Episode 118 Iterating Your Way to Great Leadership with Brian Walch

Continuous improvement comes in lots of different flavors and styles. I'm Bella Engelbach, and I'm inviting you to journey with me to the Edges of Lean. Episode 118 Iterating your way to great leadership with Brian Walsh. Iteration is key to lean thinking and especially to lean design and lean product development. Brian Walsh uses iteration to develop individual contributors into managers and managers into leaders. He joined me at the Edges of Lean to share his approach and how he developed it quite independently of the lean community.

Brian Welch, welcome to the Edges of Lean.

Yeah, thank you. Good morning. Happy to be here.

It's great to have you here, Brian. Brian, could you please introduce yourself to my audience? Tell us a little bit about what you do today and how you came to do what you're doing today.

I'd be happy to. So today I am the owner of Shift Focus Coaching and Consulting. I call myself a management coach. And what I do is I help organizations develop their managers and build strong management cultures. And I came into this from, from a technical background. So I've been in this business for about two years prior, 25 years I was in IT consulting and I worked for a small consulting firm here in Alaska.

Okay. So that's, it's a bit of a switch. I mean, a lot of people come out of, you know, some kind of, of consulting work and then go out on their own. But you say you were doing IT consulting. So, so what type of IT consulting were you doing? Was that, was that with particular industries that you worked with? Any industry?

Yeah. So my, I, I got my degree in technical communication and computer science and I, I started doing some programming. I actually helped to put some of the first class college classes online and, and just doing webpage classes and moved back up to Alaska. So I'm born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. That's my home. So when I moved back here out of college, I joined this consulting firm that was about 20 employees, pretty small, and I was doing software development and I basically spent almost the next 25 years there. I took a small break during the dot com boom and went down to Silicon Valley, worked at a startup, kind of saw it through its whole cycle of funding and closing it down in 2003, said Silicon Valley wasn't for me, moved back to Alaska to raise my family and build a life and rejoin that firm. And over the course of 25 years, that firm, we grew that firm from, like I said, about 20 employees to, we had over 200 employees. We went from one office to seven offices. And you know, my career just grew as the, as the firm grew. So I started moving into project management and doing technical project management and did, took on recruiting. So probably for almost 20 years I did all the recruiting, hired hundreds of people. I led HR for a number of years. I was filling in as like an interim office manager when we'd have changes in office leadership. I did account management and business development and sales and marketing and you know, served on the board. And so it was, you know, just had a, just a wealth of diverse experiences. And what led me to kind of this career I'm in now was a couple things. One, you know, as I've made those changes, I moved into management and kind of saw firsthand the, the difficulty and, and challenges with somebody moving into management and, and moving around and, and then I worked with a lot of organizations where I saw how important managers were and, but also like I had never know when you become a developer, you never think I'm going to go into HR and. Right, yeah, you know, and so I just, you know, I just helped out along the way. But as I did more with employee development and, and working with employees in hr, I found that I really enjoyed it. And so when, you know, just personal life experience, kind of figuring out what you want to do with the second half of your career changes in our company. When I decided I wanted to do something on my own, I knew I really wanted to be able to work with people and have a bigger impact on that area, not just the technical work that I'd been doing.

When you started out in the IT world, were you aware of the impact of relationships, of what it was like to work with other people? Or did you come in all starry eyed about, about coding and, and you know, saving the world through, through writing great software?

Yeah, no, definitely was more just technical. Loved the technical work. Like loved creating. Love, love programming, loved the, the actual work of doing it. And then you know, as I started, I mean we were a small company and so it was, it was really cool because when you'd go develop applications, you would be working with the users that would use it. You know, you'd have that really tight feedback loop and you'd be able to see did, did something I create help improve their life. And, and that's when I kind of started moving into project management because, you know, as a developer you're like, you're downstream of some decisions that you realize like that that could be done differently, but by that time it's kind of too late, the train's moving on down the track. So I, I wanted to kind of move up and you realize as soon as you start moving into project management, working with users that it, it's, it's always about the people and yeah. Relationship with each other or the relationship with the technology and you representing that technology, it's, it's still relationships.

Did you have an aha moment or was it a series of small AHAs?

I can't remember the specific situation, but I remember deliberately thinking exactly that in terms of project management, meaning I want to be further up in the chance to influence some of these decisions, these design decisions and things like that. I want to work directly with people that are making decisions about how the software is going to work. So I remember that conscious decision, but everything else and you know, get into it, I'm sure, but it's kind of informed everything, Everything else was just like a kind of keep going through the process and refining like approach and how you're going to work with, through things.

