Applying Lean Methodology in Marketing and Revenue Operations with Rutger Katz

Hi, I'm Michael Hartman. I'm Naomi Liu. And I'm Mike Rizzo, and this is OpsCast, a podcast for marketing ops pros and rev ops pros created by the MoPros, the number one community for marketing operations professionals. Tune into each episode as we chat with real professionals to help elevate you in your marketing operations career. Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast. Brought to you by marketingops.com and powered by the Mopros. I'm your host, Michael Hartman, flying solo today for a variety of reasons that we can go into when Mike and Naomi can join again. Today we are going to be talking about how to apply lean methodology within marketing and revenue operations. So to join me in the conversation today is Rutger Katz, currently senior digital strategist and marketing technologist at Conclusion Marketing. sorry, Conclusion Consulting. Rucker is a marketing operations leader and digital strategist with a deep passion for steering organizations through digital transformation towards becoming customer-centric powerhouses. His career is a mix of roles where data and technology meet customer experience and marketing. His journey began in neuroscience, which I would love to dig into if we have time, but he— where he researched the application of virtual reality and bodily illusions like the principle of the rubber hand illusion and social robotics. He proceeded to work at Capgemini in customer data analytics, where his work with global clients on social listening and digital marketing set the foundation for his expertise in marketing technology. Rucker actively shares his knowledge through LinkedIn, which I can attest to, public speaking, and now podcast— and now podcast guest, thanks to this and probably others, focusing on applied innovation, generative AI, digital strategy, and the integration of technology into marketing ops. He has a passion for exploring and applying various technologies, methodologies, and theoretical models. This led to an adoption model for CDPs, which can be applied to most martech, and the topic for today, the application of lean in marketing and revenue operations. So Rutger, thank you for joining us today, especially since it's— I don't know exactly what time it is there, but it's evening for you in the Netherlands, right?

It is 6 PM right now. Yeah, I hurriedly got my dinner in and jumped behind my PC to have this podcast, Mike.

All right.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's good to have you. And so, and we might want to say, so we are recording this on Leap Day 2024. So got this extra day for an extra episode. So how about that? All right. So let's get started. Rucker, you started your agency consultancy within the last year or so. What led you to doing that? You know, you— I kind of walked through probably a truncated version of your career journey. But yeah, what kinds of projects and stuff are you working on with your clients at your current place?

Sure. So I've been a consultant most of my career, and it fits very comfortably. I picked it out for my studies because I wanted to learn as much as I could within a short amount of time as possible. And I got lucky in having to work with a lot of global organizations in different industries and very varied colleagues. I've worked with clients of all different stages of maturity. So those that just started with implementing a CDP because they want to do more in personalization, or they just started using marketing automation in B2B. And on the other end, I've worked with implementing social analytics, did next best action modeling, And I even was lucky enough to be able to set up my own innovation lab at Capgemini, which was a ton of fun because you get free toys and attention and trips. Yeah, and in terms of clients, currently I'm working on a completely new digital platform sales technology for our biggest HVAC organizations in the Netherlands. Um, and these kinds of, these kinds of activities just come and go. Um, and right now I'm also focusing more and more on, you know, moving away from just customer experience to also think about, hey, can we move a little bit more towards sales? Can we move a little more towards customer success or customer support? And that's exactly one of the things I'm doing at my current client. You know, we—

Mm-hmm.

are looking at sales and marketing together and seeing, okay, what are the solutions that are actually fit to cross to work with both departments?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I like to think that I try to think about that full process even in just marketing, right? What is the customer's experience all the way from prospect through hopefully becoming an advocate, right? So I think it's all connected. So, uh, I would really love to dig into the neuroscience background, but I, I, that is a rabbit hole that I think I could, we could take up the whole episode on because I have some familiarity with it. My, my wife worked for a research organization that did stuff with that for a few years, but let's keep going. So I know you and I, when we, when we first talked about this, this idea of lean methodology, I think my first question, and maybe the same for some of our our audience was, oh, this is, this is, you're talking about Lean Six Sigma. But I think if I remember right, you know, this is something different, maybe slightly related, but like, can you walk through when we, when you use the term lean methodology, what does that mean? How is it related maybe to others or not?

