GA 579 | The Big Thinking of a Small Knight with Brian DeVries

When somebody comes in, it's simple and it's easy to understand. People naturally gravitate towards that and they're attracted to that. And so if you can go in and take some of the terminology out, keep it simple, keep it something that people can understand and they'll buy in.

Today I'm excited to welcome Brian Devries back to the show. Now, Brian first came on the podcast back in 2018, so it had been a minute since we a formal interview. But I've known Brian for, for many years and he's a fantastic clean thinker. And today we. It was a really fun conversation. It's not your normal sort of Gemba Academy podcast topic, but Brian actually has written a book. But it's not just a regular Lean book or something like that. It's. It's a book with lean, you know, flavor to it, but it's actually targeted towards children and. Yeah, so the book is called the Big Thinking of a Small Night. And I actually have it and I've read it to my kids and it's a fantastic book and he does a great job. So we sort of get into like, why did you write that? And like, what was your goal and what's the purpose? And again, there's, there's many leadership and lean thinking principles sort of hidden inside of the book. And so we get into that. But in particular, Brian's really big on using storytelling just in his everyday professional, lean training, lean leadership career. And he talks about why he believes storytelling can and should play an important role in making continuous improvement stick. So really fun episode. I think you're going to enjoy it. I know I did. Show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 579. Again gembapodcast.com look for episode 579. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Brian, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

Yeah, pretty good. Pretty good. How are you?

Oh, I'm doing well, man. Yeah, I was. Well, I was looking right before we. We came on that. It's been a minute since we. We last chatted. You were on episode 222.

That's right.

Easy to remember. So July 4th, easy to remember. 2018.

Yes. Yes. It'll be interesting to see if you corroborate stories. How much does the same oats has changed.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Oh, man. Well, I'm excited to have you back on and, and catch up and see how things have been going the last few years.

Yeah, I appreciate that.

Yeah, well, you know the drill, Brian. We like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Yeah, so for me, one of the quotes that I. And I've shared this a few different times, whether it's through social media outlets or just trainings that I do. And there's probably a bunch of people who sat in trainings that I've done are about to roll their eyes. But the Lorax is there's that little rock says unless. And the quote, you know, unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing's going to get better. It's not. And to me, I always think about that from whether it's the training and the skill sets that I've used or really just I'm out on the floor or I'm on the front lines and unless I believe something can get better, nothing's going to get better. Nothing's going to happen for you. The calvary doesn't come in. So continuing to. Whether it's the new skills you've learned, that belief that things can get better, to me, that quote is always summed up the way that I apply continuous improvement and really just how I kind of leave the students as they hopefully inspired as they go out back their day to day and utilize the new skill sets they have.

Man, that's powerful. You know, if you think about it, it's easy to just gloss over what you just said, but that whole statement of, you know, the belief that things can get better.

Yeah, agreed, agreed.

That's a pretty deep. There's deep meaning in that.

Yes, there is.

Like, what do you do as a coach when you encounter a. It doesn't even have to be in professional. Could be like in your personal life or something like that to where someone is just really struggling and they really don't have hope. Like, what do you, what do you do in those situations? What, what's your approach?

Yeah, my approach, you know, I lean. Honestly, I try to lean as much on my own experience as I can. And, and it's actually, it's a great way to kind of talk about really how I started to get into this business, honestly, is because I was that person. I was the one who was out there in a job where I felt like it was hopeless. You know, I just, I came into the same fires every day. It felt like I always put them out and then again tomorrow, same thing. It just, just you get to the point where you're so beaten down sometimes, by gosh, it just feels so hopeless. What do I do? But unless you keep believing that things can get better, whether it's through using your team, using the tools that we learn and we teach these methodologies, unless you believe it, no one else is going to believe it either. So I always lean on my own experiences where I was in that same position where I had that choice, do I believe it and keep believing it, or do I just give in to those thoughts of, okay, it's hopeless? And so for me, it was always about that belief that just keep believing that you can do it. And I think it's just that positive mindset, that positive energy, reaffirmation. That's what it's about for me. So I lean on my own experiences and really empathy of, you know, I know what you're feeling. I've been there. But it works. It's real.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. I've. I've always told people continuous improvement will work. It may not work immediately.

