GA 556 | What a Successful Lean Transformation Looks Like with Chad Bareither

You have to give them enough base, right, Enough wiggle room to struggle because that's learning comes on the other side of that. What you're talking about this interesting case where I'm the coach and I don't necessarily know the right thing to do and the learner doesn't know the right thing to do. I don't really understand how this is going to get to where we're going to go, but I'm going to trust the process.

Today I am excited to welcome Chad Barather back to the show. Now, Chad was on in episode 498 and so we'll link to that one in the show notes. But today we had a great, great conversation. I really, really like this podcast. We talk, I'll just really dive deep into this, the whole idea of, of lean transformations. And we start at the beginning. Like I sort of challenge them almost. I'm like, what is a lean transformation? And we talked a little bit about, you know, the, the so called surveys out there who say X percent of lean transformations fail and all that. And Chad sort of debunks that a little bit. And you'll have to, you'll hear what he says. I thought he had a really good response. And so we really just get into the nuts and bolts of why, why lean can be difficult and what we as practitioners and what we as leaders can and should be doing to make this thing work. And yeah, it's just a, just a lot of really deep conversations. We always have a few questions, kind of like ready to sort of get the conversation going. But this is one where the questions were just flying out of my mouth because I was just genuinely curious. And, and as you'll hear, ch, he's super smart, he's really humble, but he's super wise. You can just feel the wisdom when he speaks. And that's what I really enjoy about him. So show notes can be found over@gemba podcast.com look for episode 556. Also just scroll down on whatever app you're listening to this on and please go and connect with Chad. Go check out his book Improve. Last week we talk a little bit about that. That's what episode 498 was where we talked about his book. But yeah, good guy, super smart guy. And he's also kind of in the consulting world. So if there's any he can do to help you with that, go, go check that out as well. Okay, enough for me.

Let's get to the show.

Chad, welcome back to the show. How's it going.

It's going great. It's good to see you again.

Yep. I just peaked before we, before we jumped on and you were last on in episode 498, the power of Improving Less. And we were talking about, about your book back then. So it's been been a little while since we last chatted, so. But thanks coming back on and if you remember, we like to get things going out of the gate with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Yeah, so I don't know that it's my favorite quote, but right now one that's really sticking with me is prediction is hard, especially if it's about the future. And it's credited to both Niels Bohr and Yogi Berras. I guess you can take your pick of who you feel like a bigger influencer. I go with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Okay. What's that mean to you though?

So it's interesting. This became really insightful to me over the last month, really. I was recently at a conference, the Lean Solutions Summit, which Patrick Adams organization puts on and Tilo Swartz was joining a panel discussion there and he was just commenting on the fact of like we have this in my words, not his I'll paraphrase, like this epidemic of certainty. Right. We've given up being uncertain and I think that's in. Impeded us a little bit in terms of our experimental mindset. And I think that the tie back into Lean there is very important because we want to be so certain, so confident about everything, but we can't be certain. This threshold of knowledge exists where if we're not willing to be uncertain and to be humble and to learn, it's really hard to be very certain about what the future is going to hold if we've never tried it a different way.

