Catherine McDonald  00:00

Hello and welcome to this episode of the lean solutions podcast. My name is Catherine MacDonald, and I’m joined today by my great co host, who I haven’t seen in ages. Shane dauffenbaugh, Shane, hi. How are you today? I am well,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  00:15

Thanks, Catherine. I appreciate being honey here again. It’s great to see your smiling face and to talk about some of these things, we always have such a great time when we talk about it. So I’m, well, how

Catherine McDonald  00:24

about you? Yes, good, good. We’ll actually have a little tickle. But, you know, I’m good apart from that tickling the truck, but apart from that, all good. If that’s my only complaint, it’s not, it’s not a bad one. Yeah. Shane, last time we chatted, we talked, I think it was the episode on coaching, and you were asking me questions about how I take on a coach approach in my work. And today we have a new topic. We’re going to be talking about the 10 Minute improvement, which is really just about how we can make these maybe small, incremental improvements and finding the opportunities to make those within our organizations, instead of always just focusing on the big project and the grander sort of changes the three day Kaizen in Yeah, exactly. And look, I know you, and I know your experience, and I know you’ve worked across loads of different organizations to help them see this, because sometimes people do need help to see this, and I’d love to get your take on how to go about this within an organization. So are you happy to answer my questions? Yes.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  01:32

Grill away. I’m not going to guarantee, ladies and gentlemen audience that are in the audience that these are going to be perfect for you, or that they’re even going to be that correct. But these are my take because, because she asked me, not you. So we’re just going with that.

Catherine McDonald  01:48

Okay, okay, right. Let’s let me start my grilling. Okay, well, first of all, let me ask you,

Catherine McDonald  01:54

yeah, do you agree with me? Because, you know, maybe you don’t. Do you think there are opportunities to find these little,

Catherine McDonald  02:04

small frustrations, or opportunities for these kind of, maybe smaller, quick wins in work, rather than focusing always focusing on what we need to change, you know, and transform, oh, 100%

Shayne Daughenbaugh  02:15

100% and it’s, it’s, it’s not IT AND, OR, I think it’s, it’s it’s both. But I also believe that when we think about Lean, especially when companies are are really wanting to push lean, more often than not, they’re thinking about these big things, you know, how can we take, you know, cycle time down from four days down to four hours, or something crazy like that, you know, to where it’s totally possible, but that requires a lot of resources. You know, it requires a lot of people. It requires a lot of time. It requires people to be pulled off the job that that they are working on, in the work that they do. I mean, we have to consider all of those costs when we’re trying to think about what the ROI of this is, this project worth doing. You got to consider all those costs. But there’s also so many little things that are around us that, you know, we really, we really don’t even pay attention to, you know, I mean, as I’m thinking about it, I was just in a conversation with one of my one of my department directors, and this week earlier, and he was talking about a communication gap. Like, here’s a frustration that everyone should be able to relate to. There’s a communication gap. And what he was referring to is there are times, you know, not just in my company. I’m sure there are times in many other companies and companies you work with that, because they may be pretty large, we start kind of thinking in silos, if not working in silos. And what this director was talking about was, hey, I just found out about a group of leaders that decided, hey, this platform that we’re going to buy, the software platform we’re going to buy, is going to be able to solve all these problems for us, so let’s go ahead and buy it. And then when it was communicated to this director, they were like, you know, we already have that. We already have the capabilities to do that with the software we have, if the communication would have been kind of back and forth. You know, in part, I think the the problem that sometimes happens is you and I get in in a group, and we’re talking, and we’re all excited, but we don’t think about the impact that it’s going to have around those or on on those around us to be able to ask them, Hey, this is what we’re thinking. What do you think? Oh, you we already have something like that. Tell me more about it. Well, it doesn’t really fit. So, you know, we could still go this direction, but there are so many little things like that that could be leaned out. Shall we say. Yeah, of of the way that we work, that, you know, the opportunities are, are surrounded, you know, all the time,

Catherine McDonald  05:09

all the time, yeah, I think what you’re describing, oh, I would think every organization out there experiences that it’s just such a common problem. And something you said at the start made me think you said about, you know, I think you said KPI or measure we have. When we have a KPI or measure of something like lead time, is the example you give, right? It’s so much easier to go at that and to say, we want to bring that down and focus on the big figure, right? But then there’s all these other little, small issues, like communication. What the other example you gave that are, there’s no KPI around that, there’s no measure. And yet, one of the most frustrating things in an organization when it goes wrong. So we tend to focus on the things. And you know, we have famous sayings like, oh, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. It’s kind of true, you know? So that’s why we tend to focus our improvement on what we measure. But, and that doesn’t mean, Shane though, that we need to measure everything. So how do we get around this? How do we draw out the smaller frustrations that maybe actually aren’t so small and maybe aren’t so much of a problem, but we don’t have a measure on them. So how do we draw them out to deal with them?