Sure. So Lean Six Sigma is kind of like a, a bigger version and a different version of Lean. So if we look at Lean itself, it was produced by Toyota back in, I think, the second, the 1900s, 2000s actually. And the Lean Six Sigma is just a statistics component which you don't find in base Lean. You know, it was that the lean methodology itself was focused on maximizing value and minimizing waste. And part of that is what they call a DMAIC process, which is define, measure, analyze, improve, and control a process. And whereas Six Sigma is focused specifically around that, those processes, and it uses statistics to limit the the defects to no more than 3.4 million per— sorry, 3.4 per 1 million opportunities of errors, which is the 6 standard deviations from the mean. So that's where the Six Sigma—

Got it. Okay.

—comes from. But Six Sigma is mostly applied in manufacturing, for instance, AI chips right now, right? If you're producing a whole ton of AI chips, Every step of the way, you need to minimize the amount of error effects because you can throw away the entire product.

Right. I mean, it becomes an exponential issue, the more steps in the process, right? So, okay, makes sense.

But for most processes, especially if we're looking— if we're talking about marketing, which we're talking towards today, 3.4 per million opportunities is not something that we are aiming for because that is way too Wait till you agree for the product that we're working on.

So, so just for audience who's not seeing me, I've been sitting here sort of smiling and smirking because I can, I can use this a little bit to get on my soapbox that like, I think more marketers need to understand statistics, like truly, like not just like how do you generate numbers, but how to put data together. And so I will use that as an opportunity to reinforce my belief that it's an important skill to have. Especially in this day where, yeah, we have more data than we know what to do with and knowing how to apply it. Even in the age where AI might come in and do some of the heavy lifting of data preparation and normalization, all that, when you get output of analytics that happens through AI, you need to be able to evaluate whether or not it was— whether or not it makes sense. Yeah, yeah.

If you have a million customers, then you need to do statistics. If you're B2B and you have only 100 customers, it's not as interesting, I'd say.

But I think having that skill set is still an important one.

Absolutely. I agree completely. There's this very interesting— I love this book called Factfulness, which is about the usage of statistics. Factfulness. It is a great read. It has a lot of good stories about the application of statistics and how people can get confused by the assumptions that they have about large numbers, thinking, oh, then it has to be A. Whereas if you really interpret it correctly and if you ask the right questions like, okay, based on how large of a population are we talking about, then you understand, oh wait, they're actually not that big of a change.

Yeah. Well, and I think my, my big thing about it, I was talking to somebody just earlier this week, is I think if you don't understand how some of these statistical terms are done, how they're calculated, what the process was behind it, you're— it's easy to be susceptible to— I'll call it false advertising, right? And, and I, and I always come back to one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. So, uh, anyway, so I, we— I, I, I, I'm sorry I took us off in that direction, but I did. Yeah, I had to take advantage of the opportunity.

That's the rabbit hole we're jumping over now, Michael.

Yes. Okay. We will claw our way back out and not follow Alice down the hole. So let's— so I just want to make sure. So if I understood you right, Lean is a more generalized methodology that, you know, looking for efficiencies and things like that. And the Six Sigma variant is a variant of it that is specifically focused on statistical analysis and probably most appropriate for repeatable processes in manufacturing environments. Okay, got it.

Manufacturing environments especially, yeah.

Yeah, okay, now I get it. That makes total sense. I don't even think I picked that up from our last conversation, so thank you for that. All right, so it sounds like there's also maturity levels for understanding these methodologies are being seen as, as like a certification level. And, uh, you mentioned to me that you had recently gotten a Green Belt or gone through training for Green Belt level. So what, you know, what did you learn from that, right? How does that apply? And then I know we didn't talk about this necessarily, but what are, what are the levels for, for those certifications in, in Lean methodology?

So you have the Yeah, you have 3 levels: yellow belt, green belt, black belt, and then you have the black master belt, which is like the holy grail. Yellow belt is mostly theoretics. Okay, I understand the concepts, I understand the frameworks. Green belt, you're actually applying it. So I had to apply it in a use case. We went through a whole client case, or for us, we did research on our own organization. where can we find efficiencies? We'll go through the entire process of what you do in Lean. So you've proven, okay, you understand, you know how to do a Lean process. So that's the Green Belt certification that I did in fall. And now I've started with my Black Belt training. The first day is actually tomorrow, which is—

Awesome.