Yeah, I have this theory that there's just an in a human. Just that because we're human, that there's this aspect. It's almost, it's more. Almost psychological really. This need for certainty. Right. Like this need for sort of knowing like that. You know, like think about back to the pandemic. That's why it was so difficult is because you had no idea what was going to happen. Right. And just that and an uncertainty can. I've seen it wreck some people more than others. You know, there's certain people that I've worked with over the years and if man, if they didn't have a clear line of sight of how things were going to go, it just really wrecked them. While Others were just, yeah, okay, well, let's. Let's go for it. And it's, it's easy to. To read the book and say, yeah, experiment your way forward and, you know, yeah, it's nice to say on a stage and nice to write in a book. But, you know, when you really do it, when your kid is sick or you're going because they've got cancer or something like that, it's real easy to say, you know, oh, yeah, let's just roll with it, you know, but, gosh, this, this just. I don't know, man. This is a deep yearning to know. And I don't know. That's why I think it's so hard. It's. It's real easy to be critical of. Oh, yeah, well, we should be this or that. Yeah. But we're human, you know. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, it's. Especially if you look at. So there's the definitely human condition where there's, there's safety. You can look at, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. And I need to feel a little bit more secure, and I can't be as secure about an uncertain future. There's also, you know, as we've gotten into this age of information, it used to be if you were sitting around at a bar and asked a question and someone didn't know the answer, like, you'd talk about it. But now it's like, I'll look it up. So, yeah, so we have two things. We have, like, immediate access to information, but you have very polarized information as well. So not to get, like, too off into the. The tangents here of, like, being political about it, but you can pretty much find evidence to support your need pretty quickly. So, like, we gravitate. I agree with you. We gravitate towards certainty. And that's what makes prediction hard, is we want to be very confident about what we're going to do. So we go into it, and then mentally, I think we start to, like, filter. We have this paradigm effect where we filter out information that's not confirming that more certain future that we have. And that becomes a challenge, you know, so if I take that long loop around back into, like, lean and cultural change, it's hard then to say for an organization, I want you to experiment. I want you to be uncertain. I want you to learn.

Yeah, because I got to ship that product on Friday or we're in trouble, you know, and that's the other reality of, you know, where sort of academia. Academia meets reality. Right. Like, it's all well and good, GEBA Academy that you say that in your video. But hey man, we gotta get the work done today. So anyhow. Yeah, good stuff. Well, hey, we jumped in, got all deep right, right out of the gate and people, if they didn't hear 498, I don't even know who you are. So tell us a little bit about yourself, Chad. Tell us about, about your background and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so my name is Chad Bereither. I help company leaders to solve problems that'll help boost their productivity and that helps us get products to market faster, products to customers faster and improve profit. Lately I've really been enjoying the work and focusing more on the med tech. So med device and pharmaceutical industries, growing industries, lots of unique challenges there. But yeah, I partner with organizations to come in and help solve those problems, build the capabilities. A little bit of what we'll talk about today rather than just like fly in, train, fly out.

Got it, got it. Okay, well, what I want to do is to start with maybe the general theme is just sort of like the role of culture and lean and you know, how can we be successful as organizations and really individuals? So maybe to start with, talk a little bit about your thoughts on culture as it relates to being successful with whatever that means when we say we have a successful lean transformation. Sometimes I don't even know what is that? What is a success? Maybe let's start there. Like what is a successful lean transfer formation before you even worry about culture.

Yeah. Okay. I mean we're, we're hitting some pretty like high level questions here to start off with. Right. Certainty. And what does transformation mean?

Easy. Come on.

Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's fun to talk about this. So why a transformation? So a transformation. Let's just simplify that and call it a change. So we're going to make a change. We're going to change the way we manage the business, change the way maybe we manage the production line. Whatever you want to say. Okay, so the first question that I asked is why? Why would we want to change? So part of what a transformation should be able to answer, is it going to get us closer to whatever our goal is, whatever our purpose is, whatever our mission. So that's for example, organizations that I might work with might be struggling with on time delivery because they're growing. They might be struggling with cost pressures with an industry shift. Right. Or the market has shifted so they've lost market share, Something like that. So part of the transformation does have to, to your earlier point, like, keep the lights on, ship product by Friday and deliver for value for the customer. So that's part of it. The other part of the transformation is making sure that that change is permanent. I have a client that I'm working with recently that the focus is on getting out of backorder. And that's great, but once you're out of backorder, like, you still have to deliver, right? I mean, so it's like, where's the evergreen goal of stabilizing production, stabilizing daily build attainment for the long term? Like, that's more of the transformation is like, do we look like a different company? Do we operate like a different organization? Do we have different cultural beliefs, values and actions on the, the far end of whatever that objective was? So then if I tie into your first part of the question of like, well, what is culture? I mean, culture, you look it up in a dictionary, right? It's the group of learned behaviors that are either promoted or tolerated, right? So over time we, as a cultural group or a company entity, like we promote, we reward, reinforce, train consciously certain behaviors and activities subconsciously, we also tolerate some. So that becomes part of the culture, good or bad. So the culture is just like, well, how do we work every day, whether it's written down or not written down? And the question is, is the culture that you have going to enable long term transformation, stabilize that transformation in the long term? And I think it does, I think it does require some sort of pivot. If you say we want something different in the long term, we could in a short term achieve results. But if your culture hasn't changed, you're going to slide back down that hill.

