GA 598 | Making Lean Work with Darren Walsh

They've been practicing this for a number of years, and often they are very good at the techniques, but it's the thinking behind the tools that they struggle with. And then what they end up doing is applying the wrong tools at the wrong time or focusing on the wrong problem. And lean is often counterintuitive.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Darren Walsh to the show. Now, as you'll hear, Darren is a very experienced practitioner of lean and continuous improvement, and he's recently written a book called A Leader's Guide to Making Lean and Continuous Improvement Work. And so what we do on the show today is we sort of walk through some of the key themes of the book and really just some of the things that he's passionate about, starting with some pitfalls that leaders and teams, continuous improvement teams often fall into. Then we get into really just kind of talking about what we, as leaders of continuous improvement should be doing and what we need to do to make sure that we don't fall into pitfalls ourselves. And so it's a really interesting conversation. I had a lot of fun doing it, and I personally haven't read the book yet, but I'm. I'm definitely buying it because it sounds like a great read and I'm looking forward to digging into it. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com this is going to be episode 598 again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 5. 98. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Aaron, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Yeah, good. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me, Ron.

Yeah, my pleasure. Where are you calling in from?

Wales. Cardiff, Wales.

Okay. All right. Yeah. You didn't sound like you're from New Jersey or something like that, you know, so.

Yeah, yeah, we call it God's country, but it's always raining. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Okay. All right. Well, well, hey, Darren, I'm excited to have you on. I think this is going to be a fun topic, but as you know, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guest sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Well, my customers would probably say it's about eating the elephant. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a. Otherwise, you choke. So getting into breaking problems down. But to be honest, my most favorite quote is from Shingo, and that is the most dangerous kind of waste is the one you don't recognize. And I think that just really sums it up for me is that over the last couple of decades, improvement, fork and management have really been focused on improvement tools and techniques and overlooking the underlying problem. Why? Why most struggle to get the best out of continuous improvement.

Well, we'll dig in more into that here in a little bit. But before then, Darren, tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us about your background and maybe how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff.

Yep. So I first started out as a, as a production engineer or a trainee production engineer when I was 17. So that's going back a few years. And my quality manager at the time, he shared a magazine on the quality gurus. Duran Deming, Shingo is in there. And yeah, I just started reading about these quality gurus and soon after I was ordering the shingle books, the smed, the Non Stop Production and obviously Shingo's famous green book. And I couldn't really put it down, started applying the concepts. Before long I joined another organization as an industrial engineer. I had a Japanese mentor at the age of 20 which I worked with directly for about a year. And yeah, we were just trying to drive continuous improvement in every aspect. From there I went on to multiple different roles, driving site wide and multi site improvement, working in technology for Sega and then I went on to medical devices and aerospace and automotive and oil and gas and in the improvement sector with the Lean Institute.

Nice, nice. Well, you've got a well versed background, so Fantastic.

Yeah.

All right, so I understand that you're also an author and that that you've written a book. So I'm always curious to. There you go, you're showing a picture of the book. Great. So I'm always curious what leads folks to want to write books. So what was your motivation.

In the beginning? I just wanted to capture these stubborn problems which I was seeing some of the early years in continuous improvement in some of the roles. Some of them were absolutely brutal. You would get pat on the back one week for the results and then a week or two later you'd get beaten up for not delivering more results. And it was really about management through pressure at the time. And when I went on to different roles and just looking at and seeing different businesses, you see that, you know, people are maybe settling for inconsistencies and problems and managers just seem to struggle to drive improvement. So they try and help, but quite often they just add more. More problem they had, they take away time, they add confusion. And as I was going around and seeing these different problems, it just started realizing that they seem to be all the same ones over and over again. And I just wanted to try and Capture that and, and write that up.

So, all right, well, maybe I know you're in the book, you touch on some, some different pitfalls. So why don't you maybe just, I don't know, run us through a few of those pitfalls that you've seen. And, and you know, I don't know, maybe some potential countermeasures.

