GA 622 | The State of AI with Steven Remsen

One of the great things a lot of CI practitioners, I think particularly when they have taken sort of a leadership position, right, is they recognize the, you know, the people, process, and systems and tools with a very clear leadership layer over it. And so recognizing, right, as we move into GenAI or really any of the technologies I see coming down the pipeline, all those elements are still necessary.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Steve Remsen to the show. Now, as you'll hear, Steve's got a really strong, deep background in continuous improvement. He spent many years working at Intel. And so we actually spent quite a bit of time talking about his time there and sort of their program and the evolution of what was going on there and how they evolved that program. And then we really kind of then transitioned into just talking about continuous improvement, Lean Six Sigma programs at different types of companies and, you know, why some of them, you know, sort of stick and why some of them don't and what we can be doing and, you know, even our motivations as we're going about this. This type of work really play an important role. So just a pretty wide-ranging conversation and I really enjoyed it. So show notes can be found over at gemba podcast.com. This is episode 622. Again, gemba podcast.com and look for episode 622. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Steve, welcome to the show. How's it going?

Hey, good. Great to be here, Ron.

What people don't know, you know, they never really get to see the behind the scenes stuff, but Steve and I have had technology gremlins all after us here trying to make this episode not happen. But man, we've persevered and here we are, right?

You see, I'm the tools as we go.

Love it. All right, well, hey, where are you calling in from, Steve?

I'm in the Portland, Oregon area.

Okay, awesome, awesome. All right, well, um, I'm excited for today's episode, and, uh, as you know, I know you've listened to the show, we like to begin all of our episodes with our guests, uh, sharing a quote. So what do you got?

Yeah, so I was trying to pick something, you know, we hear a lot of Deming and Drucker, right? And it makes sense in our field. And I tried to pick something esoteric, but kind of when I thought about what we're talking today, I just couldn't resist George Box. So I'm sure it's been used before, but, you know, all mottos are wrong, but some are useful, right? And I think this one really resonates with me. I have, you know, before I discovered Lean, Six Sigma, like the whole toolbox of CI, I was a scientist, right? And so that's sort of, you know, coming into business, right? And so how do we sort of balance utility versus absolute correctness. And I have a real sort of systems thinker, I think that's one we'll unpack, but how do we sort of balance that together? It goes through my brain a lot, right? So I think that's a really beautiful quote that really sort of, I think a lot of CI leaders have to learn how to balance correctly, particularly if you're an engineer or a scientist stepping into that role. You can't build elegant models all the time.

Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. All right. Well, hey, speaking of your background, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us maybe how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff.

Yeah, right on. So I kind of, you know, led into this a little bit. I have a PhD in physics, material science.

You're like crazy smart, right?

You know, I'm good at faking it. Yeah. But yeah, no, I really, you know, when I go back and look at the beginning of my career 20 years ago, I thought I was going to be like a corporate scientist, right? And I did a lot of sort of work on energy materials, that sort of thing. And I got recruited to go work at Intel. I had some similar experimental background and got to work in their TD fabs. And even in that, you know, moving from scientist to engineer was a bit of a pivot for me, right? Because most of the folks I was working with had that sort of engineering background versus the scientific. But I was experimentalist, so it wasn't too far of a jump. But, you know, I got started and then I met a wonderful mentor, who was running the Lean Six Sigma program at Intel at the time. Her name is Char Stocker. She's since retired. And just really sort of fell in love with this idea of continuous improvement. I think it was a really natural bridge for me to kind of get more into engineering. And I think it really stuck. You know, I think in business, right, a lot of times it's inspiration, hard work, but then the luck of timing certainly helps sometimes too, right? And so at the time, the technology development fabs at Intel were moving a little bit more towards having to actually do production and almost looking a little bit more like high-volume manufacturing. And so some of my very early successes of applying Lean, Lean Six Sigma, right, and going through the certification belt program there was how do we pull some of this goodness and more to a technology development space? And so I did that. I was in manufacturing 5 years to the day. Then I transitioned with actually another mentor within that program who was starting an internal management consulting business at Intel. And so I started with a very small team of like 5 of us saying, hey, We're going to figure out how to do internal consulting and kept the Lean Six Sigma program going. It actually lost its charter as just being like a training organization. It had to sort of really start adding value within the organization. And so I basically went from being an engineer to being an enterprise-wide business consultant, quickly picked up like change and kind of the people side and more and more analytical side, digging more into sort of like the machine learning and then later sort of more AI, particularly GenAI more recently. But yeah, did that for a couple of years. Then basically took over the program and really sort of figured out a very interesting time, right, where a lot of large enterprises were exiting, you know, having their own training certification portfolios, right, within Lean and Six Sigma, right, and relying more on external consultants again and, you know, trade organizations and even universities. And so really, I think one of the things we'll unpack today is, right, how did I kind of keep that program going for a number of years, sort of reinvent when really a lot of programs were exiting. And then I think sort of to wrap the story up, you know, the company's going under a big change. I exited, right, this last year. And I think I had sort of the auspicious honor of, I think, closing down the last Fortune 50 full-blown, like, Lean Six Sigma certification program when I exited. So it feels sort of like there's a big change coming, right, I think, or has come, right? So it's It's been interesting to kind of see how to get CI to work right and how— what's— where is it going to next?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, so you've mentioned that you worked with Intel's program there for what, 10 years ago or something like that is what you were saying?

