and methodologies and you know, really how to formalize it. And so that's, that's really where that all kicked off and I just honestly fell in love with, with every part of it. And so, you know, along the way we've, we've built a team. When we started doing continuous improvement at Jack Henry, there it was Mark and three of us and now I have a team of eight. So we've, we've definitely evolved. We've started expanding into other parts the of, of the organization, getting coaches, even individuals going out and getting their black belt certification through you guys in other parts of the organization. So it really is expanding. It's become, you know, a really a part of our culture at Jack Henry.

So yeah, yeah, I mean I've been able over the years to be able to work with many of you and your, your colleagues and it's been fun just seeing how, you know, continuous improvement doesn't know any, knows no boundaries. Right. Doesn't matter if you're transactional, factory doesn't matter. So that's what I've always appreciated about Jack Henry is this willingness to embrace this stuff even though again, you're not producing widgets. So just real quick, in case people aren't familiar, tell us a little bit about Jack Henry.

Yeah, sure. So Jack Henry is a financial technology services company. I always like to explain it this way. Anybody that does any kind of interactions with a bank or a credit union, which is pretty much all of us, whether it's going to an atm, using your online banking, actually going into a branch, get taking out a loan. Jack Henry most likely has either produced or supports one of the, the pieces of software or you know, the products that are producing the thing that you're using.

Yeah, so yeah, okay.

Kind of a broad range.

So give us a, just a quick elevator pitch then just on the continuous improvement journey. I mean obviously you've mentioned some leans, some Six Sigma and you're real big. I know you are personally passionate about Toyota Kata and scientific think King. So give us a rundown just on like where you guys are as an organization.

Sure. So we, when we first started doing continuous improvement several years ago. We were very heavy in D.C. and, and I shared this, I think last time that you and I chatted. That didn't last very long just because the organization was still so new and so green in understanding what continuous improvement was. And, and most of the changes that we saw people making within their departments were very small. And they would come to us and say, it's going to take me longer to document through the D approach than it is for me just to go do the thing. I don't really want to, you know, take the time to do that. So they would, you know, kind of back away from us. And, and it wasn't until we really shelved that we even went through a period where we tried to do A three thinking. But again, we over complicated that. So it was, it really wasn't until we landed on Toyota Kata that we were able to get more buy in and get people to, to really start utilizing what we're doing. Because it's so simple. It's just, just really thinking through the four steps. And the, you know, the approach is something that once you practice it long enough, you start doing it innately and you don't even realize that you're doing it at times. I mean, I do it when I'm at the grocery store sometimes or I'll, I'll have conversations with people. I'm like, I can't help it. It's just, it is what it is. Once you start doing it your whole life, where are you now?

Where do you want to be? Obstacles are in your way.

What's your next target condition?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

One of the big struggles that we've had though is with Toyota Kata into our environment. I shared this last time, but again, for, for those of you that didn't hear the last session, we're an office organization. We don't produce things like in a factory. Most of our processes are not day to day. They are not. I do the same thing over and over and over and over again in a day or even day after day. They are things that are weekly, monthly, quarterly. So our opportunity to, to see those results faster is a little bit more difficult than if you would in a, in a factory situation.

Yeah. So I mean, is that, would, would you say that's your sort of primary struggle with, with just any aspect of continuous improvement in Kata in this case or other? Are there other struggles as well?

I mean, it's, it's definitely one of our biggest ones. I would say our biggest problem right now or our biggest obstacle. I don't like to call them problems. Our biggest obstacle right now is that we've actually gained such enthusiasm around doing continuous improvement within the organization. So like I said, I have a team of eight. We support our entire organization. We have 7,200 plus employees. So my eight employees are trying to support all the departments within the organization. And we've built this enthusiasm over the years and now we are running into the instance where we have a lack of resources to be able to assist. And so that has been our big focus shift this year into how do we get more coaches within the organization. So it's not just my team coaching all of these activities. We're really trying to drive more towards where we have coaches embedded in different departments within the organization and then my team can serve as their second coaches. You know, that's, that's really what we're trying to get to. So that's one of the biggest struggles that we're trying to overcome right now.