Yeah, so, so for me there's a. The organizational pitfalls of typically how we, how we roll out continuous improvement to the wrong improvement strategy for many is a problem. Quite often they will start by maybe cherry picking tools or getting subject matter experts to run events, or creating an improvement function, or chasing world class awards. And what I often find is that these often drive people to work on the wrong improvement techniques at the wrong time. So they don't really get the results. They may get a better score, but they don't get the results they deserve. And I've been there myself when I've designed corporate assessment for different organizations, I wasn't seeing the results. And I realized then the teams are working on the wrong things. And often connected to that as well is that even these organizations with the world class awards, you still see an improvement void in the team. They may have some excellent examples, but day to day most of the teams are not practicing continuous improvement. They're on a stop start approach to continuous improvement. And the improvement activity is being driven through the corporate teams and the subject matter experts. And usually what happens is perhaps three or four years in there's a change in management and there's a change in the improvement team. So the improvement team all goes and then somebody else comes in and they try and restart their improvement journey every few years because they realize that they haven't got the basics in place anymore. So that's the first one. We're working on the wrong improvement strategy. The second one is that management and leadership are not recognizing perhaps the biggest problem of all. Which stems back to the shingle quote, and that is most organizations have traditional management solution thinking and you can have all of the improvement tools and techniques you like, but if you are still supporting that and trying to drive through traditional management solution thinking, where we're into solutions and blame and come up with great ideas, then you don't get the best from the improvement techniques. And in some cases you shut down the teams and instead of them exposing problems to get help, they keep them under the radar. And the third sort of key pitfall for me is that leaders are not applying effective leadership routines when it comes to continuous improvement. Business accidents lean Whatever you want to call it. Quite often they will go and join a tiered meeting or they would go on a Gemba walk, or they would go to a Kaizen report out and they try and ask the clever questions. But really that's not their problem to solve. Their problem to solve is why aren't teams in the business working on the right things, why aren't they getting help, why aren't they more effective? And also they've got to look at are there problems which are impacting more than one team? And therefore maybe there's organizational issues. There may be a conflict of KPIs, the teams may not be set up correctly. Maybe there's a problem with the onboarding, maybe there's a problem with the leadership in that particular team. So the leaders should be looking for different problems. They're not there to solve the day to day problems for the team, but they are there to make sure the teams are working on the right things and they're getting help when needed.

So when you're working with maybe a new client or I don't know, just you're involved with a company who is perhaps just brand new to the whole idea of continuous improvement. I mean just zero, but they're open, they're willing, like where do you start? Like day zero, if you will, like what do you do with them?

For me, day zero is just going in and walking the business, trying to understand how they work and their sort of management mindset, the processes, the people and getting to know how they deal with problems today, looking at what their biggest business issue is. And then we may, like many other organizations, we might run some training, but this would be short interval training. So I don't like spending a week or whatever on training. We run some short interval training because the training really just gives them a little bit of awareness and a little bit of knowledge. And then we start coaching on the job to get them to start applying it. And we often help them start. For organizations that are new to this, we often get them to start building it themselves so they can understand the nuances and the different problems of building it. And we build it from the ground up. So we'll start with perhaps daily management and developing a system so the teams can surface and fix problems early when they're small. Once we've got that in place, we may add some and they've got less variation. We may help them with Kaizen and connect the strategy planning to that. But the harder ones is the organizations that have been on this journey for a number of years. They've got all the tools, they've got all the techniques. They may have lots of, of experts, green belts, black belts, you know, gleam business champions. So they are often the Arda group because they've been practicing this for a number of years and they very often, they are very good at the techniques, but it's the thinking behind the tools that they struggle with. And then what they end up doing is applying the wrong tools at the wrong time or focusing on the wrong problem. And lean is often counterintuitive.

So it sounds like those are some pitfalls. Are there other pitfalls that you see people falling into?

There's lots. And what I've tried to do in the book as well, I've tried to obviously write in a book about the common pitfalls of lean is massive. So there's lots and lots of pitfalls. But the three that I mentioned are sort of the big organizational issues, but they sort of transcend into day to day issues like visual management. You see lots of people posting images on social media about visual management or Bayer boards or visual boards. And for me, most of them in fact are fractured. They just seem to be a selection of KPIs and tools. And I'm looking for the PDCA element in there. And what I often see is that that is fractured, meaning that there's a disconnect between the performance, what the problems are and what the actions are taken. And I see this even when I go into organizations with world class awards. They've got some nice awards in the foyer and posters and they've done some advanced stuff but on a day to day basis. And they've got strategy maybe being rolled out, but on a day to day basis. Most of the teams are not working on the main problems that are impacting the performance of that team. Some don't know it, others know it, but leadership and management and other members of the team just keep walking past it. So that's where I try and help them really with the thinking behind the tools and also with these leadership routines. So even when we get into the visual management, the purpose of visual management for me should really help the team understand its own performance, know what the big issues are which are impacting that performance and then so they can work on that. And if they can't fix those problems themselves, they should be getting help from outside that team to fix, fix the problems. But we see it everywhere today. We see it everywhere. You can go to a local coffee shop and the dishwasher's broken down again, or they've run out of butter. You know, you go to, you're working in an aerospace and, and there's a, a form which haven't been filled in. You go into, into theater and they haven't got a certain size stent which, with a, with a good sterilization date on there or you know, you're in, you're in another organization and they run out of nuts and bolts. So you see everywhere that teams, quite often they've got this inconsistency. Quite often they don't know what the. They don't understand their own performance, they don't understand the problem or they're not working on it. And unfortunately, many leaders and managers will go along and they'll ask the wrong question and then they walk past these underlying problems so you see it over and over again. Then when teams are working on problems, quite often they end up working on the symptom of a problem rather than the underlying problem. So the problem just pops up again on another project or for another customer. So they haven't got this problem solving which is running on the underlying problem.

