GA 587 | The Differences Between Six Sigma Belts with John Knotts

When you have everybody who understands how to identify it, how to fix things at their level, and they're given the ability to do that, even encouraged, that would change the culture.

Today, I am excited to welcome John Knotts back to the show. Now, John is. Well, he manages and leads our coaching and certification team here at Gemba Academy. And so he himself is also one of our senior coaches. So he's. He's doing a lot of mentoring and coaching of. Of our various, you know, green belt, black belt, master black belt folks going through our program, and he's got a really, really deep experience and continuous improvement. So today we. We really sort of. We. We do hone in a little bit on the whole certification and training aspect of Lean and Six Sigma, kind of kicking it off with talking a little bit about where some initia fall short and what you need to do to sort of make sure you don't fall into that trap. Then we get into a little bit about sort of the differences between the different levels. Like. Like a master. Master black belt versus a black belt. Like, what's the difference? And he gives us a nice sort of an overview of that. And then towards the end, we get into this whole idea of just, like, cultural alignment with continuous improvement and making sure that we. We really get it embedded in this sort of the DNA of the company. And, like, how do you make it not just sort of this flavor of initiative? So, again, John's got a tremendous amount of experience, and I really appreciated him coming onto the show. Now, show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is episode 587. Again, gembapodcast.com look for episode 587. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Hey, John, welcome back to the show. How's it going?

It's going great.

Pulled you away from your coaching candidates and everything and get a little. Little rest here. Do a little podcast.

I love it some. You can tell when summer break starts, right? Because everything kind of dips a little bit with coaching calls.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome, awesome. Yeah. Vacation time, that's for sure.

Yep.

So, all right. Well, hey, John, it's good to have you back on and you know the drill. We like to get things started out of the gate with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, I thought about it, and obviously we've been on before, so I'm running out of quotes here, but there's a book that was written about ethics by Aristotle. I think it was called Nickel Micken. I Think is how you call it on ethics. And he wrote that these virtues are formed in man by doing the actions. It's a longer quote, but. And then Will Duran, later in the story of philosophy, which I read during my PhD program, had said it basically kind of paraphrased this long quote of Aristotle's that said, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit which is like. Yeah, like the basis of continuous improvement.

Yeah, Yeah. I love it. I love it. Good stuff, man. All right, well, hey, John, in case folks didn't catch you the last time you were on the show, tell us a little bit about yourself, about your background, how you first. Maybe how you first got involved in continuous improvement and then. And then your role here at Gemba Academy today.

Well, I've been involved in continuous improvement, process improvement for 35 years. I started in 1990 as a cop in the Air Force when the Air Force started to roll out Total Quality management, which they called the Quality Air Force program. And as a cop, I was learning about it in some training courses. And I actually attended some of them twice because I loved them so much. They were really good. And it really talked about back then, very focused on team involvement, quality circles, natural working groups. And I just saw the application of this as a supervisor and security police in the Air Force, that this was like really good stuff. And then eight years later, I had the ability to retrain in place in Germany into the manpower and quality career field. And I became an industrial engineer and a process improvement practitioner and a strategic planner in the Air Force, going through six week intensive training in Biloxi, Mississippi.

Okay.

And I loved it. And a couple of years later, I was actually doing some study because there was all these tools and there's so many tools, it's ridiculous. But I was trying to understand all these different tools, and I stumbled across a Venn diagram, four circle Venn diagram, which today they call the Ick guy. But back then it didn't have a name and it talked about your purpose being in the center of this Venn dia diagram. And the circles represented what you love to do, what you're good at doing, what people are willing to pay for and what people need. And I was like, this is what I'm doing. I love this. And I stuck with it ever since.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah. Well, we're glad you did, man. So awesome.

Kind of an interesting, you know, experience, but how one little tool can speak volumes to someone. But that was back in 2000 and worked with a lot of different organizations since then.

Yeah.

Top 10 consulting firm. Booz Allen Hamilton USA here in San Antonio, Texas. Just a lot of, lot of companies over the years.

And what do you tell everybody what you do for Gambling Academy?

And so. Well, I run the lean Six Sigma training and certification programs, oversee kind of everything that we're doing. And I am the primary coach for the yellow belt, green belt, black belt and master black belt programs. And we have a face to face trainer that does some of the coaching for our green belt. Fast track.

Yeah. Nice. All right, well, good stuff, man. Well, so sticking with that whole idea on, on training, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, your perspective on not to not. I don't want to come at this as a negative perspect, but, you know, unfortunately there are many training programs out there that sort of fall short when it comes to, you know, getting people to get, I don't know how to say it, just like real tangible results. Why do you think that is? And perhaps like what's maybe some, some potential countermeasures?

