GA 651 | The Soup Stage of Transformation with Ben Morley

So there's really no question that the tools in Lean or Six Sigma work. But I'm not going to get into a battle of you're throwing a Frisbee and I'm the dog chasing it. We're going to get into why this didn't work before, probably a leadership issue, probably an implementation issue, and that there are real ways that we can work with it if we get buy-in from leadership.

Today, I am excited to welcome Ben Morley to the show. Now, as you'll hear, Ben is an Air Force veteran, and he flew all, Different types of planes in the Air Force. And so today what we do is we sort of talk about sort of the intersection from his days as an Air Force pilot to his current days where he is a Lean Six Sigma consultant and he's teaching people about Lean Six Sigma and all things continuous improvement. And so we had a lot of fun sort of tying together those 2 worlds. And he's got a lot of stories to share today, and I think you're going to enjoy this one. I know I did. So show notes, can be found over at gembapodcast.com. This is episode 651. Again, gembapodcast.com and look for episode 651. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Ben, welcome to the show. How's it going?

It is a pleasure to be here, Ron. We're doing well. Thank you so much for having me as a guest.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where are you calling in from?

I am in the Seattle, Washington area. Up in the beautiful Pacific Northwest in the summertime. If you're listening to it, it's great. These 4 months of the year are fantastic. No rain right now. All good.

Yeah. Yeah. You're in the good times, right?

Yeah. Good times right now.

I'm out here in Texas right now and, well, we're recording this at the end of July. It'll come out a little bit later, but yeah, we're in the middle of our blast furnace, as they call it. So, you know.

Understood. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right. Well, hey, Ben, I know you know how we like to begin all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quote.

So what do you got? My quote is, dormancy is muted presence.

Ooh, what's that mean?

I mean, just because something looks still does not mean that it is stopped. It means don't mistake that quiet phase of transformation for the absence of one. The leader's job is to protect that phase Not panic through it. As we think about PDCA or DMAIC or anything that this entire philosophy of continuous improvement that meets the people in the back of the room, leaning back with the arms crossed. And I've seen this before in all those stories, dormancy is muted presence.

Mm-hmm.

And so, a volcano might be dormant, but it is not absent.

Yeah. And it could pop anytime, right?

It could pop anytime. So, as we look at how we transfer with our teams and all this philosophy and all these different tools where that transformation can be occurring with our teams and with these people involved to become skeptics, shall we say, to become true blue believers of this philosophy.

Love it. Love it. Fantastic.

All right.

Well, hey, tell us a little bit about yourself, Ben. Tell us about your background and how you got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and what you're up to these days.

Well, I grew up on an island off the coast of Washington State, and I then went to the Air Force Academy and then went to pilot training and was a pilot in the Air Force for 27 years, flying to all 7 continents, landed in Antarctica many times on the ice runway. And it was at one point, there was a guy teaching a class called EVSA, Enterprise Value Stream Analysis, because the military loves its acronyms. And it was Lean in a Green Belt sort of way. And it was a guy in a room with a bunch of butcher block paper and Post-it notes and very disinterested fellow class members of mine sitting in the room who really didn't want to be there. And the optics walking by was, I don't know what's going on, but I don't want to have anything to do with it.

Hmm.

And so, I avoided these classes until finally, one time on a mission with a buddy of mine flying to Hawaii, we're over the Pacific, not much to talk about. He's relaying that he had been in this class before too, and he didn't do anything with it. He goes on to work for Microsoft and casually mentions this to his mentor at Microsoft. He goes, hold on, wait a minute there, kid. Do you understand how important this is? Well, no. It's like, okay, that's Lean Six Sigma, and we follow that very seriously here at Microsoft. So he's like, oh, oh, okay. So he relayed that story to me. So the next time I came through the military, I did not run away. And I went and I joined the class. It was a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt class, of which I got my certification. And then I went on to become a Black Belt. And after I retired, I've taught nationally and internationally to Danone, Canada Post, Perkins Coie, a bunch of different companies, of which I do a lot of work also within the state of Washington. So that's my journey into continuous improvement.

Wow. Wow. That's fantastic. So, um, well, I'm fascinated. Uh, thank you for your service, first of all. Um, so I am fascinated with, uh, pilots and like the work that you've done. I'm sure we've got, we could do nothing but just tell war stories, no pun intended, right here. But, uh, but I, what kind of planes did you fly? A bunch of different kinds? I flew a bunch of different kinds.