Something that I'm always interested in when I'm talking to folks like yourself or just anybody that's in this world of ours who's sort of helping other people improve is the idea of physician heal thyself. You know, like, I'm curious, how do you apply these principles to your work? Like if I were to walk into your office or your, your Gemba, if you will, you know, are you, are you able to use these same philosophies and these same tools and principles?

Yeah, I've, I've try and apply when it comes to visual management, I think there's a visual performance, you know, to understand the output and the performance of the work. And I also, I look at the progress. So, so I've got a progress board. I don't like to do lists. So I've always got a progress board in my head. I' One of the things I used to suffer with a while back was on my to do list when I used to have one was I always the to do list always used to grow and I'd never get through the to do list and I take on too many actions. So now on my progress board I make sure that I've only limit the number of activities in progress to four because I don't want to, I don't want to sort of bottleneck that process. I'm also segregating my time. So as somebody who's, who's got their own business. I got to segregate my time. I got to make sure that I'm looking after my customers. I've create time. So when I can actually do some writing or some other work on my own system, podcasts, trying to get the content out there, I've started working on for my sins. I've also started working on a second book. And so for me it's about segregating your time. One of the common problems that I hear from teams who are starting out, I hear it from mature teams as well. But certainly those who are starting out and managers of the teams is they always say, oh, time, I haven't got time, I've just got too much on my plate. Well, time's not a problem. The problem is priority. Yeah, they are prioritizing something else over the improvement work. And you can take that back to your home life, your own car, your house, you're looking after your family. If you don't spend a little bit of time maintaining that performance, you're just enjoying yourself, things will crumble. You've got to put a little bit of time in to maintain that level of performance. You've got to do things when, when issues keep coming up because you've got to bring it back to that standard and you're going to look at, you know, what can we do to raise the bar. But again, a lot of teams and a lot of organizations will try and raise the bar when they got lots and lots of problems. So they don't really see the results then or they don't sustain it because these underlying problems just keep coming back.

Tell me a little bit about. So we've talked quite a bit about what bad looks like. What about. So perhaps you've worked with companies, I'm sure you have, who, who have worked with you and, and they're doing better and no one's perfect. Obviously we're always in pursuit of that perfection. You're never going to get there. But like, what does good look like to you? To spin it more on a positive side, like, what does good look like?

Well, I've worked with some organizations that they've got some fantastic processes. They got really hungry teams even when they're in a sort of a rich environment. But often the leaders are spending. It could be a cash rich business, but leaders are spending at least 50% of their time walking the business. They walk the business, they go and visit the teams they go to. They call it, sometimes they'll call it reviews, but they go in to see the team going to understand Performance, they go in to understand are they working on the right things, how are they trying to get better? So that's definitely a couple of aspects of it. But what really sets the best aside, I would also say that they are sort of humble. Humble in nature. They will, they've got this mindset of discovery. They don't jump to solutions. So if somebody's got a new tool or a new technique to measure something, you know, they don't, they don't just go down a different road, on a different path. And that's how some of the, some of the very best that they've worked with or helped, I believe have stayed, stayed on course. It's just because they've had that sort of, that, that humble nature to want to learn, but haven't gone off, haven't strayed too far to off the path and just, you know, keep going, keep building this, you know. Right, okay, what's the next problem? How can we help build teams? How can we help build teams?

Yeah, I think humility is, humility is one of those things that really doesn't get enough attention. Not just as human beings forget about leadership, you know, just being humble and understanding and realizing that as brilliant as you may be and you, you probably are, you know, there, there is someone better, right. There's an organization that's better. So to be, to be humble, maybe even hungry, you know, you know, to, to continue to learn and to, and to grow and to just be better. That's what I love about the whole idea of. I feel, I feel like many times, many of us in this world of lean and continuous improvement, we forget about that word continuous. Continuous means it never ends, you know, and it's a never ending journey. Right. Beautiful. But also for some, it could be madd, Right, because you want to finish, right. You want to be done. Well, sorry, there is no done. Right.