Shayne Daughenbaugh  06:19

Well, I think, I think we have to acknowledge, or at least I acknowledge that you know why, why organizations will will choose big things as opposed to focusing on the small ones and not drawing those things out, is an organization’s greatest strength is also one of its greatest weaknesses. And let me explain what I mean by that. I have been in so many organizations, large and small, where one of the amazing strengths that I love recognizing is that the people, the human beings doing the work, are incredibly adept at finding work arounds, finding ways to get the work done. And they hit an obstacle, but it’s easier to it’s easier than fixing the obstacle. Is to just go around. It is to just find, hey, I you know, this is what, this is what I’m running into. Let me just do this instead, and we’ll just keep the work flowing. And doing that buries all the opportunities, or just makes us blind to the opportunities that we have out there. You know, I one of the things that I think of is it’s a stupid, silly example, but, but it always comes to mind. I was doing some work with a with a crew of

Shayne Daughenbaugh  07:38

some people at the D O T, and their work was, one of their tasks was to create these postcards and send these postcards out. And when we’re talking, when we’re talking with the public and working with, you know, maybe there’s some land that we wanted some right away, you know, purchase, or we were selling it, or whatever. So communication, there were some postcard communications they had probably, I think we rounded it up to 100 or more a week that they had to do this, and one of this, and they wanted to know if there was a better way to do this. And so we were, we were walking through all this, and I was asking them to show me what the current state is. How do you guys currently do it? And one of the last steps they did was I watched them, you know, they put everything, and they physically did all of this work, putting on a postcard. They got this label, they put the label on, but the label was too long, so they ended up cutting off the label, pulling out the scissors, cutting off the label, and sending it. And I was like, well, that’s weird. Why? Why are you doing that? You know? Well, it’s because that’s how I was trained to do okay? And this wasn’t, it’s, again, it’s not really a big deal. But if you’re doing hundreds of these, you know, a week, it can add up. You know, all of these people doing this work, stopping what they’re doing, to cut off this little, teeny strip. It’s like a quarter of an inch of label, and in the discussions and the talking, that was their workaround, like they just figured, well, we’ll just cut it off because we don’t want this to be rejected by the post office. So we went and kind of followed the trail down to whoever first trained it. Went back to our mail room and asked, Hey, do you guys know if there’s if this is even an issue? They’re like, No, it’s not just folded around the edge. It was like, Oh, now that wasn’t the only fix that was was really crucial to this, but this was something that was a workaround that they weren’t even thinking about. They were blind to this idea, you know, and, and it was such a workaround that it became the process that no one even asked about. It’s just what you do, yeah. So I was, I was in thinking about that, I was like, wow, that’s, yeah, that that’s, I see that way too often.

Catherine McDonald  09:42

I know you said it’s what you do, and to me, it’s because we don’t see them. We don’t think about these things, we don’t talk about the things we could improve, because we are do, do? Do we come in and we do the job in the way we’ve always done it, or the way we’ve been trying to do it? But when do we step. Back, and I think that’s where we can resolve some of these issues, where we step back, we come together, we we drop we ask each other, we’re curious, what’s frustrating you and we build that, you know, questioning and curiosity and kind of scientific approach into our week, and we do our lesson, you know, our our our retrospective of the week. We get our lessons learned, and then we agree in a structured way, well, what’s going to change next week? And your example there about using, you know, the folding and, you know, I was just thinking as you were talking, probably the scissors go missing, and probably that leads to a whole host of other problems, because that’s what I’ve seen. You know, it’s not just have to put it, but then you’ve got no scissors, and then you get frustrated, and then you get frustrated, and then you take somebody else’s and that causes conflict. And that’s

Shayne Daughenbaugh  10:47

what happens something that’s, you know, it’s a 10 second fix, exactly, what

Catherine McDonald  10:52

if we were to just stop? And, you know, I’m trying to do that with a group of four men on sites at the moment, with their teams. I’m trying to get them to build in this end week, question, what frustrated you? You know, in a very narrow way, to ask that question, tell me one thing that frustrated you. Don’t just say what’s frustrating? You anything frustrating you No, I’m okay. Then nothing changes, right? That’s where the leadership piece comes in. You’ve got to draw it out. You’ve got to understand it, and then you’ve got to commit to the adjustment. So, I mean, that’s your example is perfect in terms of that small issue that that that’s the way it