Well, when people start out, they typically they're looking at numbers. How many people have we trained? And they're not really focused. And we talk about this a lot in the training programs in Gemba Academy that you should start with understanding what are you trying to improve, what things are you trying to make better in your organization. But unfortunately, a lot of people take a very focused view on how many people are trained, how many people have completed the training and not necessarily what are they doing with it and how are they moving the needle for our organization. When we do kickoffs with people who get into the membership programs of GEMBA Academy, one of the first questions we like to ask is what are you trying to accomplish? Before we actually discuss what do you want to train people in? Because then you can focus that training activity in one specific direction. But a lot of times training can be very tool and template driven and people get wrapped around that tool. There's so many. I already said this. There's so many tools in process improvement. It's overwhelming. And there when you learn a tool, it's like, that's the only thing I know how to use. Yeah, I often, I remember back working in usa, I used to carry a little card in my wallet. It said, I will not be a hammer. Because when you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that's, I think, what any kind of lean or six Sigma or lean and Six Sigma tends to drive people to a tool. Focus.

Yeah.

And then, and even process improvement, they see everything as a process problem. When sometimes it's employee engagement or culture or strategy. There's so many other systems level things that are going on that people, they get very focused. And I, and then when we, and we're very adamant, we don't give people templates to do things, we give them templates to like run a tool, like fill out a charter. But as far as like running a project, it's not a template driven thing. You got to think, you got to use your brain with all the stuff that you've learned. And when you give somebody a template, that's all they're ever going to do. They're going to fill out those slides on that template and say, okay, I did my project without understanding why they use the tool.

Right.

And what it leads to, to the next step.

Yeah. You know, I remember before Gemba Academy I worked at. People would be on LinkedIn, looking up, trying to figure out who I'm talking about. I worked at a company and had a boss who was, well, let's just say very sales minded and all love all my sales people. Don't worry, I'm not trying to bash salespeople here. But, but he, the fact that it's kind of like the, the fact that our company actually had to produce something was just sort of annoying to him. He was like, just let me sell it and then do whatever you got to do to like kind of get it out the door. But anyhow, unfortunately this guy was also my boss and was like part of like driving continuous improvement at a multi billion dollar company. Okay. And, and I remember he said to me one time, he said he got really frustrated and he's like. And maybe there was some truth to this. So I'm not being completely critical of him, but he's like, oh, you, you, you Lean and Six Sigma people, you just deal with Monopoly money. I'll never forget it. Monopoly money, he said. And, and I was kind of like woof, you know, like. And I think his point was that, you know, in some of the projects you trying to quantify savings and you know, maybe there were what we would call air quote, soft savings or something like that. Right. But what do you think about. Because I think there was actually some truth to what he was saying. So how do we, what do you think about that whole idea of can you continuous improvement, bringing real sort of financial value to the company? How important is that? And then how do we sort of avoid that whole monopoly money situation?

Well, I think that there's often a miscommunication between hard and soft savings. All of that is financial savings. It's just a matter of whether or not the money is going to the bottom line. Just because we freed up some time from somebody and we didn't cut that position doesn't mean that they can't do more. So there's opportunities there. And a lot of people, especially in certification programs, there's organizations that are like, oh, it has to be hard savings. And I'm like, savings is savings. But what I have seen is where I think this kind of drives that thought. One, the projects that people work on sometimes are not focused on what the business cares about. They're sub optimizing processes and it doesn't impact the overall end to end experience. And it's because they're, especially in certification projects, they're just trying to demonstrate the application of the process and being able to get through this, use the tools appropriately and identify whether or not they made an improvement or not. But when you get into real world, a lot of times I think our relevancy as practitioners really weighs heavily on how well we are supporting the people on the front lines doing their job and how we're moving the needle for the business.

Yeah.

And that's where, and you know, like, you know, one of the, the first business book I wrote was on silo behavior. And there's always this silo driven mentality in organizations. And we fall into it as too because we're, we tend to hobby shop process improvement and not necessarily focus on what strategically being done in the organization. What do we really need to move forward to that affects how we, how we actually look in the eyes of everybody else in the company.

Right, right, right. All right. I want to switch gears a little bit. So kind of getting nuts and bolts here on, you know, maybe on, on the certification side of things. So obviously there's all these belts, right. There's black belts and green belts and yellow belts and master black belts and so forth. So master black belt obviously is the, you know, the most experienced and most difficult to, to, to, to achieve, at least through Gamba Academy. Maybe there's a super master black belt out there. All respect to them if there's a super master black belt. But what do you think are the key differences between, let's maybe say the mbb, the master black belt and say like a black belt and green belt, like what's the difference there?