Yeah, I flew a C-141, which is a 4-engine heavy jet transport, and I flew that for 8 years. And then I transitioned into the C-17, which is current in the inventory and in a lot of different Hollywood movies and whatnot. So those are the aircraft that I flew.

Now, how big is a C-17? I'm ignorant on airplanes.

It's about 170 feet long, about 170 feet wingspan as well too. You can carry multiple helicopters, you can carry a tank. A buddy of mine carried Keiko the killer whale and took the killer whale up to Iceland in the early days with the jet. So we can carry— you can play football in the back at altitude. So yeah, it's a very large aircraft that can carry lots of different people and carry tremendous humanitarian aid for natural disasters around the world. So a lot of great missions we've done with that aircraft.

How in the world do you carry a whale?

Carried a whale. Carried Keiko the killer whale up to Iceland. Maybe a— How does that work?

You just like—

Yeah, they had it in a, in a container with all the scientists and animal handlers and water and all that. And it was nothing like a PR—

Yeah.

I don't want to say stunt, but, but PR activity to deliver.

Made the news for sure, right? Yeah.

Keiko the killer whale. Yep.

All right. Well, so obviously, I know that, and just in sort of our conversations before we hit record, that you've got obviously experience, as you mentioned already, with continuous improvement and your black belt and all the rest of it, but also pilot and the Air Force. So I'm wondering, I know that you've got some stories to share with, I don't know, like the discipline between a pre-flight checklist and even just like the discipline and even rigor, if you will, of DMAIC. So, talk about that.

Yeah, looking at the bridge on that, it clicked for me shortly after I got my green belt certification. Turns out I was the only green belt on the entire base at the time, though I didn't initially know that. And I was looking for somewhere to apply this new skill set. And then one day, I was flying a routine training sortie as an instructor pilot. And it just hit me that we had been running the DMAIC process for years. I just did not have a language for it. Because every training sortie starts with a crew brief. We outline training goals for each crew member. It's a defined scope, a timeline, who's doing what. That's define, basically, a project charter. And then in the air, we would rotate crew members through the seat, and each one would fly a maneuver. That's your measure. We would debrief it in real time right there in a non-critical phase of flight. That's analyze. And then they would fly it again immediately applying the feedback. That's improve. And after landing, we would do a full crew debrief and I would document it all in their training books for the next instructor. And that's control. And the thing is, none of this was ever called DMAIC. It was just how we trained pilots. But once I had the Six Sigma language for it, I realized the discipline was identical Define the problem, measure where you are, analyze the gap, improve through repetition, control by documenting it for the next person. So, a cockpit checklist and a DMAIC charter are doing the exact same job, making sure nothing that matters is left to memory.

What happens if, like, obviously, if you, you know, in a Six Sigma project framework, obviously, if you do a bad job of, I don't know, writing your problem statement or don't clearly identify your objective or whatever it might be, you can have problems. Is it similar in the flight world?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

If the rigor of, we're just, you know, gonna go fly, we're all buddies and we're not really gonna talk about stuff here. Yeah, variation can definitely creep into the process. You know, as a minor, you know, maybe the person who really needed this training before they go out on an important mission next week, Maybe they don't get it. Yeah, I wouldn't say it would become dangerous, but it wouldn't become effective.

Yeah.

Because as you can just— yeah, project scope, right? Suboptimization of these skill sets that really wouldn't affect the training or do so. Yeah, you're exactly right.

So, tell us about your book. I got some questions on your book, but give us a little overview of your book.

Yeah. So, I wrote a book called Caterpillar Soup at 30,000 Feet. And the book— That's a cool title. Yeah, it's a little different than anything else on the shelf. And I use the real-world biology of caterpillar changing to a butterfly, where it goes caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly. I use the term cocoon in substitution for chrysalis. But when the caterpillar goes into the cocoon, If you were to open it up or x-ray it or take a look inside, you would not see a caterpillar with wings. Oh, I see what's going on. Okay, fine. I'll close it up. No. What you would literally see is that the caterpillar dissolves, hence the name caterpillar soup. What the caterpillar was no longer exists. It's no longer caterpillar, but not yet butterfly. It's neither. It's the transition phase. It's the— of the seasons in life, there are 5. There are winter, spring, summer, fall, and transition.

Yeah.

Transition is the season in between seasons. And the cocoon is that for us as well too, that dissolving phase of I'm no longer that, that I was, but I'm not yet the next thing. Well, then what am I then? And that's what this book is addressing is that dissolving transformational stage, the in-between phase where we think we made a rash decision. I should have gone with my Uncle Billy's job down at the market. Oh, what am I doing? Oh, woe is me. No, no, it's part of transformation. But there is a dark, isolating part of the cocoon. But to know that it's necessary for each one of us to become the thing that we're called to be. And that's what my book is about.