Yes. And so, you know, in Lean we always talk about this idea of the, you know, some, some people express it like the plan, do check, act cycle. Right. So, so you decide something that you're going to do, which is some you more complicated than, than that. But you, you, you plan something, you do it and then if you're smart, you kind of sit back and look and say, hey, well did it actually happen the way I thought it was going to happen? What did I learn from that? You know, how do I adjust for the next time? And it sounds to me like what you're saying is that in your career, whether you realized it at first or not, you were having these, these iterations, these learning cycles where you thought that something, you know, you're making a change would do something. And then you learned whether it made the impact that you thought it was going to have or not. And then that sounds again, then it's, it's influenced, that has influenced the rest of your thinking. Was it, was there a, was there a moment or appeared in your life when you, you kind of made that mental switch to hey, it's, it is all about iteration?

No, I'd say that happened iteratively as, as well. Yeah. You know, like when I went down to Silicon Valley and we were working at a, you know, it was a product development, enterprise product development. And again it was small enough that I, even though I was professional services and working with clients a lot, I was also pretty heavily involved in the development team and understanding what they did. And that was during the time when extreme programming came out and so we were following that methodology and there was a lot of really great things about it. But we also, even though we were like trying to do strict xp, it didn't quite work that way. Right. We adapted it to our, to our own style. And, and that was probably like my first strong exposure to take a methodology but then make it your own for what works for your organization. You know, a little bit of that, that give and take that has to happen. And, and so when I moved back to Alaska and started doing, I kind of did this blend of technical work and technical project management, depending on the needs of the project. Every project we did was unique. Like, we didn't have, you know, enough consistency across our clients to say, here's how we do things. So we, you know, it's always going in and saying, what is the team? Where are they at capability wise? Where's the client? Kind of where are they at? Maturity and, you know, tolerance for change and, and their own processes. And then what can, what can I bring, like, what can I confidently bring to help this project? And, and so that, like those two things, I think kind of growing my own project management methodology and approach. I say approach more than methodology and understanding. Like, you can take things from an existing methodology and really kind of go further without having to be dogmatic about it.

If you become too dogmatic, then you get tied up in the rules, right? And then you, you're not able to sometimes, you know, finish the project because.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or people get, yeah, people get kind of like, what am I supposed to be doing? As opposed to, you know, professional skilled people. You want them to be thinking like, how do we, how do we make this go forward?

Yeah, yeah, but I think we still see a lot of, in a lot of different environments, we still, we still see this idea that, all right, we have a goal, what we want to obtain, and all we have to do is figure out what are the steps to, you know, to achieving that goal. And then we just kind of march through those steps and then if something happens that delays one of those steps or makes one of those steps impossible or we didn't actually know enough to complete one of those steps, then we kind of get, I think, into almost like a guilt cycle, right? Which is, okay, we missed that milestone which was in the plan. Now we miss the milestone, we're late, and we have to blame somebody. And, you know, then we get into, into an iteration of, of blame. And I think it takes a really different way of thinking about how work works and how people work for Everybody to be able to accept that. I was wondering, do you, do you see this when you're going in, you know, when you, when you were going into clients, do you see people, you know, really still in that I guess what I used to call a waterfall frame of mind?

Yeah, it, it's funny like I, over the course of all those years I would say it was declining meaning like there were plenty of clients, I don't know what time frame but definitely in the, you know, 2005 to 2012 or whatever where like it was, it was waterfall and they wanted to set up that way. The contract vehicles were set up that way. And so you are kind of, you know, doing that dance to say well I know this isn't going to be successful but there's a contract view and then there's how we're going to do the project and kind of doing that, like I said that dance. But as things got more, I think everybody started maturing a little bit more. I saw less of that. I saw more, you know, more openness to. Yeah, this is going to be an iterative process. We're going to have a few check ins and, and we may not make our, our deliverables but we, we will have time to adjust and we will, we will learn through the process. Again, it's still dependent on organizations.

Yeah.

Their culture and of where they were coming from.

Do, do you think. So the, the awareness that people were developing around Agile, you know, around SCRUM approaches helped with that or did it hinder that?