Mm, yeah. I guess. What's so interesting about the question of, you know, and you'll hear about, oh, X percent of lean transformations fail or whatever, I'm kind of like, like I'm one, I'm always, how do you measure that? Do you know how many people in the whole wide world have? You know what I mean? So it's a really difficult statement to even say. I mean, I think there's truth to it. My hypothesis is that most people probably do struggle with it and they quit and that's ultimately, that's failure, right? But, yeah, but, but gosh, it's like Toyota, they're still being transformed, you know what I'm saying? And ain't nobody better than them at it, right?

And there's still, you can look at leading organizations, right? So Toyota would say they're still like, TPS Danaher would say they're still DBSing DBs. So this, this, that's kind of the challenging thing is the transformation isn't an arrival. Right. It's a change in the way that we think and that we believe. And so how do you say we've gotten there? Like when the best in the world say we haven't gotten there?

Yeah.

Can I just step back as well? Because that, that quote, that figure is often misquoted where it says like two thirds, whatever you pick the number 2/3 of transformations or change initiatives fail. We put failure on this dichotomous scale of like I succeeded or I failed. If you actually look back to research that that's in it, the full quote is like failed to achieve the desired outcome. So that could have been, we wanted to get to, you know, a 95% quality rate and we got to 92 and you're like, we failed. But that study, when quoted out of context just says it's either a flaming dumpster fire or it's a long term success. And it's kind of dangerous to just say, well, two thirds are going to fail.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's almost like defeating before you even try. You know, it's kind of like you're never gonna lose weight. Don't even try, keep eating bad, you know.

Well, even, even the failure, you know, I've, I've gotten the good fortune to have a couple conversations with, with folks in the industry. One of them, Mark Rabin and his new book, you know, my favorite mistake and is, you know, when we catalog it as a failure. Right. That can feel pretty defeating versus a mistake or you know, failing forward, whatever you want to call it. But also this perception of, you know, lean transformations fail or change initiatives fail is saying, well, what can we learn from that? So we do better next time. Get closer goal.

Yeah, no, I like it, I like it. Let's talk a little bit about leadership in the role that leaders play in this ongoing transformation. Let's just call it that. You know, sometimes we'll see, you know, we've all experienced it probably in our careers, you know, being micromanaged didn't have any autonomy. Maybe there was just sort of like top down mandates given you're going to do this, you know, or, or leave, you know, that sort of thing. Like, like what's a leader to do? What kind of behavior should they be demonstrating to ensure this stable long term transformation?