Yeah, like 15. Yeah. And it's running the program for nearly a decade. Yeah.

So, I mean, I'm curious to just hear, like, what were you seeing on the ground? And, you know, obviously, were you happy with what you were seeing or what was your perspective?

Yeah. I mean, I think I kind of look at this from the angle when I sort of took on the helm and said, hey, should we keep doing this thing, right? I mean, like I said, I was leading an internal consultancy, right? I mentioned we started with a large team. We had our peak, we were at like 60, right, across most major Intel sites. So there was a big question of like, hey, do we really want to keep this Lean Six Sigma program going? And I think it really helped at the time, I was actually going back to school and doing my MBA. And, you know, I saw a lot of sort of practitioners, you know, sometimes you say eat our own dog food in the world of sales. Sometimes I prefer to say drink your own champagne. But, you know, it's the tired quote, right? When you have a hammer, you only see nails. And so I really started to start looking at how do we deploy this program not so much as a CI practitioner, but more of like, how do we look at this from portfolio management and governance perspective, right? And can we you know, my team, we did internal buildback for our services. So, you know, the P&L I ran, we didn't have any money to run it, right? We had to do it all, you know, buildback. And so could we get the program to work here? And I think, you know, we did some marketing research, we really kind of approached it from a marketing strategy and even sort of like a user experience strategy. And really sort of think, you know, what do the employees value, right? How do we sort of market this and get them continuously to be excited? About doing certification. And then what's right from the, you know, at the end of the day, what are our business owners, right? What is the value going to the enterprise of the program? And so we really sort of made some big shifts in the program from sort of like mandate to enablement, from sort of like, I don't know, certification factory to, you know, a capability platform, really sort of switching right from this, you know, push to a pull system, right? And how do we sort of even sort of like move away from like localized Herios to more like enterprise design. And so I'm happy to kind of unpack it, but I mean, it really sort of picked up, right? And over the last 5 years, we were running the program still really sort of churning out the ROI. It was, you know, over $600 million, right, in the last 5 years I was running the program.

Wow. So you mentioned something about— I can't get the words right— like you were talking about like a sort of like a certification factory towards— yeah, like, talk a little bit more about that. I'm curious to hear that.

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the most fascinating things about Lean Six Sigma, right, is, you know, long gone are like the Jack Welch days and, you know, all the, you know, almost every large enterprise and company having their own certification program. I think GE's like New York School of Management Upstate, I, you know, finally closed down, but you still see it on recs all the time, right? I have, you know, young folks, right, that are coming into the marketplace, you know, right after school, they're still looking to get Lean Six Sigma certified. So the value And the customer demand is still there. But, you know, when I ran the program, I had a very sort of a very light touch, right? I was very careful with governance. But one of the things I really sort of was a stickler about is, hey, we're going to be practitioners and we're going to figure out, you know, if this tool is right for what you're trying to tackle in your role, right? And if you're going to do a certification, we're going to find that sort of sweet spot on how do we add, you know, finance approved, business value to what you're trying to do, right? And not just, you know, exercise the tool for the tool's sake. And was also very open to— I'm very tool agnostic, right? So if we can layer in, you know, Prosci or a Kotter change people piece, or does it make more sense to look at— a long time we did like process mining technologies, right? So is there a people or a tech or even another methodology, right? Do we want to pull in some like theory of constraints or, you know, we're focusing more on lean, you know, that sort sort of thing, right? So being adaptable as well.