No, it's, it's actually interesting because I look at MBB and I, I Think mba it's like a master's of business administration in there. But I really see the MBB is like doctorate level type work. The. When you start out in process improvement, you're very tool focused. Understanding these tools, how they fit together and then trying to apply those. Black belts now are more looking at like end to end experience and they're trying to. They should be partnering with people and coaching and mentoring others. Whereas a master black belt is now looking at like what we just talked about, that strategic direction for the organization. And it's important that master black belts get with whatever organization they're working with some kind of seat at the table because they're the ones who should be looking for where are the bottlenecks in this organization that are preventing us from achieving the next level. And they should be learning more than just process improvement. They should be learning about culture and change in employee engagement and development. There's so many other factors that go into running an efficient organization than just process improvement. And basically, you know, now it's like, oh, your toolbox is getting a lot bigger.

Right.

More than a hammer in there. But they're obviously their job is to coach and develop black belts who are coaching and develop green belts and probably training yellow belts. So they should be imparting that and bringing those people along. And they're very, I think they're very portfolio focused versus just a singular process. When we teach in the transforming your value streams course about trying to figure out where in your plant you should start value stream mapping, that's the kind of step that like a master black belt should be looking at. Okay, what's the order? What's the roadmap? How do we develop this long term for our organization? And then standardizing the way that we do this so that everybody's doing it kind of the same way and we can report this stuff up and track activities. That's where I see that master black belt really kind of can transform what process improvement is doing for an organization.

What's your thoughts on how much of a financial, I don't know, acumen or just the ability for like a master black belt to, I don't know, like read a balance sheet or understand a P. L. Like, do you. How important is that?

I would believe that if you're partnered with the business, you should understand all of the things that they're reading and doing. So you should be able to understand, at least at a high level financially where an organization's going, what's going on. Yeah, but I. One of the Things that I tell everybody from green belt and black belt is that when you're a process improvement practitioner, one of the best people to make as your strongest connection is your financial person, whether it be a cfo, an sfo, a comptroller. I don't care what it is. Take them donuts and coffee on a regular basis because they're the ones that you. We don't know. I mean, we just, you don't have visibility, typically at the level that you are into what really is going on. And if you want all those factors and planning understanding to be able to figure out, what should I work on? How much am I going to save? How do I identify the benefits? You're going to need help.

Yep, yep. Yeah, I remember back in my corporate days, yeah, some of my best friends were the controllers or whatever, you know, just trying to like, you know, because, I mean, not selfish, like you really did need them to make sure that, you know, they could help you, guide you, that you're working on the right things, you know, and that you're gonna, you know, not spend four months on some project and then realize that we were successful. Thanks. But didn't really do anything. You know, it's like that's an awful feeling, right?

I have been in organizations where they, they just do, you know, from the domic perspective, they just do the Dhamma and I've seen them where they call it triage and then they turn over proposed solutions to a business owner and then wash their hands of it with a proposed benefit and then they call it, okay, we just saved $10 million. No, you didn't, because you didn't implement it right. When I got my master's degree in quality Systems Management from National Graduate School, one of the common things were the students had to go and actually do a process improvement with a company. And often they would go to the company and they would propose a solution and then the company would sign off on it. We accept this, but they never implement it because there was some kind of cost involved in that. Well, I remember we did this as a cohort with two other people and our whole thing was we are going to save money without, you know, them have signing anything off and we're going to complete the entire project through end to end and, and we're going to do it without taking our wallets out. And we did. And it was, it was pretty effective, but nice. I just, I've seen that too often where we're just not really getting real benefit.

Yeah. Yep. Okay. So another, another thing that I know that you're passionate about, as am I, is this whole idea of cultural alignment, you know, as it pertains to continuous improvement. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and perhaps how can, you know, how can a company, how can an organization start embedding it more intentionally?

One of the number one things that I hear from organizations is we need to build a culture of continuous improvement. It's like those words just flow off. Their first thing is they don't understand what their culture is to begin with. They don't know why it exists, what it looks like, how it's being driven. But when we talk about continuous improvement embedded in the culture, and it's not like that's all that we have, but really thinking about consistently changing, improving your organization, Some of the things that have to happen in organization is one, you got to train everybody. You got to teach them how to identify opportunities. And that's simple stuff. 5s7 deadly waste. Those kind of trainings are. I mean like, everybody should just know where to find, find the opportunities. But where I think the biggest problem is is when managers don't let employees actually make changes. And you can always tell where there, there's a resistance to make any changes when they're constantly telling their management what needs to be done. And then the manager will be like, okay, that's a great idea. I'll write it down and I'll put it on my list of to do things, which goes to the bottom of the list because at the top I have my managerial things that are bigger and maybe we'll get to your thing. And then the employee feels like, well, I identified it, but then you didn't do anything about it. And really I think the role of the manager, the change that occurs is really, they should then ask, well, what can you do about it? And then when they, well, I think I could do this. Okay, try it. Yeah, but a lot of organizations are afraid, risk averse, and they don't want to give that level of empowerment to the employees. And whether it's intentional or not. But when you have everybody who understands how to identify it, how to fix things at their level, and they're given the ability to do that, even encouraged, that would change the culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, for sure, for sure. Now obviously we've, we've already mentioned it. Within the continuous improvement world, especially on the lean and six sigma side, there's belts, right? There's green belt, black belt, master blackout, and so forth. So I'm wondering Though, like, with all respect, and we love our belts, right? But if we want to really take that next step towards like just deep, deep transformation, do we need to think even beyond belts a little bit? Again, not, not any disrespect to the belt idea, but like, how do we make it just like penetrate the organization so deeply that it just never goes away?