So, I don't even know like the full process of the whole butterfly story kind of thing. Like, play it out a little bit, like, and then how that would— how that sort of relates in your mind to continuous improvement.

Well, it's with this metaphor of cocoon, you look at working with a company or working on a project where sometimes it needs to dissolve, to fall apart, if you will, in order for it to ultimately be what, you know, the boss said for us to do down on the floor. It's this uncomfortable phase. I'd worked with a team. Were highly motivated, but they were getting bogged down. Products were failing internal testing against customer specifications. Some of these tests took days to run, and every failure pushed them further behind on their delivery dates. They'd call the customer, explain the delay, keep testing, and sometimes they would simply ship partial orders just to get something out the door. These are highly technical products with long development lead times already. New testing equipment had been purchased, but it was going to be 6 months from being operational. So, there's really no quick fix coming. The breakthrough for them did not come from the equipment. It came from a question. The team had reached out to one customer and simply asked, do you actually need this criterion to be met as written for that specific part? And the customer almost casually said, no. It turns out that the purchase order they were using was a boilerplate form. The customer used the same form for a range of different orders without modifying the stated criteria order to order. And the specs of that form were far more restrictive than what this particular product actually needed. Once the customer told them that, what the real tolerances were, all right, capability analysis, the team validated the product on the floor immediately and filled the order. That one conversation changed everything for them. The team started running Kaizen events on other orders in their queue and found the same problems repeated, mismatched criteria on the paperwork, no actual defects on the product. It was a massive boost for their morale because suddenly the backlog was not a wall anymore, it was a puzzle they knew how to solve.

Mm-hmm.

And they kept building on their momentum with more continuous improvement work and eventually took a $5 million product backlog down to zero. And improved their delivery times by 84%.

Hmm.

And I think what strikes me looking back on this team spent months assuming the constraint was the problem or them. It was never the product and it was never them. It was an assumption nobody had questioned. And that's that soup stage of this transformation. Everything looks like failure right up until the moment somebody asks the question nobody thought to ask.

All right, let's dig in a little bit more. I need to hear some more, uh, war stories, no pun intended here. So, so I know that you've, uh, I know that you've written a little bit about, um, I guess it was an in-flight emergency on a C-141, I believe it was. Um, talk a little bit about that.

Yeah, I'd been out of the cockpit for about 3 months. I'd been doing some alternate training, and so I was on my first flight back in the jet with the crew after finishing that training. And then, one of the oil gauges on the engine starts fluctuating erratically, and it became clear pretty fast I needed to shut that engine down. So, I informed the crew, and one voice of my crew member came back with some real tension in it because he knew I'd been away from the cockpit for a few months, and now he was watching me handle one of the more serious emergencies you can face in an aircraft. There's nothing he could do to change the situation. I validated that with him. But what he didn't know was that this moment had already happened hundreds of times in my head, in training, in the simulator. I remained composed on that day, not because I was aware— was not aware of the stakes. Certainly, all of us were. But because I'd already rehearsed them. We'd worked through the procedure and navigated it without incident. That day. That's the real lesson on preparation, whether we're preparing to start a project or I'm preparing to propose something to my boss. Preparation doesn't eliminate the emergency. It means that when the emergency does arrive, your hands already know what to do while your mind stays clear.

So, I guess my question is, from a technical perspective, you clearly had practiced it, rehearsed it, and all the rest of it. That's great. But what about, like, like, how do you— how do high-level performers, like, like pilots and whatnot, like, how do you control your— I don't know, like, your heart rate? Like, like, stay calm? Like, what is— what's the secret to that?

I think because we practice this so many times, we go on a bit of autopilot. Not to be automatrons, clearly we know what's going on here, but it's not something new to us. It doesn't freak I've been in situations in mid-air refueling where there was a potential for a mid-air collision. You know what to do. You practice it. You're not left there staring at your pilot or copilot wide-eyed wondering what to do. You know what to do and your hands move through it and you go mechanical with that.

Yeah.