Yeah, it reminds me of like the early TWI days, you know, and the whole, the idea of just the multiplier effect, you know, sort of the original pyramid scheme in a good way, right?

Yeah.

You get three guys and you get three, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's. So it's interesting you mentioned first coast, second coach. Talk a little bit about what that looks like for folks who aren't familiar with those. With those terms.

Yeah. So, you know, and that's, it's something that we've definitely struggled with because my team is really new. I only. Of those eight, only two of them have been with me for more than 18 months and only two of. And those are the only two that actually have their black belt and lean Six Sigma. The others are very new. Some of them have been with me less than a year. So they're still, they're still trying to even learn how to be a learner and a coach, let alone being a second coach. But you know, the way that looks is really, you would have the learner who is the person who's doing the activity. Right. They're the ones that come to us and say we have this thing that just doesn't work the way that it should. We, we want to be able to, to make this better. They're the ones leading the activity. They're the ones going out doing the experiments and things like that. But they're learning the kata approach along the way. Right. We don't just have them come in and you go do these things. We want to teach them the four steps and how to apply that and how to, how to ask those reflection questions along the way. Because again, once you start practicing it, you just start to see things differently. The coach is there to really help guide them through the structure of the four steps. Right. Getting their challenge, understanding their actual condition, getting to that small bite, the target condition, and then doing those experiments along the way. The coach is there to help guide them on that journey and helped, you know, if they're struggling to see things differently or you know, really knowing what direction to go, that's what they're there for. The second coach sits and kind of rides along so that they can offer the coach guidance as well. Right. So we all need somebody to, to listen to our coaching cycles or watch how we're doing things and offer us some suggestions. I mean, I even ask people to sit in on my coaching sessions sometimes and I've been doing this for a really long time just because there's always things that you can learn from a different person's perspective. And so one of the things with, with my group that we've really been working on is, is having those second coaches provide feedback to the coach of, you know, look at the way that maybe the target condition or the challenge statement is written. You know, look at that language going back to, you know, Mike's book on how should those, those condition statements really be written out? You know, what constitutes as an obstacle or an experiment versus this is just a task you really need to go do. So that's why they're there to really offer that guidance and just a different perspective in a lot of instances, you know, because we all look at things a little different. You and I could both hear somebody say the same thing and we can take something differently from it. So it's just a good opportunity to have them learning from each other as well.

Yeah. So I'm curious and obviously feel free to share as much or as little as you, as you, as you can, but can you maybe walk us through maybe an example of something one of your learners or just again, high level, no doubt getting into details of what a learner is working on and maybe some example target conditions, some example obstacles just to get a feel for maybe like a routine of, of like a coaching session might look like?

Sure. And one of the big things that we're doing in my team, so like I said, most of my team is new and we're learning together. We actually took a break over the summer, we, we stopped taking in any new work so that we could spend three months doing daily coaching cycles within the team. And the. The easiest way for us to do that practice was with. With our own work. So we had a strategy meeting earlier in the year. We wanted to talk through what are some things that we want to change in our approach to doing continuous improvement at Jack Henry. And so we had this. Things that we either were already doing and we wanted to improve or things that we weren't doing that we wanted to start doing. And so we've been basing our coaching cycles off of that work. And so we kind of broke up the list amongst the team and we had different people take different roles. And so some of the things that we're working on are around, you know, building a communication plan. So we don't really have a communication plan for what CI is doing at Jack Henry right now. And so we created a kata that is strictly around having a communication plan. And what are we wanting to communicate? What does that cadence look like? Who's the targeted audience? What is the format, you know, those types of things. So, you know, our coaching cycles really are. We'd have. And we did a rotation, so everyone sat in a role. I think we did seven cycles and then we switched seats so that people could get familiar with the different roles. But, you know, they're. They're looking at things right now and one of them in what are all of the different avenues in which employees at Jack Henry get information? So, you know, one of the obstacles that they're trying to overcome is that we don't really know. We know the standard ones. We use teams and Slack in some instances and, you know, we've got an internal page. There are some groups that have different SharePoint sites and things like that. But we have an obstacle because we don't know what all the avenues in which employees gain information. And so the target condition that they're working towards right now is that they have landed on the format and the avenue in which they want to communicate around a specific CI education program that we have coming up. So they're just looking. We're really working on our internal processes to help get that practice so that when they go and they work with other teams, they will have seen how that whole thing functions and works. I sit in as a master coach and then we have a second coach that sits in. We use the template that is in the book. We've just turned it into an Excel doc and they send it to me and then I provide feedback after every session to the learner, the coach and the second Coach based off of, of, you know, the feedback that they gave. And it seems to be working really well. I had them all do a survey before we started to just kind of give me an understanding of how comfortable do you feel in all of the, the, the different roles that we're going to fill. And then halfway through, I had them do it again. And so you can definitely see where people are getting more comfortable. Just getting that daily practice is so important. And that's why I was saying that's one of the big struggles that we have in an office environment because most of our processes are spread out, the cadence isn't hourly daily. So finding those little tasks that we can practice with, I know they're not big things that probably don't necessarily need to be a kata, but for us, they've been really helpful to have as those practice items that we can, you know, really talk through. And we've had some great discussions within the group, you know, as we are having those meetings, just, just, you know, coming up with. And again, everybody's got different perspectives. So somebody may see what a person writes as a target condition as good. And then somebody may challenge that and say, ah, well, you know, they'll start to poke holes in each other's statements and things like that. So it's, it's really fun to watch too, but it's a great learning opportunity.