So did you talk about like changes then that you were— that you decided to make, you know, once you've noticed things weren't going the way they like? What did you do?

Yeah, I think, I think some of the big ones in terms of, you know, again, sort of had these two perspectives, right? Who are my two internal customers, right? So one is the individuals, right, that are going through this. And so we really sort of developed a healthy marketing program. We looked at, you know, Bain's elements of value, right, for, for consumers. And, you know, what are the sort of key points, right? People are pulling away from this. Is it, does it make me better at my job? Does it make things easier? Does it save time? Does it save money? Do I get brand recognition from this, right? So positioning all that sort of things and a lot of sort of like market research, right? Like, you know, okay, if, you know, people are still, you know, looking for certification, where are they getting it from and what are our competitors doing, right? What are the universities? What are the trade organizations? And what are we adding, right? That was unique. In our case, it was a lot of one-on-one mentorship, right, with experienced, you know, mentors within the enterprise, right? That was— added a lot of value. And then at the other day, sort of like looking, right, again, what does the company need, right? What value are they getting out of the program? And then, you know, am I feeding, you know, my folks, right? Are we getting enough build back from this? What is our, you know, what does our billable model look like? To deploy this in a way that it's at least breaking even. And I think in terms of— I thought the interesting things too is we really sort of saw this as we really sort of studied what people are looking for and how to add value in the enterprise. There were sort of these two sides, right? There was like, hey, there's a lot of, you know, really great tools that are becoming available to folks, right? So doing like, you know, predictive analytics, machine learning, both supervised, unsupervised. There's a lot of stuff on like the tools and statistical side. Yeah. But then on the other side too, there was a lot of sort of people stuff, right? Like, how do we actually— I really early in my career, I got very fascinated with change management and leadership because I would see brilliant people with great ideas. And initially, I was really confused on why some things would stick and why other things would really fall flat, right? And it really had to do with the people systems, right? And so we did, you know, Prosci, ADKAR, Kotter 8 Steps, all these sort of things. But at the end of the day, kind of bringing back, you know, what I mentioned earlier, it's really sort of the systems thinking, right? How do we pull all these tools together and effectively coach people and their business environment, which is another element in the mix. How do you get all these things to come together to really work? Right. And this goes back, right, that some of those models were useful and some weren't. Right. So how do you get the right mix of things to really sort of add value, right, to a person in their role?

Yeah, it's super interesting. Like even just in the certification world, you know, obviously we offer certifications here again by Academy. And I remember in the very beginning, like one of my passions was that, you know, there's some— unfortunately, you know, I'm not going to disparage any of our competitors, but there's some get-rich-quick— oh yeah, right? Like, just go up and pay some money and you blink and you've got a green belt or a black belt or whatever it might be, you know?

Yeah, I used to tell folks that. We would always get those folks. It's like, hey, I want a black belt tomorrow. I'm like, cool, I know someplace you can pay $10, take 5 classes and get it, right? But that's not what we do here.

Yeah, and same, you know, I was like, you know, well, maybe we'll lose business, I don't know, but I, you know, I couldn't sleep at, you know, being a certification factory or a mill or whatever you want to call it, you know. And, and, but it, but unfortunately in our world, there's a lot of it. And sometimes it can give it a bad name. Like, the methodology itself is not good or bad. It just, it's a methodology, right? But you can deploy it poorly and, you know, have the wrong intentions. And it even seems interesting on the other side of it, the person going through, you know, we'll get all kinds, you know, some people like, you know, they're they literally want a line on their resume because they might be able to make more money if they say they're a black belt or whatever it might be. You know, you get a lot of people who just genuinely want to learn and be better at their jobs and all that. And so, yeah, it's interesting just the human behavior and motivations and, you know, all these, all these messy things that make the— yeah, I know.