Just like with maybe any other technical or maybe a doctor in an emergency room or any other profession. And you move through it and you separate and you mitigate the emergency and you stabilize the situation and move from there with all the different checklists we can run. Some of it is pausing, right? There's a clock in the cockpit and sometimes we say, wind the clock. Don't just start pulling levers and flipping knobs just because there's a bunch of lights and bells and whistles going off. Pause. Wind the clock, get your bearings, work as a crew, identify the problem, make sure you're to the root cause and you're just not going after countermeasures, flipping and turning stuff off. And we would work through that as a crew. Later on, sometimes the emotion would hit.

Yeah.

When you're after the mission, sitting around with a crew, maybe you're taking a shower that night, now you start replaying, oh boy, That was something.

Probably more nerve-wracking after the fact than it is during, perhaps?

It is.

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, it is. Because we work together as a crew and we're constantly working to solve solutions. You're constantly looking for, in the situation you're dealing with, what are the variables? What can we control? What can we not control? There can be the tyranny of the urgent, right? We're losing money right now in the company. We need to do this. Maybe, maybe we need— are we sure? Is that a root cause or is that just a shotgun blast to handle something, right? Is this tied to a KPI or is just some sort of an emotional reaction? The same in the jet. You start flipping stuff and not working together as a crew, you know, measure twice, cut once, if you will, to make sure you really know what's going on.

Right.

You can make a bad situation So, trying to slow down what you can to slow the cadence, to expand your awareness out, to not get tunnel vision, to work as a crew, to talk things through, that's how we would get through situations like that.

Let's dig in a little bit, maybe some of your consulting work or just some of the work that you've done with companies as they're trying to continuously improve. Maybe talk about a situation, like, I'm sure you've, you know, been involved in a lot of different types of projects. you've encountered where maybe some buy-in wasn't happening as efficiently or as quickly as we wanted to? Like, what do you do when you sort of walk into that whole situation where, you know, arms are crossed and scowled faces and you could tell you're not the favorite person in the room kind of thing? Like, what's your strategy?

I kind of like those folks, if you will, because they're not going to weathervane into something. I have a way of— you address it, you know, maybe I said, yeah, I was back in college in 1985 and I took a class like that. Yeah, I've seen that. And then we had Billy here. No, no shade to any Billys listening, but we tried this 2 years ago when he was here. We did this thing and then it rolled back. Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't work. Yeah, that 5S stuff. Yeah, there's the other plant. Yeah, it didn't. So everybody's got a story like, okay, great. But I think if we got people in the class, I will let them know that Lean requires leadership and buy-in, and there was probably somewhere along the lines that that did not occur. Was this the flavor of the month, right? 5S?

Mm-hmm.

Were there true issues going to— or were they just— they expected to metaphorically bring a plumber in to build a house. Did your company send 1 or 2 people to a Green Belt class and then come back to change the entire plant of 300 people. We got 2 Green Belts here. Thank you. Ron's here. He's going to fix everything. Ron's going to fix the whole plant. You're setting the thing up for failure. And then we're going to blame Ron, blame Ben, blame her. You know, that's why I told you that stuff doesn't work. Why do we send them to class? Right? So, it's— I'm not invalidating the situation. I disagree with the solution.

Hmm.

Is that— Lean's been around for a couple of weeks, couple years, maybe—

Hundreds.

Yeah, it's been around a while. So there's really no question that the tools in Lean or Six Sigma work. But I'm not going to get into a battle of you're throwing a frisbee and I'm the dog chasing it. We're going to get into why this didn't work before. Probably a leadership issue, probably an implementation issue.

Right?

And that there are real ways that we can work with it if we get buy-in from leadership. If we find that leadership's like, yeah, yeah, I don't need to sit in that class. I took a back-end call. You just go work with the people on the floor. Okay, that's a warning sign. And we, as consultants, can come in and say, we're going to go train your people, but chances are this may fail. And there's a number of continuous improvements that fail. I'll tell them that. And here's the reasons why they do fail. It's not all popcorn, rainbows, and unicorns. These are reasons that these great, wonderful tools will fail if they're not implemented properly. The company that's looking to maximize throughput, we got— I worked with them. Throughput, we need throughput. They'd have stand-ups. What's your throughput? What's your throughput? But they wouldn't allow for the worker to set up the job properly. Every job gets set up in an hour. And you got guys going, not for this job. This job takes 2 hours. They'd record it on their phone. No, Ron, all you're getting is an hour. But no, no, no, only now. So then the throughput— so there were people maximizing throughput, putting stuff in the recycle scrap bin just to meet the numbers on throughput.

Okay.

So that's, that's taking an aspect of the tool and making it a weapon.

Yeah.