Now, are you, I. Are you doing most of these coaching sessions virtually or are you doing some in person? All virtually, yeah.

So my team is spread out across the country. I have. There are two people who live in Kentucky near me, but I have, I have employees in Washington state. I have employees in Texas and in Illinois. I mean, they're all over the place. So we don't get together in person very often. So they are all virtual.

So then how are you guys monitoring coaching sessions? Like sort of a virtual Toyota, like kata board or like, how are you doing that?

Yeah, so we have an internal system that we use that has a storyboard template. And so the learner will pull that up and share their screen. And we'll walk through all the different segments of, you know, we'll start with reviewing their challenge statement. We'll talk about, you know, what's the target condition that they're working towards, make sure that that target condition is in line with getting them towards their challenge. And they're not working on something that's arbitrary and you're not going to guide them there. Then we, you know, they just go through the reflection questions and they, they go through Each segment of the board that aligns to the. The questions that are in the reflection period.

So, yeah, how's. How's the, like on a change management side of things, like, how's it been sort of adopting this new way of thinking? Because it's obviously, as we say when we train people, cross your arms and then cross them the other way. Right. And it feels weird, right, to do this scientific thinking. Has that been the experience, crossing your arms the wrong way kind of thing?

I mean, I'd say there's always, you know, there's always a handful of people who don't see the value in it. And, you know, for, for us. And this is what I always tell my team, just, you know, kind of try to meet people where they are, understand what may have happened to them, what their thought process may have been. You know, they, they may have been burned by trying to make change in the past. And, and people tend to carry that kind of thing with them. You know, going back to, you know, our discussion earlier on on change, people are just afraid of things sometimes. So learning to meet people where they are and try to be understanding of that has really been beneficial because you start to build those relationships with people and then they're more trusting. But the other thing that I tell my team is go and find those people who want to learn. Because if we can focus and spend our time with people who are truly interested, and we do have a lot, we have several people who reach out and say, hey, I either participated in an activity or I sat in on a class, and I'm really interested in learning how to do this and utilize it. It, you know, in my area, in my life, you know, can I. Is there more education that I can do? I always tell my team, focus on those people, the people who really are engaged, they. They really want to learn what we're doing. If we spend our energy there and we help those people grow, other people are going to see the benefits that happen. And you're just going to, you're going to get more people to buy in once they start to see, oh, that person did it, they gained this from it. Maybe there really is something to it.

One, especially if you're not sort of being annoying and pushing it on people who don't want to be, you know, involved, you know, and it's just more of a pull system. And eventually they'll, you know, some people may never come around and, and, you know, that's their choice. And then, you know, if the organization's going one direction and they don't want to be on that train, then they can choose to get off, I suppose. Right.

So, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, that's just. That's definitely been our approach the past few years. Anytime that we meet somebody with resistance, instead of trying to, you know, keep banging our head against the wall, we just kind of back away and try to give them some space and understanding and, and we'll go spend some energy and time where people are asking us to come. And I've seen it several times, people circle back around eventually because they start to see the value in it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I'm wondering if somebody listening right now who's just getting started with maybe scientific thinking in particular. Toyota Kata, that framework, like, what are some practical tips that you would have for them to, as they, as they get started, assuming they have a basic level of understanding what it is, they've read the book and Gamma Academy video, whatever, you know, but, but they're really doing it. Like, what are some practical tips for them?

Yeah, I mean, I would say for anybody who is just getting started, and we're actually starting to work with some of our customers around this aspect of they don't have a continuous improvement, say group or team or department or whatever, but they want to start doing continuous improvement there. You know, what we've basically told them is just start doing it. Start, start making a list of all of the things that are frustrating to you. You know, when you're sitting at your job and you're doing something and you just feel really frustrated around this particular task or that you have to do, make a note of it. Make a note of the process that you're doing and the thing that's frustrating and just start identifying all of the things that you want to, or not all, but some of the things that you want to work on. Right. Because knowing what you want to work towards and improve is the first step of understanding, you know, where to even go. And then, you know, you don't have to have a big fancy environment or tool or, you know, anything like that to use. We started out in Excel. I mean, we have a nice, nice, you know, system that we put all of our stuff in now. But when we first started, we were doing everything in Excel. We just had, you know, we, we looked at the book and we looked at some templates and things like that. We recreated them in Excel where we could have a place to put the challenge, have a place to put the actual condition and, you know, those types of things. And we eventually built some roll up reporting in Excel to where we could start seeing the different types of benefits we were saving and you know, get some reporting around how many activities and things that we were doing. But I would say just, just start doing it. I think far too often people wait until they have the perfect process to, to move. And I am, I'm of the mindset of let's just go, let's start doing something. Because we're. Everything's an experiment, right? Every single thing that you do in your life is an experiment. You're going to learn from it, you're going to hit that knowledge threshold and then you're going to, that, you know, okay, let's go figure something out, let's go research, let's go talk to some people. But I think far too often people just wait around until they have right, the perfect thing. And so my, my, you know, my suggestion is always just to go, just to get.

I mean I, I even do it through email. Like I was communicating with a colleague the other day and, and they were telling me about something that they had going on. They were excited about trying this thing and so I just replied and they knew what I was doing, I could reply and it's like what do you think think's gonna happen? You know, and that's all I said and, and then they replied back lol. They knew what I was doing and then they clearly stated it, you know, but just that, that whole deliberate practice of just really thinking through here's what I want to do, here's what I think is going to happen. Then what actually happened? What did you learn? Like that, that deliberate learning is just so powerful and if you, if you sort of, you can say lol. But really it's important that you, you know, specifically state, you know, those, those predictions and that sort of thing because without that I think I get your, your thoughts on this. I, I actually think I was just teaching a, a class the other day and, and I actually said that I, I really do believe that the whole idea of making a prediction in the scientific thinking framework like that is almost the most secret sauce aspect of the whole framework because I don't really care like what kind of lean six sigma you're doing. Like I had been doing it for 20 some years and I don't think I had ever in my life predicted what I thought was going to happen after an experiment. Like what do you think about that, that whole idea of making a prediction and the power of it?