The next level where Green Belt, you can do it, for instance, within the marketing department. Black Belt is where you would look across departments at a more strategic, you know, a higher organizational level to find efficiencies, to find, you know, improve the value stream in that sense. And when I did the course for the first time, you know, I saw Lean pop up here and there during my career, usually at banks for whatever reason. And when it started for me, it was just a candy shop of frameworks and structures which consultants like me love.

Of course.

Because then we can sort of fit the chaos, at least in my head, the chaos that's in my head of ideas and frames. Oh hey, here's something where it actually fits in very neatly. How can I improve processes within marketing organization, within the marketing operation? And here are some tools which I can apply very easily to cover a certain question or to cover a certain the issue that I'm encountering of, okay, I'd like to improve this process. I know I should. Do I have an urgency somewhere? No. Okay. How do I— what can I use to cover up that or show that demonstrated urgency to the rest of the people so they, oh yeah, we should change that process? Yeah. And that is where I really liked it.

Yeah. I'm having done work as a consultant in my career and having written methodologies at one point. What I find the value of those methodologies and those templates is not so much— well, I've seen them where they— where some consultants use them as a crutch, right? So they're very— it's kind of like, sorry to all the PMI-certified people though, but I've worked with PMI-certified project managers who are terrible and they know the models and everything else, but they don't know how to apply them. You know, I think these templates and methodologies should be seen as a tool, and where you get real value is where you can leverage those And adapt them to a specific scenario. And I think that's what I'm hearing from you, is that the part of the methodology provides that, and then these certification levels help you develop that skill set of knowing how and when to use different parts of it and how to adapt them to a scenario.

Okay.

I am swinging for the fences today. I don't even know if that applied to that. Does that, does that even, that analogy even ring true? Like, that's a baseball thing. So I don't know if that works for those of you in Europe.

I do know about baseball. I've seen the movie Moneyball, so I have a good idea of what baseball's about, but it's not as big here as it is in the US.

So yeah, I'm sorry. I, I, I, basketball. Yeah. I don't know any cricket, you know, analogies.

We don't do cricket. That's the UK. We do hockey.

We do field hockey.

Oh, okay. That's like the Dutch sport, field hockey.

Yeah. Well, so I was on a call the other day with people who are mostly in Europe and Africa, and I said, I'm one of the few Americans who's following Six Nations right now, right? So I'm a rugby fan.

Awesome.

And I'll watch the tour. I'm a big tour fan. So, okay. So let's— so when you and I talked again, I'm kind of going back to that. Part of the Lean methodology, and I think you've hit on this a little bit, its goal is to help organizations do, you know, with doing the right things and doing them the right way, right? So it sounds, that sounds, yes, absolutely. I think we could all get behind that. It sounds simple, but there's, I'm sure, more nuance to that. Can you explain a little more about what that means and Well, we can— I can, I can hold my next question and maybe you'll touch on it, but I think to me the hard part there is what are the right things, right? But knowing what that is.

Yes.

And I'll give you— I will give you another analogy. So I'm a big fan of like, uh, personal, uh, tools for improving your efficiency. So I was a Frank Covey fan. There's Eisenhower Matrix and they they all have some sort of like prioritization. How do you prioritize the to-dos or tasks on your list? And I always tell people like, the model seems simple. It's knowing which ones are the high priority or in the different range, right? Or yeah, important but not urgent or important versus urgent. And so I think that I would love for you to dig into that specifically if you can.

Yeah, I will. Absolutely. So maybe to start at the basics for those of those are the people who don't really know Lean. So they build it around 3 Ps: purpose, the right thing; process, the right way; and then people, the ones that are doing it. And so the goal always has been to sort of enhance efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction while cutting waste. For instance, in one of the videos that we saw, they applied it very successfully to a volunteer group that was packaging food relief in the, in the US. So you saw that they took a long time, you know, putting every, uh, you know, can of beans and, and, and potatoes, potatoes, whatever it was, in the specific box. And they used the lean methodology to figure out, okay, how can we quick, as quick as possible, as efficiently as possible, get as many boxes ready within a certain set of time? So, you know, they reorganize the, the room, they, they change people's position, they change people's tasks, and it's fine. Okay, this is the best way of doing it.