And so, probably getting into the people side of things and looking at the culture, we can probably help to dismantle. Again, I'm not invalidating. You saw this at the other company, but here's some different ways that I think to go through it. Values are your belief. Culture is your behavior. Those are 2 different things. Values is what the company puts on the website. Transparency, people first, top-notch. Okay, great. That's fine. That's easy. But when I walk around and talk to your people on the floor, do I feel any of that? Do the folks on the floor understand the KPIs? Do they know what they're working toward? Or is it, go talk to my supervisor. What's a KPI? Go talk to them. I just work this machine and, you know, I work an 8-hour shift and maybe if I meet my numbers, I get a pat on the back. If not, I get yelled at. Okay, so all of that. Culture matters so much more than values. Values are your beliefs, but culture is your behavior. And if we can modify the culture to match up, that's where companies go from good to outstanding on a very steep curve.

Got it. So, maybe to wrap things up, Ben, Let's say there's someone listening right now that they're like, yeah, sounds great, Ben, but it's not working here. Maybe they're struggling, maybe they're frustrated, maybe they're discouraged. Um, and I don't know, hopefully they don't give up, but sometimes people feel like they want to give up, right? Because it's just like, what, why, what are we fighting for, right? Speak some words of encouragement and some— give that, give that person some advice.

I think of Karen. She was a mid-career professional who— she had spent a decade at this company that had been promising rapid advancement for high potentials. So every year, you're on track for promotion soon. Every year, it never came. Instead, she got just enough— that bigger bonus, a new project, a flattering review. To stay hopeful and keep over-contributing. From the outside, it looked like a place to grow, but from the inside, it was a trap that thrives on keeping you stuck. Then one day, a friend of hers asked her a really brutally honest question: Do you actually want to build your future here, or are you just afraid to leave?

Oof.

And in that moment, she realized she was not just an employee. She was captive to a system Running on her hope and effort, giving her just enough to keep her from leaving. So for a plant manager or an ops leader, that same trap can look like a facility that keeps you firefighting, waiting for the culture to change, waiting for your turn, getting just enough appreciation to stay while you quietly lower your own expectations. So here's the audit. Is this situation actually helping me grow? Or just giving me enough to keep me stuck and burned out in place? That's a question where the metamorphosis starts. Not when the system suddenly becomes perfect, but when you decide you're done being loyal to stuckness. It's the same theme John O'Leary talks about. You're not definitely— you're not defined by the fire you walk through. You're defined by how you choose to live on the other side of it.

Hmm.

Stuckness.

I like that. Wow, good stuff. Well, this has been a fun conversation, man. I, uh, I appreciate you coming on. I'm wondering, do you have any sort of like final words of wisdom or some parting advice that you want to leave with the listeners?

It's a tremendous set of tools that we have the privilege to apply and use with those people around us, and As all of our listeners know, the tools work great. All of us have wonderful stories of great wins. But sometimes it's the people issue to meet them where they're at, that stuckness, the crossed arms, if you will. And sometimes taking them through a process map or something easy that's not finger-wagging, but just shows that learning to see, right? The steady state that can help break those silos down. Well, oh, I didn't see this. I didn't see that. And it builds a common language. in a neutral environment, a setting, a value stream map, what have you, to go, oh my goodness, I didn't— it's that learning to see and all those skill sets that can help bridge the gap to maybe bring them alongside for us then to start working together. And before you know it, you've improved a process and they take great ownership in it. That's the great wins that I think all of us are empowered to work with, with our clients.

Love it. Hey, Ben, if people wanted to connect with you, what's the best way?

You can find out more about me at my website. That's BenMorley.com, B-E-N-M-O-R-L-E-Y.com. If you're interested in the book, Caterpillar Soup at 30,000 Feet, you can find that on Amazon. And then I'm on LinkedIn as well too, at Ben Morley and the number 1. So, that's how you can get in touch with me.

Yeah, we'll link everything up in the show notes. So, everybody just kind of scroll down on the show notes there and And be sure to go connect with Ben. So, all right, well, hey, thanks again for coming on, man. I appreciate you.

Thank you so much for this opportunity. I really appreciate it.

All right, take care, Ben.

Best to you.

Thanks for joining us today. We know the path to continuous improvement can be challenging to walk alone. That's why Gemba Academy exists, not just to provide training, but to be your partner and problem solving. Whether you're just taking your first steps or leading a global transformation, our goal is to help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Beyond our library of Lean and Six Sigma resources, we're here to coach and guide you through your journey, whether that's through personalized support or joining us for a live training to get that immersive, hands-on experience. To learn more, go to gembaacademy.com.