I think it all starts with every organization needs to define their why, what is going on in the organization that we need to transform through improvement, Basically establishing that burning platform. And that starts with leadership and management. You can push the noodle up the wall at your lowest levels, but you're only really going to get so far if you're not getting any support. We talk about that culture and just embedding that level of culture, that thinking that everybody understands what to do, how to identify opportunities, how to improve them, and then they're given the ability. But then you bring in somebody like, you know, a senior black belt or a master black belt, where now they're sitting down and they're actually developing roadmap for how do we build out the capability and the capacity to be able to do this? Because that, I mean, the bigger the organization, you know, you can't just. I, I think you've talked about this before, but you can't just go out and 5s everything, right? You got to do it in pieces and you got to be able to celebrate those wins and show everybody how this is benefiting and make people want to do it themselves versus being forced to do it everywhere.

Right?

Because it just doesn't work. Yeah, but. And then I would. The biggest thing, whenever I've worked with an organization, I've always focused on coaching and mentoring over working on projects. That's interesting because then, so if, when you go into an organization and if you're constantly just solving problems, you're like special forces paratrooping in. You fix the problem and then you leave. And we hope that through the control actions, the solutions stick. But when you can go into an organization, give people the very basic understanding of how to fix their stuff and this, I mean, like just some very basic charts and some very basic understanding to read and know what they're doing, they'll start coming to you and they'll say, well, this goes on and this happens and that happens. And I don't think that's right. And, you know, now your role is, well, what can you do about it? I'm here to help you, but I'm not going to solve your problems for you. You need to learn how to solve those problems yourself. And so that's where I think as specifically in belt development, coaching and mentoring others is like a huge thing.

Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Well, hey, man, this has been a lot of fun, John. Always enjoy catching up with you. And I'm wondering if you want to leave us with, I don't know, some final words of wisdom or some parting thoughts for folks to think about.

Well, that's a good question. I would say that in everything that organizations are doing in their process improvement journey, that they're looking at all of the system wide aspects of what's going on. And if they have practitioners, that they're looking beyond just belt training, how can we teach people about culture? How can we develop people in employee engagement and employee empowerment? How can we develop them in training and coaching as we just talked about? So it goes beyond just getting certified to be able to follow a methodology and implement it, but to do things that are, you know, take it to that next step and create a development plan for all of the people that you're trying to grow in this, this concept.

Yeah. Love it. Hey, if people want to connect with you, I believe you might be on LinkedIn a little bit.

A little bit. I'm on LinkedIn every day. I post every morning.

Yeah.

I come up with it every morning.

Yeah.

But he's not kidding, people.

If you don't follow John, you need to, because. Yeah. Even weekends, right.

Every day. Even when I go on vacation, I do it every day. It's been.

It's funny because do you ever batch up any. A little bit ahead of time?

Well, it's very occasionally, like I have something. Oh, I want to talk about this at a certain time.

Yeah.

So I might write it and schedule it.

Okay.

But almost every morning, that is the one of the first things that I do in the morning. I go through and I have follow a whole bunch of people and I read what they've posted and comment on their stuff, which often gives me ideas. And you're one of them. So when you're out there posting, I'm usually reading your stuff before I actually post. And then I might have some ideas. Like I have like a repository in email where I keep ideas that kind of come to me because, you know, you forget like, what was that idea I had?

Right, right, right.

But I, I will sit down every morning on my phone, not on a computer. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. On my phone. Wow. And I literally type it.

Why is that? Why? Is there a reason that you.

Well, so you know that, you know, I live on a horse farm and our office is actually in a separate building.

Okay.

So in the morning, I'm over in the house. We don't have an office in the house. I don't have a computer in the house.

Okay.

So I have to do it on my phone or I'd have to like, you know, traipse over in my shorts to. To the office, which I'm not going to do, so.

Okay.

And plus that I find it. I. I just find it easier to just type it out on, on a phone, but then I share it to all kinds of other platforms. So you actually can find me pretty much anywhere.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll be sure to link everything up there in the show notes so people can go connect with you if they're not already following you. So. Good stuff. All right, well, thanks again, John. Take care. Take care.

All right, have a wonderful day.

You too. 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.