Um, so I'm wondering if I was in that video because I have been one of those people who's done that, right? Yeah, yeah, through my church we've, you know, filled those boxes and—

Exactly.

Get a bunch of people who don't know what they're doing and, and I think we were all aiming for perfection, right? Which is probably not really what is needed. But anyway, sorry.

So, so when you mentioned, right, the right things. Lean has a couple of tools in there to help organizations. Okay, let's identify the right things and then also make sure that we keep focusing on the right things, that we don't, you know, we don't have any scope creep or annoying requests that nobody actually wants to do. And it was also one of the things I hear from looking through LinkedIn, hearing people from marketing operations, from revenue operations, that they're getting requests that they don't add any value, that they don't have any strategic value. You know, for instance, a last-minute request to start and launch a new campaign because we need to deliver more leads right before the end of the month or whatever. And then sure, you'll get leads, but those won't be sales qualified leads. They'll be useless. But wait, you've got the KPI of leads. So I think a lot of us are challenged in these positions that we don't really have a lot of tools or frameworks in, you know, how to start the discussion or at least challenge the work that we are getting thrown over the fence or from higher up. And I'll give a brief description of a couple of those. So for me, the one I really like the most, and I think this is my My best, my favorite one is the Hoshin Matrix, which is an X matrix they call it. And it aligns your company goals of 3 years, right? Strategic goals with 1 year. So the things you want to do this year, you break it down and link it with activities over the top. So, okay, which activities does that mean for my department, for my ops department, whatever? And then on the right-hand side, you cover that with KPIs and the ones actually responsible for the activities. So in one overview, you have who's responsible for which activities and how do your activities actually pull back towards global and strategic goals. So that whenever someone asks you, hey, can you do this for me? And you can, you know, look, here's the Ocean Matrix. No, no, we're not doing that this year because we are focused on these topics. These are KPIs to, you know, get our strategic goals for the year in place. Everything else goes to the bottom of the prioritization list.

Sorry for that. Can I— can I— so this is H-O-S-I-N? Hoshin? H-O-S-H-I-N. Ah, okay. Japanese term. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So interestingly, literally today on LinkedIn, I saw— I think it was Daryl Alfonso who posted a poll And it had to do with, you know, what are some of the challenges with people understanding what marketing ops does? And in my— I've had this conversation a couple of times, and I think part of it is where I think this might be going for me in tying it back to marketing ops folks is this might provide a framework for you to not just push back and say no, right? Which is maybe what you're doing, but to change the way that you are seen is where you're being strategic and being strategic about how you work with the organization. So you can tie those things back. My guess is most people will not immediately be able to say no on things. There'll be a lot of pressure for highly visible things like turning around leads. It happens all the time. And at the same time, I think you can start to use something like this as a tool for— this is how we're thinking about how to prioritize our limited resources, both people, technology, time. And money. And I think that what is what I think I want our listeners to take away from this is think about this as a tool, not necessarily of a full methodology, but tools that you can use in your tool belt to help you be seen as more strategic without just simply saying, no, that's a stupid thing to do, which I'm sorry to all of our, you know, I think there are a lot of marketing ops folks who complain about this. And are in search of ways to change that perception.

Yeah, I think everyone within marketing operations and revenue operations wants to have the strategic talk and make sure that they have the baggage, the accordance of higher up. Okay, what you're doing is actually you know, strategic in nature. These are activities that we want you to do because they are attributing to our strategic goals for this year.

Yeah.

Everything else, waste. Don't focus on it. You have my blessing of saying no to things that are falling off. So another thing which I liked on doing the right things is called the Kano. The Kano is 3 bars, and it's a good way to plot your CX-related activities. So you have a line which is basics, line which is prestige, and the line that is sort of the wow factor. And it goes on one axis, it is the amount of effort you have to put in, and then the amount of benefits you're getting from it. I'd have to do it in a visualization because it We're talking on a podcast and this is something that you would love to see visually.

Yeah, yeah. And I know you shared some stuff. We'll try to put that into the description or when we post about it, share some of those things.