I think it helped. You know we had a few people that were very strict scrum, you know, people but I think most people that I worked with as they'd gone through it and they'd used it, they kind of taken what I just described which is the, you know, take what works and feel free to leave what what doesn't. And you know, I always felt like for the size of projects I was working on that worked really well. I think as projects got bigger like I talked to, I, I didn't work on huge multi year projects as a project manager. Those projects, as I talked to those project managers, they require, they did require a certain higher level of rigor because you had larger teams.

Brian, I want to ask you about this thinking and how you use this thinking in your management consulting. I loved what you said about having that sympathy and empathy for people coming out of technical roles and going into management. I think that's one of the hardest things that people are asked to do in business because they frequently have very little preparation for that. But I'd love to hear your, you know, just a little bit about your approach. How do you, how do you work with people to take a more iterative approach to how they, how they become great managers?

Yeah, well, I thought it was really good. You know, the way you summarized kind of a core principle of Lean, which is like you, you do something or you make a plan, you do something and see how it goes and kind of reflect on it. And that I, I think that underpins a lot of, like when I coach people and, and just how I think about how you actually do it. You know, every management job is unique. Like it doesn't, doesn't matter even if there, you feel like there's some consistency, there's differences in the person, there's differences in what they're going to, how they're going to interact with people. And so that, that kind of framework of plan do reflect is, is kind of how you make progress. And so when I work with people, I start with just leading yourself, like focusing on leading yourself. And so I, I've got a, and I'll just quickly tell you, I've got this shift focus management methodology. And there's seven modules. So the first two are self first leadership. Because like you said, when somebody is moving into management, they typically are coming out of, in a lot of situations, coming out of individual contributor role where they've had pretty good guidance, pretty good structure, and they make this dramatic shift to where there's not a lot of structure. They've probably lost some of their peers, maybe they haven't identified or haven't don't have mentors yet, and maybe they never will like they want. And so it's imperative to understand how do I lead myself and, and figuring that out. And it starts by just taking small steps. You know, if there's not a, there's not a, here's the plan, do it. You have to kind of iterate along your way. And then the second one is management mastery, which is how to, how to really master your role as a manager. And that framework, you know, you may have a job description in your, in your role, but often they don't tell you or give you guidance on how to progress within that role. You kind of get in that title and you feel like, oh, I'm supposed to know all these things, but in reality you're, you're just starting out. And so I wanted to provide some language so that people could understand where I'm at in terms of progressing within my role. So I call it practice, perform, pioneer and then how can I, how can I advance or how can I move forward in this role? And it provides kind of a structure for doing that in a way that the manager is directing that and designing that and having the conversations that move that forward. So that, that's those two modules and kind of underpinning that is strategic purpose. So when we do that work on that kind of self first leadership, we create a personal dashboard. So it's kind of like you know, if at the corporate level or the organizational level be the strategic plan, at the individual level it's a personal leadership dashboard. And then when we start moving into team leadership, I have a methodology or a framework I call the iterative improvement engineering. And, and this really came out of, you know, if you've talked to entrepreneurs, you hear the phrase of like I'm too, I'm so busy, I don't have time to work on the business. I'm so busy working in the business. Well, managers, I don't know what the corollary would be, but managers have that problem in spades. Right. They, they typically are bringing some of their individual contributor responsibilities into the job. You know, I, almost all managers I know are still doing some of the work and then you know, they're responsible for managing people that's, they're learning that they are responsible for communicating with their boss and other stakeholders. So they've got all these dynamics going on and they don't have time to just kind of take a step back and say what, what needs to change or improve. And that's really the transition from being a manager to, to a leader.

To a leader. Yeah, yeah.

So I, I wanted to give them a framework that, that they could use that would be sustainable. That would be like we talked about, like you would learn and would be a little bit self perpetuating and provide a vehicle for them to develop themselves and engage their employees more.

And one of the pieces obviously of that then is, is that reflection. Right. So the, the self reflection. You know, looking at, right. You know, here's what, here's what I thought was going to happen, here's what actually happened. And, and what's my, what was my role in that? How do I contribute to that or just reflection on, you know, I, I took this action and here's how it worked out. And, and yeah, what did I learn from that? Do you find that your clients are impatient to skip that step?

I think there's two things that happen. One, I don't know if they're impatient. I haven't met anybody that's been impatient. They don't naturally do it, but I think when they do it, coming from the project world, it's, it's kind of a, almost a standard thing you do. So you're used to doing it. A lot of times people don't. And when you do it once or twice, you realize how powerful it is and it kind of change. Can change the tone a little bit. So, so anyway, I, I think I, I wouldn't describe it as like they're anxious or impatient to skip the step as much as they either haven't done it or they just think they're too busy to do it.