You run— I always try to convince people, right, that they're trying to build a portfolio, right? And if they ever interview interviewed with like a true CI practitioner, they'll catch on pretty quick if they just, you know, took an online class or they actually delivered business value with the methodology, right? And so I used to joke around with my team, like, you know, my nightmare scenario is we grant someone a Green Belt, a Black Belt, and they go interview someone else and they're like, what's DOE, right? Or what's SPC? Or, you know, whatever, right? Or so it's, yeah. So we were pretty, you know, make sure you know the tools and the disciplines, but then also have flexibility on how to approach them. It was interesting because we, you know, the other side of my business, right, was being internal, you know, enterprise-wide consultants, and that we were all black belts, master black belts. And, you know, they very actually rarely did sort of like full-blown, like end-to-end Demake projects, right? And I'm sure your, you know, certification suite is very similar where the tools interact and you get a lot of value if you use all them together. But we really saw like a lot of like piecemeal, right? Like, I'm going to use a process map with a SIPOC, but just stop there, right? That's where we need to— that's shorter, but it meets the needs of what needs to get done. And certainly we can layer on more later. But so that was always interesting to see. It was sort of like the— I can't remember the name of it, right? You learn like a martial arts discipline, but once you become a master, yeah, you start mixing them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, for sure, for sure. So I mean, obviously, you know, you've been in some big companies and big organizations. Intel is obviously a huge company. Like, what, what did you learn about like how to sort of make things stick across such a large organization? Because obviously a lot of moving pieces and a lot of personalities, a lot of different motivations and, you know, abilities.

Well, I think, yeah, and sort of large, complex or sometimes not even large, just complex business environments, right? There's a lot of stovepipes. Stovepipes, like you said, there's personalities, there's business units that have different objectives. And so I think one of the things, one of the sort of the mental models, right, going back to George, I sort of shifted was thinking more of this as sort of like portfolio versus project mindset, right? How do we sort of get this whole thing deployed? And so, you know, you have to rely on sort of your OpEx, you know, background, right? You have to think about operating rhythms, right? I know that One of the newer keywords I'm seeing a lot is like rhythm of business, which I really like, right? How do we sort of, you know, manage governance, prioritization, trade-offs, and at the end of the day, sort of like, you know, leadership behavior, just not practitioner skill, right? So, you know, how do you sort of lead a program? And I think just sort of engagement was really important, like, kind of going back to those stovepipes, right? A lot of times we would find, you know, I don't know, like a community of practice in shared services, finance, or in legal, or, you know, there's a pocket of, you know, etch engineers and manufacturing, like, we're starting our own Lean Six Sigma program, or we're starting our own CI program. And, you know, it's interesting, right? I saw, you know, I interacted with a lot of other folks that were running their own programs also at the enterprise level. And, you know, sometimes the, you know, attitude was like, hey, we're just going to pull you into the fold. You got to like get on board with our governance. And our approach, I think my approach that worked much better would be like, that's awesome. You guys are doing this. How can we help? Right? Where can we check your boxes? And I might have, you know, just a few. You know, there was one of our great partnerships is we were like one of the three legs on the stool for this program that was also doing like advanced business analytics and then like people systems, right? And then, you know, our program was their third thing, but we worked a lot with them on like, hey, we don't really like this part of your training or this part of our training is pretty much covered what you're doing here. Can we just, you know, skip out of it so our folks aren't wearing time? So that's sort of like How do you systems integrate your program versus just sort of jamming it through? I think really made a big difference, right? Is, you know, all sort of like as a key enabler, but there's always something to be said about like psychological safety, right? Like, you know, when people— word gets out, right? Are you easy to work with or are you not? Right? And so you want to be a go-to, right? People, hey, I heard you help stand up this program. Can you help us? Right? That's really where I you start scaling out effectively.

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious to hear, I mean, now that you're— that you've moved away from Intel, what do you— what's next for you? And then maybe part 2 of that question is like, from all of your experience and what you see out there in the big world, like, what do you think organizations are struggling with the most, maybe as it pertains to continuous improvement?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting. So, you know, I kind of mentioned earlier, right, you know, we may, I believe so, close down one of the last, you know, big LSS certification services internal. But I think CI is still really alive. I mean, I think it's, it's been very interesting, especially in tech to sort of see this, this AI, Gen AI piece come through. And I've seen it a lot before, you know, it's sort of a tech company with sort of digital enablement and automation. And, you know, it gets very tool focused, right. And I think one of the great things a lot of CI practitioners, I think, particularly when they're have taken sort of a leadership position, right, as they recognize the, you know, the people, process, and systems and tools with a, you know, very clear leadership layer over it. And so recognizing, right, as we move into GenAI or really any of the, you know, technologies I see coming down the pipeline, all those elements are still necessary, right? And so, you know, I think Lean Six Sigma is going to be another tool in the box, right? I think that's where it belongs. I don't know if it's going to be the core enabler, right, where it's been. I think other buzzwords will come and go, but at the end of the day, right, how do we get those three things working together, right? And I've been doing some advisory and consulting work as sort of I look for my next opportunity. Maybe I'll keep doing that because that's been fun. But, you know, really, how do you sort of build? Or I think one of the things I did that was quite challenging is how do you sort of refresh an enterprise CI program and really get it sort of design the systems that actually work at scale. What's the right model? And maybe it's not the most elegant one, but what really sticks and adds business value? It helps you understand the system. It helps you make hypotheses, allows you, basically guides you to make better business decisions. And I think, I mentioned avoiding the tool worship is really important here, or being dogmatic about any one methodology. And I think this is is where I tend to add in a lot of value, right? I have this sort of tech and business background. How do we integrate all that really to get results that stick right at the end of the day?