So the thing on the basis is, so let me just explain the 3 lines very quickly. Imagine you've got a hotel, right? You've got in every hotel, which makes it a hotel, is that there's a bedroom, right? Those— that's a basic. You need a bedroom in your hotel, right? When you're— whatever your engagement with your customer is, whatever your product is, you need to have the basics in order. If it doesn't function, you can forget about any customer satisfaction whatsoever. Um, so that's a basic you need to have in order. It doesn't need to be excellent in quality. No. So at a certain amount of time, there's sort of a cutoff of when it will increase or add value to the, the, you know, Net Promoter Score, uh, uh, yeah, or no.

There's like a baseline expectation you have to meet.

Exactly, exactly.

And then after that you can differentiate.

After that you differentiate, then you go into the prestige. Now the prestige will be something like, I've got a good bathroom, you know, something like a bath. I'm happy, I'm very happy if my hotel room has a bath. And has that, that's large enough to fit my shoulders in so I don't have to sort of squeeze in and sit upright very awkwardly. I'm very happy that that's there. It doesn't need to be. It's still a hotel room if it's not there. I'm very happy that's there. For me, it's a very big prestige component. And then the wow factor is something that if it's there, it surprises you. you can really win points by it. And something like that would be getting everything just right, good customer service, proactive communication, personalized here and there. That is that prestige, that finesse stuff. If the other 2 are not in order, the perceived stuff won't really matter because you still have sort of like a disconnect between, oh, I've got very nice people at front desk and they're very Nicely, but my hotel room is just very basic. So, uh, it's, it's sort of like a disconnect.

So could I, could I do a little quick thought experiment? So my mind immediately went to this could apply to culture within an organization. So, you know, if you get, um, say some sort of great benefit or something you think that will appeal to people like snacks or money towards having a home office if it's a remote thing, but otherwise the underlying culture is not great, right? That benefit really doesn't solve the baseline expectation.

No.

Okay.

No, absolutely not. It's exactly like in employee experience in that matter, right?

Yeah.

Culture is a basic. You know, a good manager is a basic. It's not a prestige. If it's a poor manager, people will just No way they'll quit whatsoever. Um, payment is something that's a prestige. People would go for a lesser paid job if there's a good working culture, if there's a good manager, they'll be okay with it. You know, if it's a very good pay, they'll be very happy with it, but it's not really, um, that large of an influence if, if the basic is, is in order.

I mean, and I'm not an expert in this, but my My— the things I've heard often when it comes to employee satisfaction, money, you know, compensation is certainly a mix, but it's, it's not the biggest differentiator in that. You mentioned, you know, your direct manager and culture and things like that tend to have a bigger outsized influence.

Yeah. And then the wow factor, for instance, at my office, we're very lucky. We have our own free barista. And we have like a very good view. That is a wow factor, you know, that is something that I didn't expect, but every day I'm up there and getting a very nice coffee.

Nice. All right. Well, okay, so we've got these different models of identifying the right thing. So let's, like, the other half of this is the right way, which, if I understood it right, is about process optimization. So if I, you know, how do we understand current processes and how technology can help? Should a process be adjusted first, then the technology? Like, how do you— well, so first off, I like, I have a little bit of a hard, hard time going right to the right way. Anything where it says the right this, the right that, I struggle with because it assumes there is one answer, which I— find difficult to just accept.

It's the same with the right thing in the right way. There is no ideal solution. Yeah.

I mean, this is my, this is my hangup with the term best practices, right?

Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine.

So anyway, so, so, so let's, do you have similar things on like the right way that, you know, tools or ways of thinking about that?

Okay, so I think Lean is, is very much focused about the process optimization, right? So that is really the core, I feel, the core of Lean. Um, but if you don't do the right things, then, you know, whatever you do in, in the right way in the process optimization, yeah, it doesn't really matter. Um, but so if we're—

So, so, so sorry, so this also just, it just like, this literally just hit me and it ties back to my own educational experience in operations research, which is about optimization, but it also presupposes that you know what you need to optimize for.

Exactly.

Right. So I think of UPS or Amazon with their trucks, right, or whatever, right? They can optimize for a number of different things. It could be fuel consumption, time to delivery, maximizing how many things they get out, minimizing something else, right? So, uh, you don't have to get into like what are those kinds of things, but I think for our audience it's important for them to know like Optimizing a process means you need to know what you need to optimize for.