That's right. Persevere.

And we can continue to turn that. That wheel, you know, that PDCA wheel or whatever it might be that we're gonna get there.

I agree, I agree.

Well, good stuff. Well, hey, Brian, tell us a little bit about yourself. If folks forgot about what you said back in 2018, maybe catch us up a little bit about who. Who is Brian and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, sure, sure. So, currently I'm working. I'm a senior business advisor for Lean Fox Solutions up here in Michigan where I live. Do a lot of work with far as training, green belt, lean training, leadership training. And so I've been doing that now for getting close to a year. Prior to that, worked at a bunch of different levels and organizations, was all the way from, you know, frontline manufacturing supervisor all the way through, you know, director level at global organizations. So gotten to see a little bit of everything, a little bit of different businesses and industries, but currently just enjoying the role as far as being able to be out there, meet new people and see new faces and new places all the time. And it's been a bunch of fun so far for at least this first year, so. But yeah, had a good time.

So I know you've been at this for some time. What is it, like, 15 years or something like that? You've been at it for a little bit. I'm curious if you could maybe just talk a little bit about those early days and how did you first get into this whole continuous improvement movement that we're in?

Yeah, it's. It's A it's a story that I use so much, especially when I'm meeting new folks and new clients, whatever it may be. You know, I got into this because I'm a product of it. Right. You know, I. Before I got into contingent improvement, I was a golf course superintendent. I went to school for golf course management, turf grass management. Got into it because I love to play the game. And while I was in that business, I just kind of thought to myself that it wasn't the passion that I thought I got into it because I love the game and I get a day off. Last place I want to be is the golf course. So, you know, at that time I created this grand plan of I'm going to go find somewhere that'll help me pay for school and figure it out from there. And so that was kind of the big plan. But happened to take a job as a manufacturing supervisor where I was really exposed to lean continuous improvement for the first time. And I remember that feeling of it was a chaotic environment where you're going in, you're working 12 days a week. It seems like 12 days, 7 days a week, 12 hour days. It just, it was chaotic. And I remember kind of having that deer in the headlights look. If I was to kind of put, you know, a metaphor around way I felt it was, it was just chaos. But over time, you know, 12, 15 months of utilizing lean continuous improvement tools that I was being taught, we transformed the way we worked. And I went from that state of chaos to really kind of the way I would put it, that state of control. You know, work happened and my job became much more about problem solving and people development. And it was all through again, that belief that it could happen. And during that time that was really, it was that experience of, wow, what did I get myself into? To okay, now work happens, we're solving problems, things are rolling. I wanted other people to feel that way. And so for me, that's what got me into doing what I do is I want other people to go from that state of chaos, hopelessness, whatever it is, and the fact that this, it can work for you, that you can feel the same way I did. And so that's what's driven my whole career.

Yeah, I love it. You mentioned like sort of like a state of control. I also like to think of it as like when you enter into that, I don't know, when things just sort of click, I feel like you enter into that almost that state of flow right where.

Right.

Things are just sort of moving with purpose and intention and It's a man. It's a, it's a beautiful experience. Right. When you look around and you see, hey, things are clicking. And then.

That's right.

With any good system, if something happens, you immediately know and you can respond and. Correct.

Absolutely.

Keep going.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. 100%.

All right. Well, I know you're, obviously, you're, you're an author and you're big into storytelling, so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about, in your opinion, the role leadership and storytelling play in, in this whole continuous improvement movement.

Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. I think, you know, for me, what I think I learned early on is there's, there's a lot of different ways you can tell, you know, how we do go about, whether it's 5s, problem solving, whatever it is, there's a lot of different ways to train it. And really, in my experiences, I think what has been successful, at least for me, has been that art of, of telling stories that help relate what we do to something in everyday life. You know, one of the first things I started out with, I remember is, you know, continuous improvement. When I try to explain to people, you know, what I do, and that's probably a sidebar conversation where it's, you know, how many of us, how we go out. I'm a continuous improvement. I'm a lean person. And your people, your friends are what, what does that mean? But I always kind of put it in a way of, you know, well, if you're late for work, you're going to go back through your morning, figure out what happened, and do something different the next day. In essence, that's continuous improvement. It doesn't have to be any more complicated. That. And so I always think about storytelling in a couple of ways. One, to help simplify what we do, simplify a message, simplify a tool, an approach. And then the other piece of it is, as we're collecting data or we're going about problem solving and trying to define it, the ability to tell that story is just as important. And so if you have an ability to not only rewrite continuous improvement and its tools to what we do, make it simple and relatable for people to understand. It's also the ability to take data problems and put it in a way that, that people can connect with and say, okay, this is important. It's important that we solve it. It helps with some of that upfront buy in, but really it's about telling that story of how bad things are, how good they could be. Let's go together and work on it. So for me, it's kind of twofold of telling a story that makes something relatable and telling something that makes it simple.

I mean, even just thinking about when we try to make a problem visible via a statistical process control chart or a histogram or like, that's a story.

Sure is. It sure is. 100%. And I can remember, you know, those early days in the supervisory role being able to take some of the data that people talked about all, you know, seemingly for years, at least the way it was taught. You know, we've been talking about this for years. But being able to put it in that form where something can, it can connect, it tells a story. It shows, wow, look where we are. If we make this change, look what we get. And being able to put it in a visual form that, that tells that story, that was powerful.

I mean, I. The IMR charts, my favorite control chart, you know, and just individual moving range chart. And then when something pops above one of the control limits, it's like, hey, we've got something going on here and we need to, we need to understand and, and statistically speaking, that shouldn't happen.

Right, exactly, exactly.

There's something unusual.

So. Absolutely, yeah.

All right. Well, sort of what I want to get into now is maybe just a slightly different topic than we normally sort of approach on this podcast, but I think that's, that's kind of exciting for me, honestly. And, and so you're, you're an author and so you might. People think, oh, you wrote some lean book, you know, another lean book. Right, Great. No offense. The Lean Book authors.

That's right. That's right. I may be working on one of those too, so we'll see.

Okay. Okay. Yeah, but no, but you wrote a book that's focused and directed towards children.

Yeah.

And it's called the Big Thinking of a Small Night. I actually have it at my house.

That's awesome. Thank you. That's awesome.

So first of all, like, what inspired you? You have children and.

I do. Yeah, I do, I do. I've got a 10 year old boy and a soon to be 5 year old boy. At least the time of this recording. He. And this, the story really is built based on him. So the little night. Yep. His, his name is, his name's William. Our knight is William. So yeah, it's, it's just something where as we go through this, similar to how, you know, you describe to your friends what you do for a living, being able to Take some of those same principles and put them into a format that is digestible for kids. And starting that thinking early to me was always really important. I think, you know, you look at what's, what's unique, you know, what do you have that's unique to offer somebody? And I think for me it was, you know, I've always used whether it was the Lorax, Harold and the Purple Crayon, some of the kids books that, that we love growing up. I've used those in my trainings and I thought, well, that's kind of my unique piece. Maybe it's not unique, there's others that do it. But at the same time, that's what I could offer to the world is stories and concepts that we teach, but putting them in a format that our kids can take and kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, you name it, and start to build that way of thinking. And this one focuses a lot on some of those leadership skill sets.

So the inspiration was to be able to move the story forward for your kids and others or reach a different audience or.

Yeah, it's a little both. I, you know, I've, you know, I guess part of what made me think about this is when I brought on folks to my teams in the past, I give them several different books and oftentimes they were all about simplicity or something that's, you know, a children's style book that just, it, it takes a message, it takes a concept and puts it in a really simple form, Form. And I, and my whole message has always been simplicity. People connect to things when they're simple. And so can we take what we do and for instance in this book, take a leadership skill set and we think about being a leader and guiding others, that true servant leadership, and put it in a format that even our kids can understand it even at young ages. They can take that and kind of start to process that now rather than having to teach them that as a brand new concept later. Let's get those skill sets out there. For me, it was about being able to reach, you know, some of the kids and also have that inspiring story that, hey, maybe you bring on a new team member, give them this. It's, it's something that shows that what we do here is, is create problem solving and continuous improvement skill sets that are simple. And you can boil it down to something as simple as a kid's book.