Yeah. If you don't mind, I'll start with two, like tangible examples. I can say, you shouldn't do right. So maybe we start there kind of. Kind of back to the M. Not the failures but the mistakes I've seen and how that can inform the future. So it's not uncommon that an organization might start their shop floor transformation with something like 5s. Well that's good, right? I'm not saying that's the wrong thing to do. I have a personal thing about 5s shop wide. But what problem is it solving? But maybe that's a future episode. If we're going to do that is like does everyone understand why? And back to what we started in the beginning transformation, like what is that going to help us do better? So we've cleaned up the floor, we've put tape on the floor. You've lowered my amount of inventory at my workstation. How does that help me do my job better? And so just by mandating that like we 5s, we put floor tape, you put up your audit sheet or whatever. I don't know that we're getting the buy in or the change. It's just like you're just asking me to do something else at the end of the shift is clean up instead of just go home when I used to. Another example I can point to that is this was a TPM example and it was a 5S initiative. And the continuous improvement team, I'm using air quotes, not sure if this is on video or not. Right. Came in and they did it over the weekend when some of the machine operators weren't there. So they come back on Monday and it's like where are my tools? So like in that case it was done morning. It was done to them. Right. So this top down micromanage or mandate of like we're going to clean up the floor whether you like it or not. Because I've heard that that results in better performance. So those are the type of things that we don't want to do these blanket, you know, organization wide at least my recommendations not these blanket organization wide. Just like apply a tool because we think it's going to improve. But we haven't defined what improvement means. Let me say a little bit of some examples I've seen where it's working really well. So I have a contact that's in Danaher and I just asked him like so how do you onboard new leaders? And they have like a three month program that they go through where that leader has gone around and participating in and helping facilitate Kaizen events. So if you just think about that mindset, they're understanding the DBS approach. To improving processes in business and they're learning that before they even take on their leadership role. So that's pretty incredible. That's a pretty substantial investment. And again to any of your listeners, I'm not saying you have to go do that. I just want you to think differently about what is the leader's role in supporting Lean principles. If it's just to review the 5S audit Spider web chart at the end of the month or is it to actually get involved and understand how making change. I have another client I was working with recently and getting the leaders out of the corporate center and into the job sites was a challenge and we're really showing them it's starting to pick up steam. And so they're saying take them by the elbow, lock arms with them, take them by the elbow, get out there, ask questions instead of being certain, kind of ties back to our prediction and uncertainty. Ask questions about what's really happening. You can't manage off a spreadsheet and say I know what's happening at the job site. Encourage and coach. So point them back to standard. Try experimenting, changing something small and seeing if we get different results. Like that type of leadership commitment is saying I believe in the principles of Lean, not just this tool based approach.

Yeah. What do you think we as just an overall lean movement need to be thinking about in order to see more lean long term, successful lean, ongoing transformations.

I think we need to be aware that it's going to take time. So how long did it take Toyota to develop what is the Toyota production system? And we said earlier it's still improving. But you could look at the history of Ono's first experiments in the maintenance shop to where they had maybe organization wide. And you're talking about 20 to 30 years. I think it's about 27 years after.

The wars, you know, like right after.

The wars until, until like the 70s. Right. Where they would say that this is something that we can now replicate.

Right.

Danaher went with like Shingajitsu trainers and things like that. But they took about 17 years from when they initially started to when now we have an enterprise wide solution for that. So for organizations that are like show me the roadmap of their six month transformation. I'm like I, I mean we're really expecting cultural change, leadership behavior change and that happens slowly. There's been a lot of, and I don't know it, I don't know if it's the, the algorithms online. It's kind of like the red car effect or whatever. Like you want to Buy a red car, you start seeing red cars everywhere. I start thinking about this, you know, training, coaching. And now I'm seeing all these posts about the importance of senseis and coaches. Coach deployment is my experience now doing this for several years required to build that knowledge and that capability and that accountability. I think we've relied too much on classroom training right. Where we can say here's I'm going to tell 20 people what to do and then they're going to go be successful with that. So what does that mean? Kind of back to your question, what does that mean? It takes longer because we're really investing in developing individual people and individual people over time build that culture. Right. That learned set of behaviors that's tolerated and promoted. So we need to do that and cultivate that slowly over time. We can't just be like, okay, now that was the pivot point that we're turning the Titanic on a dime and we have a new culture.

Yeah, yeah. Earlier we were talking about the dangers of sort of like top down management and mandating things and all that sort of spinning it a different way than if we just turn our attention to our frontline team members as it relates to get, you know, really to lean. What can we be doing to help them feel like they're part of it? Like they're, they, they are the initial owners of, of this transformation. Instead of like they're just being compliant, like what can we be doing? What strategies?

Yeah. And so I want to be clear when I say there's nothing top down, I just mean the mandate for specific tools, specific activities. I think we definitely need a top down commitment to say this is what we're trying to accomplish.