Yeah. So one of the things, and that's the last thing I'll say about the right things, there's this thing which are called customer arenas. And whenever you're sort of lost and thinking, okay, how would we further improve our offering or further improve our services or processes, whatever, you can throw in a customer arena where you invite a bunch of customers. And you put them sort of in this middle arena and your own colleagues are sort of in a half circle around it. And you would use it as a way to get firsthand feedback about your proposition, your service, whatever, where you ask them, okay, what is the thing that bothers you the most? So you can know, okay, what are my priorities in fixing it? And of course you can do this with a survey or you know, whatever, a structured way. I also like it, besides the quantitative stuff, to get some qualitative stuff, because quantitative stuff often tells you this is something that's wrong, but the qualitative stuff will tell you why is it wrong or what are they expecting. Sometimes they don't know it, but you could get some insights.

Yeah.

So moving over to the process, you know, lean sort of assumes and You know, everyone usually has sort of a process in place, right? We are creating a marketing campaign, we're, whatever you can think of, we are creating a product, there's a process in there. And so you have your customer request or demand, you know, whatever that might be. And then the process is the answer. Okay, how do I build this product or how can I answer this request? And So now let me just figure out how I wanted to follow this up, because your question as well, Mike, was about the technology. You can assume that there's already a technology in place. It doesn't have to be, but it could be, and it might not be the ideal piece of technology at the time, but work with what you have and then figure out if you need to change any technology further down the line. So in terms of process, you could go, and this is where the focus of lean is, is you have this thing that's called the kaizen. And the kaizen is 6 steps. You go through these and you constantly iterate small changes. There's this great story about, and I use it constantly as an example. There was a Tour de France team And they were, you know, they didn't do very well. They had a team, they cycled, and they tried to figure out, okay, how can we improve our team in such a way that we are winning the Tour de France, constantly winning the Tour de France? So what they did is they found any small, whatever small piece of improvement they could find for their cyclists to become better. They would bring them their personalized pillows. They would, you know, give them massages. They would check whatever tiny little thing they could on the bike to further improve it. They, if you can think of it, they tried it in terms of, you know, just a 1% improvement of the team. And I think after 3 years, they won the Tour de France, I think, 5 times in a row. or something in that number. So they got there to consistent improvements.

Yeah.

And that is the idea of the Kaizen that you walk through. You're constantly checking, okay, what are things that are going wrong? Let's analyze them. And if you're doing a Six Sigma, you would also use statistics here. Try to figure out what kind of solution it is. We implement the solution, we test it to see if, okay, it does actually fix the problem. And then we standardize the solution. So we are ensuring that it will be It stays in place. So if I'm doing a process change in my marketing department, I want to ensure that everyone still keeps following the process. If I'm changing or adding a CRM and I'm expecting my sales team to use the CRM, then I for sure need to figure out some way to incentivize them to use it consistently.

Right.

As possible. Otherwise, I'm building a solution, but no one's using it.

So Yeah, I mean, it's— yeah, okay. So you can apply this to the change itself as well as adoption of change or reinforcement of it. Okay, so I love that idea of— you said kaizen?

Kaizen.

Kaizen. So this sounds like this— it's almost like a flywheel effect, right? Little change here, you get better. Another little change, and it gets even— like, the difference now is becoming greater. It's sort of a multiplier effect. So I like that. How are there— it's still at the same time, you know, you need to identify like, what are the— what do we think the most impactful little changes are that, you know, or, and maybe impactful is a combination of both. What does it take to do it as well as what do you expect the outcome to come? So there's a little bit of a cost benefit.

So within the Kaizen, you would analyze, you do, we do, for instance, the 5 Whys, you know, get to the root cause of the issue. And you would also do something that they call a fish grate, where they try to break down the issue in all kinds of different attributing factors. So you have an idea, okay, which factors should we adjust first? Because we're thinking they're the most influential. So you already have sort of like a way of, okay, these are the 2 things from this challenge that I should cover first and see how that fixes the problem.