What do you— you've mentioned AI several times now in our conversation. Like, what is your take on just the state of AI in the world?

ChatGPT and— Yeah, it's— I'm so— I've always been like an early adopter of AI. Actually, a colleague, hopefully we'll get out here, but we had written a paper and we talked about it. One of the last things I did at Intel, we actually ran the first GenAI classes on how to— versus like ChatGPT. And then we had an internal tool and the other stuff that started rolling out after that, like 3.5 moment for ChatGPT. But one of the most interesting things we found is people had access to a lot of tools. OpenAI was actually great about getting out training and content But at the end of the day, it's a people story, right? Like we started hosting workshops and people showed up. First it was like, what am I allowed to do and what am I not allowed to do? But then it came more of like, hey, we had some great stories of people laughing or even crying at the tool. Someone said, my colleague who helped launch the tool in the early days when it wasn't great, she was using it for parenting advice too. And it told her, hey, as a mom, you're supposed to have all the answers, right? It's, you know, you get these sort of things that— so I think, you know, people are, are, are sort of brilliantly imperfect, and these sort of tools that come out, they augment a lot of, you know, our weaknesses, but then they have their own, right? So how do we sort of work on these sort of partnerships with, with technology, I think, is really important. And I know the— I know we talked a lot about, I think, about, you know, how this could certainly be a singular moment with Gen AI. There's a lot of new parts of the technology, but some of this feels like a story repeating itself again. We've had a lot of technologies that, I think the big focus right now is on productivity, right? And I see some massive opportunities there, but we're still, I think, in the hype cycle, right? We're going to have to bring people along for the story and they're going to play a big part on how AI effectively gets integrated into enterprises, right? I still don't think we're seeing quite all the value there.

Um, yeah. Are there other platforms that you experiment with? I mean, obviously ChatGPT seems to be the most—

Oh yeah, no, I— well, there's, uh, I used to use a lot— there's a great tool called Poe that lets you like basically play with all the different models like in a single thing. But no, I kind of jump back and forth, and they have different personalities, and it's, it's sort of fun. Or I've gotten into that sort of like custom GPT space, right? How do I design something that's— yeah, it's more for mine. One of the things my team did before we left Intel too, is we worked on this enterprise tool called the AI Assistant Builder that was basically like a locally run instance that you preloaded and like, hey, I'm an HR professional or I'm an engineer, and then it sort of used RAG to, you know, how do we get a more focused model, you know, or GPT based on what you do, right? Yeah. Kind of helped with some of the hallucinations and some of the other pieces with it. But again, I think it's a tool. Yeah, a powerful one, but one that needs to get integrated with people and process to really be effective.

For sure. Good stuff. Well, hey, Steve, man, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you taking time to come on. I don't know, do you have any sort of like final words of wisdom or anything that you want to leave with the folks?

No, it was really great talking. Like I said, I'm exploring, right? I really get most energized by helping organizations design systems that actually, you know, hold up to scale, right? And how do we navigate these complex systems? And, you know, again, build the right model, and if it's not the right model, we go on to the next model, right? What really adds value. But no, it's been a lot of fun, Ron. It's, uh, I've listened for a while, so it's fun to finally chat with you.

Awesome, awesome. And if people wanted to connect with you, Steve, what's the best way?

Uh, right now it's on LinkedIn, right? So, uh, you know, sometimes I get an O in my name. The last name is R-E-M-S-E-N. Uh, but otherwise, that's the best place to —kind of connect with me. And I'm pretty active on the platforms, so you can hear my thoughts on tech and business. Nice.

Yeah, we'll get it linked up here in the show notes. Everybody go connect with Steve over there on LinkedIn. So, all right, man. Well, hey, I appreciate you coming on.

Hey, thanks, Ron. Have a great day.

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 to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1,500 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.