Why are we doing this? Yeah.

A financial goal, a quality goal, a delivery goal that we're going after and say this is where we need to get. As you get lower in the organization. Right. It's important then that the director, manager, supervisor, frontline level to say how we are going to transform in that way. And what does that take? Well, that takes things like Kaizen, Kaizen events or you know, continuous improvement and experimentation. It takes coaching, it takes leaders being on the Gemba, asking questions, showing support for trying and failing, making mistakes like supporting that try and try again and this leader standard work of staying close and connected to the work. Another thing that's very important in any lean transformation is this daily management system. So do we understand on a daily, like how am I going to be successful on a daily basis and if I am experimenting, how do I iterate so how do we get that ownership, that autonomy, that authority? How do we get the authority for making process improvements like closer to where the information actually lives, to where the work is actually done. And we do that by supporting the workforce of not saying, okay, I'm going to come in and tell you what we're going to do. And I'm guilty of this. In my early career I studied and first career experience as an industrial engineer and I was convinced I could just calculate my way to the best solution and everyone's going to buy in because the math says it works. And I've run improvement events where then the team is telling me I don't think it's going to work, math says it's going to work, ends up not working well, is that really supporting the line in making that improvement? Again, I could back to our quote about predictions. I could be very certain this is going to work. But if the rest of the team isn't coming with me, I'm just one person who's crossed that threshold of knowledge and they need to come with me. So how do we provide an environment where I can give you the goal to go after but I have to give you enough, enough breathing room to experiment with the tools yourself and learn what works and then build some buy in and some cultural change on my own. Hopefully that made sense. I rambled a little there.

No, that was good. One of my favorite aspects of TWI training within industries is just the whole idea of sort of put the learner at ease in the beginning. What are your thoughts on that? Just from a human behavioral perspective, you're going out there, going to work with someone, they don't really know who you are. Car they're kind of nervous like what is this all about? Like what do we do to put folks at ease?

Well, so I, I don't know what a lot of organizations do to accomplish that. I think the answer is not much in some of the organizations that I've been in. But yeah, I mean the first thing is just the environment, right. You get on a shop floor and it's, it's depending upon the industry, right. Maybe it's noisy, maybe the lighting's different, right. Maybe there's displays, you know, visual displays or whiteboards that you don't really understand. Like having a little bit of onboarding time and some grace to say, like if we're making an investment in this person, it's really important that they understand what we do here and how we make decisions. If we, if we value, because we say this in a Lot of cultural things like we value inclusion and we value innovation, and that's great. That new team member can't really contribute if they have no idea what's going on.

Yeah, yeah.

And so getting him at ease, first of all, with the physical environment, I think can't be understated. But also taking time to explain the way we measure things, the way we make decisions, how I'm going to be measuring your performance, how as a team we measure our performance, I think is really important to take our time with that.

Yesterday we're recording this year in October, but won't be released for a little while. But we're doing a live green belt training here in our facility. And I, I just kind of walked in yesterday. I'm not teaching the class, but, but I walked in and John Knotts is teaching the class. And they were right in the middle. It's like a green belt fast track class. And they're right in the middle of sort of like this hypothesis testings and P values. And everybody's like, oh. And John said, ron, come up here and explain this. And I remember just looking at the students and I could just see that they just had to sort of just like scared look on their face, like, what in the heck have we gotten ourselves into? You know? And I remember I. What I said because. And I believe it is like, guys, this is not a big deal. We're gonna get this. And then I just sort of paused and just looked at everybody until they like acknowledged, okay, you know, and just almost, because sometimes I feel like we go into these things with this mindset of like, this is really hard and get ready, you're gonna really struggle, so pay attention, you know, Whereas we get to say, hey, we're gonna make it, we're gonna do it, you know, and you don't have to go into it with this, I don't know, like this negative mindset, right? Like, more like have that. What they call the growth mindset. Right? Like, don't, don't be, don't have a scarcity mindset. Have a growth mindset. I feel like that's a big part also to, to help folks just almost take a deep breath and it's gonna be okay because I'm with you and we're gonna do it together.