So I've personally never written a book, so I'm curious, like, what was that process like for you to sort of write the book and get it published. And all that was lean or I'm worried maybe wasn't all lean. I don't know.

That's right. There was a lot of. It was a lot of back and forth as we went through the stories. I remember we had a lot of folks that helped, you know, edit and read and go through the stories, make sure they made sense or you know, the message that we had connected even his rally cry of many Bravehearts. There's all sorts of things where, trying to get those details where it was enough detail, but it wasn't, you know, you think about some of those kids books, you know, my, my son is almost 5. It can't be that long of a book otherwise he's going to tune out. So making sure it was the right amount of information and at the same time still a really fun story. And so the story really progresses. It's, you know, several challenges that he faces himself and he comes upon this challenge that's just too big for himself to solve and he learns the lesson of, you know, if I teach others how to problem solve as a team, we can really solve a lot of things together and just how good that makes people feel and that teamwork and how rewarding doing that feels, you know, that's what the essence of this is all about. But yeah, it's a fun process. But going back and forth through the stories, like making sure there's enough detail, enough challenges that are somewhat feasible. It's a kid's book, you know, there's all those pieces where you go through that process. And then my wife, she has her own kind of digital advertising graphic design company. She did all the design work, she published it. So she went through a lot of the kind of back end process of helping get this set up, do some of the advertising. I was just the story guy that was kind of it. So I'll give a shout out to my wife Allison on just the work she had put into making it look the way it does.

Talk about your night's hat.

Yes. Yeah. So it's an old pot and oddly enough, we just had Willie. He went, he went and we did some advertising with some pictures of him with a pot on his head. But just kind of thinking about, you know, the time setting and just, you know, kind of putting people in that moment. The details, you know, there's elements of just having enough detail and having that old pot on his head. You know, it's just something that just kind of shows this is his shining armor and it's very in some ways, it's an innovative thought. You know, it doesn't need to be this crazy. Great, I'm gonna go out and have this great night helmet, a pot. Just throw it on your head. Now you got yourself a helmet. So it's just. It's being resourceful. It's, you know, working with what you have, imagining yourself doing some great things and having that mindset. That's what's going to carry you through.

Yeah. So you've already touched on a few of the. Of the. Of the lessons, but I'm wondering if, are there any like. Like, what is super important to you that if there's, like, one thing that. That folks could take from this book, whether they're children, maybe even, like, what is it?

Yeah, it's the biggest message is that servant leadership. That as a leader, I think as you grow and I, even myself, even in what I do, I still can think of times where you, you know, you kind of put yourself in that way of. Hannah, if I give this away, you know, I feel that less valuable and trying to get rid of that mindset and maybe teach that early. But it's about servant leadership. Teach others to know what you know, to do what you do. Teach others to solve problems, empower people, and your team will be great. So it's really about, you know, teaching others to problem solve and empower your village to. To make everybody great.

Yeah. What is like, teach a man to fish and.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Exactly. Right. That's 100, right? Yep.

Yeah, no, that. That's fantastic. So if someone were, like, thinking about writing a book or whatever, I'm curious, like, because you've been through it now. Like, are there any lessons that you learn? Like, if you did, we sound like you may be working on another one. Like, or what's the PDCA process for. For writing a book? And what kind of challenges are you that, you know, should people expect to face?

Yeah, I think for me, it's getting others, other sets of eyes and other minds involved earlier in the process and just making sure that what you're thinking makes sense. And, you know, I went through and created what I thought, you know, created the story, refined. It felt really good about it. And then I started letting folks read through it and they started bringing up some other ideas. Gosh, had I thought about this, I could have saved myself a lot of time, a lot of headache, a lot of just kind of going back and forth. I think a big lesson for me was just getting more people involved earlier. It's kind of Funny, because when you think about really what the whole point of the book is, is getting people involved, teaching others, it's empowering folks. So for me, as I go forward, move forward, and potentially even just more leadership lessons for kids through mediums like this, it'll be getting folks involved a bit earlier in the process.