Yeah, I, so I have heard of the 5 Whys and I don't know that I've ever officially used it. Maybe I've informally done it in some ways, but it might be useful for our audience to at least get an idea. So the idea, if I understand it right, you can maybe add to it, is the concept is you've got an issue or a challenge or something you're trying to do and you get with the right stakeholders. Or stakeholder, and you ask them why literally 5 times, right? To let them and ask them to— it's not to be a jerk, right? It's to get them to actually explain themselves 5 different ways and to get to the heart of what, you know, more of a root cause analysis. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So it's the root cause because sometimes people Say, oh yeah, this is how we've always done it, right? And those kinds of answers, you just want to kick them out the door as soon as they say something like that. Say, no, no, no, no, no, we don't want to go to that level. Go a little bit deeper. Why have we always done it this way? What is the reason for doing it in such a way that we know, do we need to change something down there or not? Yeah, and sometimes after 3, you're done already. So it doesn't have to be 5. Right.

Um, but the idea is don't, don't just accept the, the initial answer. My— the one of the, the strategies that I've used as a consultant in the past too is it works best if you have 2 people conducting the interview and you really, uh, you actually plan— you have to plan ahead, right? You may have a series of questions and you can, you can flip-flop going back and forth between who does it. But the key is when the person answers your question, Don't immediately ask the next question. Yeah, be quiet. People do not like to have silence.

And so it is such a good methodology sometimes, just be quiet when you've asked a question. Because if you have an idea of, but there should be something below this, right? Just be quiet. It's hard to do. So hard. I think it's very hard to do. I'm a chatterbox in that sense, but—

Same.

At a certain point of time, people will just like, Maybe they're still expecting something from me. Well, okay, and then this and this and this, by the way.

And what I found is, I don't know that I would say more often than not, but consistently enough, the best information came from that time where I just didn't say anything. Yeah. And so, uh, it's, it's a, it's, it's a subtle thing, but it's, it is hard, especially if you're a vocal person, to fight that urge to say the next thing. It is, it is. Right. Um, okay, so this also— so this, we're trying to like this reinforcing loop of getting better, but could it also be one where, you know, you ex— you hope for improvement but you might get something that doesn't work? Is the idea also that you learn fail fast? I mean, whoever— I can't think, that was a Google—

Um, fail forward is the Lean Startup methodologies terminology, right?

Okay.

Um, I've done Lean Startup, I've done design thinking, I've done Scrum Agile. I think I've done all of the things I can, like the entire list of the methodologies. Um, so it isn't necessarily a fail fast, fail forward. I mean, yes, you want to be better at this, you know, performing the kaizen. You want to do this quicker and better. Um, and you'll notice that As soon as you've done it a couple of times and the people are sort of enjoying becoming better, because you'll notice that their KPIs, their team KPIs or the department KPIs, they'll increase. You compete with each other for, okay, so now we've reached an 8 in our response. Let's go for a 9. Can we get a 9?

Yeah.

Sure. Let's try for that 9. You'll see that their they'll become a culture of people who are trying to be better. And that is sort of the goal of the kaizen, the lovely culture behind it, which they've achieved at Toyota, at least, where people become sort of self-motivated to, you know, find issues and try, okay, let's do this, let's try and fix this one. Because I think this is also something that we are encountering as a blocking issue for whatever improvement we're— whatever process we're trying to improve.

Yeah. Well, and I am a big— yeah, I think I like the idea of making small incremental changes. I've— I mean, if I could create and do methodology, I'd probably incorporate things from lots of these different ones. But a principle I believe in is that, you know, you have to spend an amount of time understanding where you are and where you want to go. The analogy I like to use is sailing. I'm not a sailor, but as I understand it, right, the only thing you really know is you want to go from point A to point B. And what you really know right now is what are the conditions where I'm at? So how can I make steps in that right direction, learn and adjust? And sometimes that means you're not going in a straight line, and that's okay.

Yeah.

Sometimes you may find that your destination was not really where you wanted to end up, or you're getting close to it, close enough is— so I'm a big believer in that. So I think I like some of these concepts, um, and it, and it, it frees people to be comfortable with things that are ambiguous, which is most of real life, right? You don't always want to have all the answers you want. So, all right, well, let's— so let's keep one of the— so we started to touch on this a little bit. So one of the challenges with any change effort though is communicating the change and what it means for the people in the organization. Some, and it'll be different depending on what their roles are, right? Does the, does the Lean methodology provide tools for helping with communication of change and managing change?