Right. Yeah. And then it, it is a, essentially it's a habit that needs to be formed. Right. That you like any other habit, you need to practice it.

Yeah.

And then I'm sure that's then where your coaching is really powerful that, you know, give people that space and ask the right questions.

Yeah. And I, I think it's, you know, imperative to like separate out the, the results from the, the post mortem. So what we do like in this, these iterations. So we do quarter long iterations. We'll, we'll do a demo day. And so that's like just what are the results? You know, what did you, what did you accomplish? And you know that comes from software development.

And that sounds very. Software development. Like.

Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, but it, but it's great because like, as a, like that's one of the things as developers, like you don't want to just have somebody keep talking about what they're developing. It's like, nope, make it always, you know, always runnable, always whatever it was always green lights, you know, always something you can show. And so that, that demo day was very powerful in software development. So I tried to incorporate that same concept in process improvement in iterations. Like show what you, what you've done. And it's really imperative that you don't put judgment around that. You know, that people just say here, here's what I did not, not talk about it. And you know, we, we all make, like you said at the beginning, we all make excuses. We all want to go like, yeah, but you know, I got sick and this happened and we had a big customer complaint that we had to address and you know, whatever. And it's important to like get everybody to remove those excuses and just say, this is what we did. Because you, you gotta, the idea of iteration is you're, you, you do that learning process and so you're learning how much can we do? What's our, what's our cadence, how, you know, how, how resilient are we, how progressive are we? What can we really accomplish in a, a quarter? And that's going to take a few iterations. So you do that demo day. The post mortem is really, and like separating that out. The post mortem is really where you get to evaluate how, you know, how did we do? What did we learn about ourselves? What did, what can we change? What do we want to keep those questions.

And I'm intrigued by what you're talking about with cadence. You know, one of the things that, that I found in my consulting is or in my coaching, excuse me, is that, you know, so the idea coming out of lean is that you do daily coaching. But I, but what I found is when working with people who are in management that, that daily coaching sounds ideal, but when you're working on some of the bigger things, sometimes, you know, a two week cycle or a month long cycle, cadence might actually be better in order to, you know, to try something out, see what the result really is before you make a decision about, about whether you stick with that approach or choose a different approach. So you're saying that you really use kind of like a quarter, a quarter by quarter. So it's three months.

Yeah. And yeah. And if, you know, in the project world it's like, is it, do you have an objective you're trying to get to or are you time, you know, kind of time boxing it? And I think with management teams, timeboxing really makes sense where it's like we're, here's what we're working on and here's what we're trying to accomplish. But after three months, we're gonna, we're gonna show how much progress we made and we're gonna, we're gonna reflect. And so then we know like how much can we do in a three month period and then within that three months. Yeah, it's, it's kind of the, the team is meeting weekly, there's, there's a few other formal check ins.

So it's not the, the leaving things for three months then coming back and saying there is, there is

for, for

people to come back and say, you know, here's, here's, here's what's been happening in the past week. Yeah, yeah. And so are you working with teams as well as with individual leaders then?

Yeah, exactly. So typically it's like one, one leader, you know, that's more kind of the one on one coaching and and some of that. But within the context then of this iteration, it's typically there's a, you know, what I, what I recommend is like a core team and then start pulling in a few people for specific iterations. Because that, that's kind of when I said it's also a vehicle for employee engagement. You want to give your employees some exposure to what it actually takes to make changes in the organization. You know, we've, we've all been there where it's like, we're complaining that our president or CEO or whatever, like, why don't they just do this? And once you, like, get some insight into what it really takes to make these changes, you're a little more gracious and a little more understanding when things don't happen as fast as you'd like. But then you also feel like more hope too. When you really feel frustrated by something, you're like, oh, if I know if there's a, a change process going and they're trying to improve things, it may not change when I want, but it doesn't mean it won't ever change. And that's, I think that's important for employees.

Yeah, it must be really powerful then, you know, to have that kind of insight into, into how the change is happening and perhaps what the leader is experiencing. I mean, that's a great then development tool for, for the employees who are working with that leader too, because now that they're seeing a leader, I would guess in some cases being vulnerable, in some cases, you know, making mistakes and then realizing and reflecting on, on what they might do differently the next time, that has to be extremely powerful.