But I think it's, it's so important what you just demonstrated there as a leader behavior. I mean, you're the leader in that environment. You are leading them through the learning experience and you're, you're creating space for them to Feel at ease. Right. To have some psychological safety. Yeah. You look at, you know, again, I know we, we oftentimes and go back to like these, these big organizations that have lifelong transformations like Toyota. But in Toyota, I was meeting with some folks that grew up in that organization and got trained on the production line. You pull the andon cord and stop the line, they sell it. Maybe not celebrate confetti and stuff, but they thank you for pointing out the problem. Oh, we've never had that problem before. Thank you for pointing out so we can make our process better. The juxtaposition and I haven't been in a US Automotive in some time, but compared to like you don't stop the line for anything. Right. It's just a very different mindset when you're put doing that and saying we're gonna figure it out. Even we make a mistake. Like I'm here with you to help figure out why we made the stake and what we're gonna do better. But you don't feel that in a lot of industries, you don't feel that in a lot of organizations. And I think it all goes back to culture of what is my expectation on day one. So in this case, if you're a continuous improvement professional and I expect that your statistical analysis and your P value are perfect. Right. Your prediction about the future was perfect. And then I mess up. Oh man, I'm in that 70% of change initiatives that fail, like I fail or I succeed and that culture is just not conducive for long term development of people, long term behavior change.

Yeah. And what's interesting about and circling back to your, your, the whole idea of predictions and thresholds of knowledge and all that. It's like yesterday when I walked in there, like I've taught this stuff for many, many years and I could do it with my eyes closed in all humility. Right. And so like I had no doubt that I was going to get them across the finish line. And so that's one way that's, that's easier. I could, I could speak with that confidence. But, but in those situations to where I'm at the threshold of knowledge along with the learner and I don't know like what we got to do to make it work, but we could still have that confidence. And the whole idea of we are going to experiment our way forward one step at a time and I'm confident if we don't quit, we're going to get there. So I feel like even if you don't know like what you're talking about in a way. Right. Or what the answer is, so to speak. You can still have that confidence with that learner to put them at ease and again, lock arms and let's go. Let's take a step. What do you think?

Yeah. So I mean, the one thing is there are, there are situations where the learner knows what to do and that's great. They're going to take the step forward. There are situations where the learner doesn't know what to do, but the coach or teacher sensei knows what to do. And you have to give them enough, enough space. Right. Enough wiggle room to struggle because that's learning comes on the other side of that. Well, you're talking about this interesting case where I'm the coach and I don't necessarily know the right thing to do and the learner doesn't know the right thing to do. And that's. I totally agree. This trust the process that, that quote just came up from a client I'm working with where they had said, I don't really understand how this is going to get to where we're going to go, but I'm going to trust the process.

Yeah.

And the thing is, and I echo back to him is like, I don't know the specific process changes that we're going to take. I mean, we're in week one of an engagement. I don't know specifically what is going to get you to close the goal or close the gap on the goal. But I do know if we follow this process together, we're going to learn and we'll be smarter two weeks from now.

Yeah.

And it is uncertain. So go all the way back to the beginning of our conversation in that quote, humankind, like, I want to know. I, I need to know that you know how to get there as my coach or your sensei.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's principles. Right. And this is back to where I say it's not, you know, not a mandate. Like, I don't want to focus on use the tool. Use the tool, use the tool. It's the principles. If we follow the principles and we follow the process, I can have confidence, you know, I can put you at ease as the learner and saying, I don't know. But I don't have to be frantic like, I don't know, I don't know. We got got to work harder. It's okay. We'll step through that threshold of knowledge together and a couple days from now, a couple weeks from now, we'll have a lot better idea of where we need to be.

Ah, so good. So good, man. This has been a fun conversation.

I do want to say it sounds easy when we say it. And this is what I tell a lot of people about lean, including. This is right. It's simple. It's not easy.