What role did your kids play when you were actually writing the book, Amy?

Yeah, especially my five year old. We tested the story on him a lot. Can we keep his attention? Are the images good? Is the story long enough, short enough? Is it, does it still make sense? And what really landed with me, there's a couple different things. One with him and just the questions he would ask would help, you know, help how? I would tailor the story and so we'd go through and I'd read a page and I'd ask him questions about it and see what he, see what he pulled out of it. You know, just do you remember this detail or that detail? And so from those questions, those conversations that really helped with my, you know, as much of a conversation you can have with a four year old, he was key to being able to say, you know, these images are effective. He always remembers the pots when he brought that up, he always remembers the wooden sword. So there's certain things that go with the story that, you know, his input, as best as he could give it definitely played into how we created the story, what details we put in there, what details we took out because they just didn't understand the wording that we used. And so I think that's important and I think that was also challenging. I love corporate speak and big buzzwords. Being able to take those things down to, you know, kids levels was in some ways difficult.

Like what? I'm curious though, and I've seen you before, like speech and whatnot. You're sort of naturally gifted at it, I think. But like, do you, I don't know, do you use these principles of simplicity and I don't know, just an elegance to your delivery like when you're trying to teach adults, trying to get people to buy into this whole continuous improvement process?

Yeah, I sure do. I sure do. And I think that's, I think that's why ultimately I decided to go with at least the first book. Being a kid's book is because it's, it proves that what we do, you know, you can make it as complicated as you want, as technical as you want, or in many ways you can make it as simple as you want. And it's like we always talk about, you Know, it's easy to make something complicated. It's really complicated to make something easy. And if you can put it into this format and show that, you know, what we do is, it can be simple. I think it's important. But I think over my career, you know, I think about my time as frontline supervisor, some of the roles that I've had, when somebody comes in, it's simple and it's easy to understand. People naturally gravitate towards that and they're attracted to that. And so if you can go in and take, you know, in some ways, a lot of it'll take some of the, the terminology out. I remember working for an organization where we didn't call things standard work. We didn't call it. But if you went in there, you'd see forms and, and tools that we had that looked a lot like standard work. It looked like a lot like 5s audits. We didn't call them that because they like different terms and doesn't really matter to me what your terms are. But keep it simple, keep it something that people can understand and they'll buy in.

Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Awesome. Well, hey, man, this has been a lot of fun. If folks wanted to, well, get, get a hold of your book, I mean, I guess anywhere books are sold or.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, it's funny. So it's on Amazon, Barnes Noble, Walmart, all the different platforms recently we had it. It's kind of cool seeing it's imprint at our local bookstore. I live up here in Michigan and see there's a local bookstore in our little town and they picked it up and it's just kind of cool, you know, just. So just as you brought that up, it's just kind of one of those cool things like, hey, there it is. There's, there's a lot of folks.

How did that feel first time you.

Walked into that bookstore? That's pretty cool. Pretty neat to see, you know, your work connecting with somebody locally. And there's a bunch of them there that now friends and family and folks that are around that are close to, they can go check it out right there in print, put their hands on it. It's pretty cool. And they're all. So I went through and signed them all, did all that. So I had a bunch of fun on that. But yeah, available everywhere. And again, it's, you know, target audience, you know, kids, nieces, nephews, grandkids, all of that. But it's also really a great gift for new team members, those types of things to really show the simplicity of what we do.

Yeah, fantastic. Well we'll have it linked up in the show notes so everybody can just kind of scroll down and, and, and go pick that up. So awesome. Brian. All right, man. Well hey, I appreciate you coming on. I'm sure we'll do it again down the road.

I hope so. I hope so. We'll talk again soon Ryan. Appreciate it.

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 Six 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.