Yeah. Yeah, it can really kind of elevate, elevate everybody, you know, to go from, hey, we're just order takers and just kind of turn in the crank to, hey, we're part of this organization and we can actually help move it forward.

What's, what's the, what's the kind of the change in culture or environment that you see when you do this?

Well, there's a couple things. One is just that, that change from like, hey, we're just kind of turning the crank and doing this to we're doing this, you know, we're moving, moving up and progressing. So there's that kind of, I guess I'd call it self determination and, and a little bit of, you know, ownership of, of things so that there's that culture. There's also this, this recognition of how much change you can handle. And so.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. I had one, one client who we we went through this iteration to work on one aspect of the business, but they had some other changes going on in, in different parts of the business. And when we did the postmortem, they, you know, we were talking all about, about that, all the different things that were going on outside of just this one iteration and what they're working on, and they really came away with this confidence that they can handle quite a bit of change that, you know, they kind of felt like, oh, this is all going wrong. They're like, no, we actually made it through this really well and we even took on some additional work and we don't have to settle things down. In fact, we can kind of lean into this a little bit. So it, you know, it brings some, some awareness and, and, and then the third thing I think is just the, you know, kind of the, the stature of, of the organization. Like I said, you know, it isn't just the manager going from manager to leader, but it's like the, the know kind of a different Persona from just being, being employees to being part of the organization.

Oh, wow, that's great. When you start working with a leader in the team, are there any things that you see that get in people's way that you have to, you have to help them get through before they can really get. Get moving?

Yeah, there's, there's several. I mean, partly that's why I kind of like starting with the self leadership. So it's kind of figuring that out for yourself. You know, a big one is, is the time component.

Yeah. And I just don't have time. I'm too busy.

Yeah, too, too busy. I can't. Can't make, can't make time for this. And, and so that's why, you know, like this kind of like this thing in a box or whatever, this nice framework. It's like, okay, here, here's would be your time commitment. You know, can, can you commit to this and you do it so that, that helps. You know, the, what I talked about with the demo day and you know, this kind of evaluation of results and so making this shift again, it's better if you start with yourself first because we're our own worst critics. And so part of self first leadership and is kind of understanding like I'm on this process, I'm improving things and kind of relaxing your own self criticism and enjoying and really leaning into where you want to go. That same thing happens at the team level. Like it's natural for us to just criticize our progress and so changing that, changing that dialogue and, you know, helping every. Everybody else change that dialogue of, like, it's not that we didn't make these things happen. What. What can we learn from it? Like you said at the beginning. Yeah.

Is it. Is this a language that you teach people to in those demo days?

Yeah, I wouldn't say it's language. It does help that, like, I kind of facilitate the demo day, the time. Because, especially. Because then I really, you know, that's what I really spend time on. Like, here's what this means. This does not. This is not an evaluation. And as much as the manager would say that the employee that's responsible for these results is going to feel like I'm being graded. But. Right.

Because the manager's right there. The leader's right there. Right, right. And that's. That's what we're used to. We're used to. If you're in front of me, it's probably because you're evaluating me for something.

Right. That's.

That's the way we're trained to think.

Yeah. So there's two things that can help that, especially as they're learning this. One is the. The manager takes on some of the results. So, like you said, being vulnerable, they do a demo right there and they're going first, like they. They get a show with what they did. And then the second is me being the. The facilitator, so I can, you know, kind of model that and, and use language. And I'm a. I'm an outside third party, so there's some of that natural power structure already removed. And I'm not, you know, I. I've. I've been with them through the journey. So it's not like I'm just coming in as the external consultant. I've, you know, I've probably met with them and interviewed them and talked to them. So definitely going through that. But I think, you know, it's not. I don't want them to be dependent on me, so I want them to eventually that. To be, like, normal part of the process.

I think that's so important, Brian. I think, you know, and again, for people coming out of a technical background, but people coming out of any academic background, everything that they've learned through school is about somebody telling you most of the time what you did wrong. Right. And that idea of the grade, you know, did I get a B or did I get an A? That's so baked into, you know, how we come into the workplace and being able to just look at something and saying, all right, well, this is this is it. This is what happened. And it's okay to delve into what made it happen that way, but that doesn't mean that we're going to. It's that it's about criticism. Because the problem with the criticism, as you know, is when you, when you start to criticize, then the creativity get shut down. You can't think creatively anymore, or you have to. Oh, you, you have to be defensive or, you know, try to get away in some way.