Not necessarily with communicating change. So, okay, I think it's good to realize the Lean methodology, it's sort of originated from the factory line. So there, there was a different kind of discipline there. You know, you listen to your boss, you you've got a certain mindset in, in performing. But they do have a change component, so it falls under the people bubble, right? We have those 3 bubbles: purpose, uh, process, and people. And the change falls under there. So one of the, um, tools that they have is a sort of, um, 4-dimensional matrix with multiple levels. with I believe, I can do, I understand, and I receive support in order to want to change. So most change, you find resistance somewhere along the way.

This is a part of the process. See, now this is neuroscience coming into play here, right?

I really enjoy behaviorisms and talking about behaviorisms and reading about behaviorisms. I've just read Influence which is a very nice, almost a research book of people's behaviors and how to influence it.

Yeah.

And when you look at LinkedIn and people posting certain ways, you're like, oh, this is something that they picked up from that book. I knew it for some reason. So, yeah. So originally, Lean doesn't have a lot of tools for managing a larger change. But they did add, I think it added it a little later, which is they call it the Change Acceleration Process, which was designed by General Electric. And that has 7 steps of change. And it is something similar to Kotter's model for change, which is, I think, 8 steps that covers roughly the same. So, okay. In terms of change management, I would refer to one of those, you know, if you know I'm going to pull like a larger change, operation here, you know, it's best to sort of pull from those methodologies, at least to get the organization departments, you know, moving. You need to get a couple of people in the leadership team to sort of understand where lean is coming from and see, oh yeah, this is something that we are going to try, we are going to do within our organization, we are communicating about it, because this is our way of Reducing costs while at the same time, you know, improving our product quality or our processes because we know or we feel we have an idea that our operational cost is too high or that we are making too many errors in our product release or product production. And this is the way that we're going to move forward on trying to fix them.

Yeah, it sounds interesting. What I think this all requires though is a strong vision, a vision for a future state that's better in some way, right? And then you can tie back any change, large or small, to this is a part of getting to achieving that vision. So, Rucker, so we've covered a lot of ground and I wish we had more time. We don't. Is there anything we haven't covered here yet that you would want to make sure, like, I want to make sure the listeners know about this one thing?

Not really about this one thing. I mean, it is, I think it's a very nice methodology to at least have sort of like a basic understanding of so that you can try and apply it at your organization.

Yeah.

It's actually quite fun to do it. We really enjoyed doing it, right? Even with a test run, we, on our training day, we did it with building Legos. basically in trying to figure out, okay, how do we get the— we have to make little flowers as quickly as possible in the best way of processing. And while we were so focused on the process, you know, once we had like a testing round, we noticed we didn't actually ask the client what they wanted and how they wanted it to be delivered, and we could change our entire process based on that. Oh, damn it. So those kinds of things are really Really fun to do. If anyone wants to try the certification, I really recommend it. Okay. It was one of my most fun certifications and trainings to do in terms of, hey, I can apply this to so many things.

Sure. Absolutely. I love that. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll try to make sure that we provide resources, links to some of the resources you shared with me.

And I'll post on it constantly. I really love this topic. So I'll be talking about it a ton.

All right. So we know at least one way in which people can learn more about this. If people wanna connect with you or learn more about you or what you're doing or the LEAD methodology, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn, you know, DM me whenever you're interested. You know, I love to talk about this. I'd love to talk with people if they're, okay, I wanna try this in my organization. Can you help me? Where do I get started? And, you know, We can explore together. I'm also exploring it in my own organization, the clients that I'm working with now in the specific area of marketing and revenue and operations.

Fantastic. Well, Rutger, thank you again, and thanks especially for staying up late for us. Appreciate that. I'm sure you've got family commitments as well, so I know that's tough sometimes.

The little one's just gone down to bed, so I'm a free man now.

All right, all right. Well, I appreciate it. Enjoy it. Enjoy, uh, enjoy that time. And we really thank you. Thanks to our listeners, uh, for continuing to support us. We look forward to bringing you more interesting topics like this. Until the next time, bye everyone.

Bye everyone.