Yeah, I mean it's absolutely key because I mean if, if You've ever done anything scientifically, you know, go back to school if you did any kind of chemistry class, right. Like you, it's always part of what you have to do. And it's, you know, I always like to tell people, it's how you gauge one. It helps you understand your knowledge threshold. Right. So I'm going to go do this thing and if you don't talk about what do you expect to have happen? Okay, how do you know if you were right, if you were wrong, if you had enough data and information going in? So making that prediction that what do you expect to have happen statement really is, you know, taking, kind of taking stock of all the information that you have about the thing that you're working towards. Right. So it really requires you to think through what all do I know about my current condition and this thing that I'm getting ready to go do, how much do I know about that to be able to say, here's what I, I really think is going to happen. If you don't do that, you're not really taking that stock. You're not really thinking through what you actually know. You're just, you're going out and doing things for the sake of doing things, in my opinion. And so when you, when you actually have that, what did you expect? And then once you've done the experiment, you circle back around with what actually happened. It's so impactful. Even, even if what actually happened is what you predict, is it. Because I think a lot of times people think, well, it's only impactful if something negative happens or, you know, whether you exceed or you, you know, you don't fully meet it. But even if you are spot on, that tells you so much about, okay, my decision making based off of this information, you know, that I know about where I am now and all the things that I have control over and all of the things that I know about this environment or whatever. I was spot on with my knowledge threshold and I had a good understanding of all the information that I needed to know going into making this decision. And that way when you go to make another decision, you're going to go, okay, I knew all of, I did my research in these five areas and something similar to this. I need to go do that again. Maybe you don't get the same, you know, the same outcome, but you at least have a good understanding of what you need to know going in the next time. But I just think it really gives you a good gauge of, of what your knowledge threshold really is, which is so important, because it's something that we overlook all the time. What do I really know about this thing that I'm trying to do or say or.

Yeah, well, especially if there's any sort of pride in your process. You know what I mean? Like, if you don't enter it with humility, then at least asking these questions can sort of. Of guard against, you know, the prideful or, you know, just your bias. Right. Like, we're all. We all have a bias. Whether we like it or not, we have a bias when we enter into anything. So, yeah, following this framework. That's the beauty of the framework, is that it really sort of pulls emotion out. It pulls pride at pros, pulls bias out, and just allows you to sort of proceed through that. That corridor. Right, that we. When we teach it.

Yeah, absolutely. Because I think there's some magic that happens when people can stop. I mean, you know, I always tell people it goes all the way back to when we were in school. You know, when you start elementary school, you have to take tests where you have to get the right answer. You get called on in class, you know, and you're expected to give the right answer in the moment. And that's a very stressful. I mean, for most people, that brings about a lot of anxiety. And I think that we experience that for so many years that we're in school that when we get to become adults, we have this fear of not having the right answer. And so I think that these. This approach allows us to kind of set some of that stress and anxiety down of, I don't have to know everything. I don't have to have the right answers. Right now. I can say I don't know yet. Let me go, you know, let me go figure that out. And so I think that this approach allows us to start kind of unpacking some of that as well.

So for sure, good stuff. Oh, thanks. Thanks again, April, for coming on. This has been a lot of fun. Do you have any sort of, like, final words of wisdom or any parting advice for folks out there?

I would say one thing that we've started doing this year that has been really helpful and again, just putting up because we're in an office situation. It's a little different than in, you know, manufacturing. We've started utilizing processing goals. So there's a difference between, you know, outcome goals and processing goals. And really, I mean, you can look at them as tasks, but we've started breaking it down into the processing goal level in many instances, because one of the things that we found is that we would have, you know, a couple weeks or a month or so in between our coaching cycles because our work is just comes in that cadence. And so we started breaking it down into processing goals, which really keeps people on track of, here's the 15 things that may have to happen for this experiment to happen. So I think a lot of times that we say we're going to go do this experiment, we think we're just going to walk away and do it. But, you know, let's just say, for instance, your experiment is utilizing a form. Well, you have to figure out what data elements you're going to use. You have to figure out what format you're going to put it in, what platform you're going to. You know, there's a lot of things that go into making the experiment happen. And so we would find people would show up to, to coaching conversations and they hadn't moved because they just didn't have really any kind of reminder or those smaller and they're not really target conditions, but they're at a much, much smaller micro level of things to do. That has been really helpful for us just to lay out what are all my processing goals that I need to hit along the way to ensure that my experiment can happen so that I can make sure I hit my target condition. And it's been really, really helpful in the type of work that we do.

Nice. Good. All right, April, if folks wanted to connect with you personally, what's the best way?

I'm on LinkedIn, Facebook. I think you have my LinkedIn.

Yeah. April Bell. Right. So we'll, we'll get everything linked up in the show notes. So everybody just kind of scroll down on whatever you're listening to and go connect with April and tell her things. Thanks for coming on to the podcast. So. All right.

Thanks for having me, Ron. Fun as always. Always good to catch up with you.

Yep. And next time you're in Texas, we'll do it again in person.

Sounds good.

Awesome. Okay, you 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.