Yeah. And. And as you know, from coaching, you know, what we learn in coaching is that our clients have the answers. And, you know, and it's. It's funny, like, that's one of the, the biggest things we learn. But like, I, I remember having to learn that as a parent with my kids, you know, and letting, Letting them experience the consequences and not having to say, I told you so. But, you know, we still do it. We do it to ourselves, and we, we can't help ourselves doing it to other people. And so we just have to keep training ourselves to, to remind and remind ourselves people will learn and they will learn better than. But if they do it themselves, then if we try to tell them, oh, that's terrific.

I really like that. Yeah. And that, that again, that's, that's kind of goes back to another lean principle, which is respect for people, which is this idea that people are actually amazing creations that are very able to learn and, and develop and to. And to grow and. And so part of respect for people is knowing that, yeah, you are capable of learning. You're definitely, you know, just put you in the right situation where you can learn.

Yeah.

Yeah, It's. It's really. That's really good. What. So as you, as you're working with. With clients and with teams now, I. Are you finding that clients are bringing you back after a while to, you know, to get to another level? Are they? Well, that's something you'd like to do.

That's the hope. You know, when you talk about iteration and like, just talking about iteration in my life, you know, I've been at this two years and I've got this. All this, you know, background that I'm kind of bringing forward, but really as my, as my own self, two years, and it wasn't like year one, I had this figured out. I knew kind of like what, like the impact I wanted to make and where I wanted to make it. Like, I know managers have the biggest impact in how employees feel about work. And I know if employees feel great about work, they go home Happier, they have better lives, they have better relationships. So I knew this is where I wanted to make my impact in, in the world. But it, it took some iterations to kind of, kind of figure this out. So it's really been in the last year that I've kind of been honing this, this methodology. And you know, so it's, it's almost like as you go through business, so my methodology goes through lead yourself, lead your team leader organization. And so, you know, the. I kind of am progressing and building it out through, through that. So, you know, so like going on from iterative improvement engine. It's. There's a Org first careers, which is all about, you know, recruiting and retention and employee development and how you continue to build that team. That's where I've got a lot of, you know, that was 20 years of my experience in consulting, but I have, but I have yet to, you know, have a team kind of keep going on that journey with me. So yeah, it's a, it's an iterative process and that's what I love about the whole experience.

And that's great. That's great. Brian, how could people find you the best way?

My kind of my hub is my website, shiftfocus.com there's, I'm. We'll be adding more content to that, but there I. There's a subscription form on the bottom of the page. So I publish a weekly email called Simple Sundays and they can subscribe there. And also my LinkedIn information is there and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so shiftfocus.com is the best place to go.

That's great. Okay, so here's my last question for you, which is this. What is your one piece of advice for a young person starting out?

I would say the number one thing is to guess. The advice would be to remember it's always about people. And what that means is, you know, especially technical people, but kind of in any discipline we, we think there's a tool, there's a technology, there's a framework. But the more you learn, the more you realize it's all about people. And so invest first in yourself. And like the number one way you could do that coming out of, you know, whatever young adults into professional career is invest in emotional intelligence and developing that skill. That's a skill that will serve you well in your career. And then two is develop and develop and maintain your relationships because that's, it's always about people and that's what will help you along the way.

It's always about people. And I think that's, that's a hard thing for people coming out of. Again, some of the, you know, our technical, academic or engineering backgrounds is, is, you know, you go into. Because you're so excited by the technology. Right. But technology without people is, is kind of useless. So.

And yeah, and you will be more fulfilled and happy and successful even in your technical pursuits. If you remember, it's always about people. Because. Because it is. I mean, it's advice. I wish I had, like, had more concretely long ago.

Yeah, me too. Me too. Brian, I think it's so interesting that the way you've developed your, your framework and the way that you think about things and how closely it aligns with Lean thinking and, and I really wish you all the best as you, as you move your, your company forward. So thanks very much for traveling with me to the Edges of Lean.

Yeah, thank you, Bella.

This is Bella Engelbach, and I'd like to thank Brian Walsh for being my guest at the Edges of Lean. What did you learn from this conversation?

What ideas did it spark?

We would love to hear from you. You can find brian@shiftfocus.com he's also on LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn or at lean4humans.com or comment wherever you watch a listen. Don't forget to subscribe and check out all my friends in the Lean communicators community@leancommunicators.com where you'll find lots of great new content every week. The Ages of Lean is written and produced by Bella Engelbach with support from Podcast, Inc. This is a Lean for Humans production.