But, but I think that's, that's part of the mindset. Yeah. So I, I've sort of discovered that there's a, there's a, this fixed mindset. Like, like perhaps similar to the work of Carol Dweck. There's a fixed mindset and there's a discovery mindset. And you know, whatever you do, if people spend a lot of time on this and they've got advanced tools and techniques, if they've got the wrong mindset, they will get a completely different result. Yeah, yeah. And, and teams often remember the managers who really believe in them, who want them, you know, you want to try and do the right thing for them. And for the business, the ones that are in it for themselves, they. Yeah, they. They don't really, you know, pull out all the stops for them. So humility. But having the mindset of continuous. You said continuous. Continuous improvement. It's not stop start, but it's also continuous learning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So maybe to wrap things up, I'm wondering if there's some, I don't know, some. Some leadership pitfalls or some things that those of us that are trying to continuously improve that we need to be mindful of, that we need to look out for, and that, you know, when we do sort of trip over them, we recognize that we did and we adjust accordingly.

Yeah. I think the main pitfalls from a leadership perspective is that, yeah, this traditional management solution thinking is a big thing for me. So, you know, you. Sometimes it's not easy to see in ourselves, but we can see in others quite often. So maybe get a small team view together and start helping each other out. But you see it when we jump to solutions, we all do it and we see it when we jump to blame. But really, I think the real test of whether or not you've got a bias for traditional management solution thinking in the organization or you're part of the organization, it's whether or not problems are being surfaced by your visual management or your teams and are being addressed. When you've got a bias for traditional management solution thinking, quite often these problems will just breed and grow and then all of a sudden they grow into bigger things. And quite often as well they slip through and they get closer to the customer. And then the customer is starting to see that inconsistency and they get that dissatisfaction and then they perhaps walk away. So to remedy that, we've got to practice and there's different techniques. We can do this. We got to practice getting into the mode of discovery mindset. We've got to spend time on the right things and that's also prioritizing the right things. And that's because we want to drive, we want to create new improvement habits. If we don't create new improvement habits, then we will coach in the wrong way. And lastly to connect those three together is applying certain leadership routines. So for me, I've got five leadership routines. Perhaps the first three are the foundation elements, but critical first one is check alignment. So there's a very quick routine. Are my teams working on the right thing? Do they understand performance? Are they working on the right problem or improvement activity? Do they need help? Are they getting that help? So that's the check alignment. The next one is check and embed in standards. Standards don't maintain themselves, so it's kind of similar to the old style layered audits. So do we have routines in place to check and embed standards? The third one there is help chain. So if a team has got a particular problem that they cannot solve within a given time, so we need to have that help chain work. And I've got five steps for making our help chain work and that's to make sure that, you know, if the team are not getting help, they'll stop calling for help. So they'll end up passing under bad work on. So we need another team to respond in the right way. And then, you know, leaders themselves, they've got their own problems to work on as well. So they should be focused on perhaps strategy. Well, they've got to cook that strategy. There's no point doing the normal corporate thing, which is having a great big idea and then rolling out for the organization. We've got to cook that strategy the same as chefs would do it, top chefs in a restaurant. So we've got to go and cook it, test it, and that's part of the policy deployment. We don't just roll out these big changes. And also there's an element of helping with the change management. We need leaders and managers to walk the business to understand, first of all to speak to people, to know them, but to be aware of the problems, to understand the issues that the teams are having, maybe to motivate them to drive on, to address any resistance and use that to also feed your strategy because you might have a great idea in mind for taking the company to the next level. But if the company cannot sustain horseshoe objectives or policy deployment objectives, then you've got to understand why aren't they. Yeah.

Nice, Nice.

Wow.

Gosh, we've covered a lot. So what's the name of your book again?

It's Making Lean Work. It's a leader's guide to increasing consistency and getting significantly more. More done in less time. Making lean and continuous improvement work. That's it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're gonna have it linked up in the. In the show notes for everybody to so well. And then I guess it's available anywhere books are sold and all this kind of good stuff.

Yeah. Yes, Y Routledge Press, Amazon and all other stores. You can get your copy. And yeah, it's got some fantastic case studies in there. It really sort of tries to break the whole problem down and then put it across in sort of simple ways. And it's got, I try and explain the different elements to daily management and kaizen and mostly focusing on daily management and leadership routines and then, you know, explain that, call out the pitfalls again where people. There's lots of great books out there on how to do things. A lot of them don't actually get into the problems you can, you can expect along the way. So how do you. Yeah. How you can navigate these, these pitfalls.

Wonderful. Fantastic. All right, and Darren, remind me, if folks wanted to connect with you directly, what's the best way? Is it LinkedIn or something like that?

Yep. Yeah, you can go on to LinkedIn just, just search for Darren Walsh, Lean Coach on, on LinkedIn or through my website, www.makingleanwork.org. i'm also running a promotion. I'm doing some research for my, for my next book. So I'm running a promotion because I want to run some assessment, do some maturity assessments, assessments for organizations to just to go and double check these problems that they're having.

Good. All right, well, hey, thanks for coming on, Darren. This has been a lot of fun.

Yeah, great, thanks. Thanks, Ron. Yeah, good speaking to you.

All right, cheers. Bye. 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.