Yeah, yeah. No, for sure, for sure. Why don't you maybe wrap things up, Chad, with, like, any final words of wisdom? You know, you got a lot of experience, you've seen a lot of things. What are some final words of maybe encouragement even that you can give to folks who are. Who are on this journey?

Well, I think we use that word transformation. We start at the beginning. That's a big word transformation, A big change, you know, but we have to start somewhere. Right? Throwing out more quotes here. Right. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. There's also, like, one of my favorite Chinese proverbs. You know, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. Like, but not saying like, like, don't set your. Don't set your litmus test to this. Pass, fail. It's about learning. And that is uncomfortable. Right. Because the future is uncertain. The change I'm going to make in my process, like, I can't be 100% about the performance increase, the quality improvement, the lead time reduction I'm going to get because I've never done it that way. So, like, take that pressure off of yourself. Take a first small step, but also give yourself the grace to learn through that process and say, you know, I'm going to be better at this tomorrow. Yeah. And I only really need to be one step in front of whoever I'm coaching.

So peeling back to current a little on my personal life with my family. My wife and I recently kind of wrote up this. We called it Pereira family code. You know, I got teenagers, I got young adults. I got teenagers, I got little ones. And. And so we, you know, listed out a bunch of things that our. Our family's all about, like, you know, say you're sorry and that sort of thing. But the last one, I'm gonna read it. I have it on my little. Then my notepad or my note file here, the last one. And I think it perfectly aligns with what you just said, is also to be patient. And then it says, be patient with others and yourself. Growth takes time, and everyone is on their own journey. We're always in such a rush with ourselves and others that, you know, we just. That just impatience can just eat away at us. And Then that leads into so many other vices that can just wreck your life. Really. What do you think?

I mean, I totally agree. And, you know, we can be in a rush, you know, to where we started. Like, we got to get delivery by Friday. And you do. Like, sometimes you need to get things out the door. You need to just finish something. But, you know, patience with others. And also, when you come into a situation, you don't know that they have their context or they know what assumptions you are making. I'm super guilty of this. So kind of back to the patience thing. Like, I'll fly into conversation. I'm like, spitting off things that my kids are my wife. And they're just like, what do you. I've been thinking about it in the other room for two hours. Right. I'm just like, here's the plan of attack. And they're like, I don't know what we're talking about.

Yeah.

So, yeah, having that. That patience, I think is super important, especially in this context that we're talking about. About culture change is like, you. You can't change the culture. Let me see if I'm phrasing that right. Right. Everyone needs to change to change the culture. So, like, you can't get to culture change faster just by you learning. And this kind of comes back to, like, it's coaching, it's investing, it's repetitive action over time. And that's probably not a really sexy answer that executives want to hear of. Like, it's going to take time, but you can only go as fast as you can move your organization.

Good stuff. Hey, Chad, if folks wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

I think the best way is to find me on LinkedIn. I assume you'll link that out in the show notes down below. You could also find a copy of my book on Amazon or my website, bereithergroup.com you can download chapter one for free to see if you even like it.

What's the name of the book?

The name of the book is Improve Less. It's the focus and aligned framework for sustainable, continuous, continuous improvement. And so you can find that on Amazon or like I said, get a chapter from my website for free. And those are probably the easiest ways to get in touch with me.

Okay. And then if you haven't listened to episode 498 where we actually talk about the book, now that you're done with this episode, go ahead. I'll have Jessica link it up in the show notes as well. Just hit the button and you go back and listen to 498 as well.

So.

Hey, man, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you coming, coming on and I think we got the next topic or something about 5s and you know, or as Mark Graben would say, lean as misguidedly executed lame or whatever, you know, so like we can get into all that kind of stuff. Maybe that'd be a fun one.

I think it's great. Oh yeah. And if you're already thinking about another one, tell Adam Lawrence I'm coming for him. So he's like, okay, okay, five or six. I gotta, I gotta catch him.

Yeah, exactly. Good stuff. All right, man. Appreciate you, Chad.

All right, thanks a lot.

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