Shayne Daughenbaugh  11:28

could be handled. I think that’s, that’s something that that I, I feel like we kind of miss in and you mentioned, you mentioned that you used the word scientific thinking, right? When it comes to lean, we look at the big things, you know. How can we take something that takes 40 days and put it down to four? Or, how can we, you know, take something that costs this amount of money and we can find a better way to do it so we don’t have so much scrap and now it costs this amount of money, or whatever, you know, how can we better the customer experience? And we’re looking at these big projects. But one of the beautiful things about Lean is you can also just train your people, just, you know, your everyday workers, your frontline workers, all your people on that idea of scientific thinking, giving them really simple tools, like what I called, you know, what you just mentioned about, you know, the weekend retrospective. You know, I just made a sheet with a table on it and handed it to one of the groups that I was working with and say, here’s a bug list. You know, what are the things that bug? You write them down. Let’s see if they’re actually a problem. Maybe it’s just a one time thing. So, you know, you just write it down, and you don’t go back and, you know, but if you can go back and track it and go, Hey, there’s something to this, you know, that retrospective, that being aware, figure out, what does bug you? And one of the questions that that I love to I’m just now starting to really bring this with me every time I go into talking with people, you know, with groups or with teams, is what are you willing to tolerate, like there? I mean, this is another thing, not not just, you know, what’s a workaround, but what are you willing to tolerate? You know? Is it email response lag, you know? Is it people failing to to follow the SOPs? Is it passing poor quality down, expecting someone else to fix it? What? Because what you’re willing to tolerate is what the process is going to be. So being aware of that, I think, is a giant step in, oh yeah, I tolerate a lot, and I will sometimes push back on teams. They’re saying, you know, yeah, we’re going to do this. Probably this is going to happen. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we’ll just have to mitigate it later on. I’m like, wait, wait, wait, what if you didn’t tolerate that? What if you set expectations on the front end, working with this other, you know, whoever else is involved that, hey, this is our new expectation. Are you on board with that? How could we reach this expectation, oh, there’s, there’s a, there could be a really helpful dialog with that, but to stop tolerating things that just blind us again, blind us to the opportunities that are in front of us.

Catherine McDonald  14:13

Your your job is really important there, Shane, like it’s your job is not to go in and just fix things, because that it is never a sustainable solution. The way that you explain it there, your job is to help the people doing, the work, leaders and, you know, frontline workers, to become more self aware about the approach that they actually do have in terms of habits and behaviors, and to really look at that in terms of, well, why do I do this? What is my mindset that that is making me do this? And could I do it a different way, to get a different result, to make life easier for myself and everybody else you know? And when people get that, that’s a huge part of lean that we don’t always talk about in terms of the behaviors and habits and working with people and mindsets like there is a. Lot of that in order to become a lean organization. I mean, that’s almost like a fundamental so the work that you’re doing, Shane, you’re you’re working on the process, you’re looking at the process, you’re observing the process, but you understand that you’re not just there to fix a process. You’re there to change mindsets about how to deal with issues.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  15:17

Yeah, yeah. It brings me back to, we’ve talked about this several, you know, probably several times, but just taking time to reflect and having that, that reflection of, hey, why am I doing this this way? Yeah, you know, is, is there a better way to do this? What about this way doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to work, you know?

Catherine McDonald  15:41

Yeah, it’s not easy though, is it? I mean, easy right now, though,

Catherine McDonald  15:49

but I mean, what do you think so if there’s an organization, or a manager, you know, or a leader listening to this, and they say, that’s what I want for my organization, I want people to reflect. And I want to, you know, have whatever you call it Kaizen, or whether you call it retrospectives. And I want, you know, for us as teams to understand our lessons learned and to be able to adjust and cut out the small issues. And I want us to develop and continuously improve in that way. I mean, not everybody’s going to have that same mindset and same want at the same time. So what is your advice to Oregon, to somebody who might be listening, who’s maybe driving change in their organization, who wants to make this happen? What do you think you know is a realistic way to go about this?

Shayne Daughenbaugh  16:36

I mean, I have. I mean, I just have, I just have my way of going about things with people, and have just recently, like, tried to, it’s really simple. It’s like, it’s like, four steps, but to frame this in a way that catches in people’s mind, and I’m going to call it the tolerance test, going back to what I just mentioned, you know, the first thing is to notice, hey, what is it we’re tolerating. And again, this, this requires slowing down and and paying attention, rather than, you know, trying to bowl forward, ahead and just get the work done. And the the behind the scenes of that is you need permission to be able to do that like your leadership needs to support you spending a little bit of time to slow down and reflect on how we do our work, so that you can improve how you do your work, like each person can have their own opportunity. Can have their own way of looking at things, and find, you know, little things that can better their work, and you know, that can go upstream and downstream so that. So there I have four moves for this. I guess you could say in the tolerance test, first is noticing, what are you tolerating? What are the small, annoying things that you’ve stopped seeing and and that does require to, just like, stop and hold on, you know, and walking through each step of like, for instance, you know that that example of the mailing the postcard. Okay, so what part of this process just seems kind of like silly? Is a workaround, is whatever, you know, they’ll probably come up with, oh, yeah, cutting that edge off, that little bit. If I didn’t have to do that, you know, I stick it on, I throw it in. I’m good to go, and I’m, you know, we’re done. So noticing. The second thing is, I always want to make sure, in putting guardrails into Hey, what? What are the root causes of that? You know, don’t just fix what we have on the surface, but look a little bit deeper and try to figure out what is it that’s causing that? Is it? Because, you know, I’m trying to just push these through too much, and I have too much of a load on my plate, and maybe I need to talk about, hey, you know, let’s, let’s open up the conversation that I can say, Catherine, if you want me to do this, what is it you’re going to take off my plate so that I can do this? You know, there’s, there’s that, or maybe the root cause is, is something completely different. It’s not even related. Maybe it just gets passed down too or it’s an assumption that is made that no one is questioned. But first we want to notice, then we want to find the root cause, and then the third step that I want to give people is to own it, own this problem and the solution. Don’t wait for someone else to do it, especially if you’re frontline. But you have, you know, a lean managers or or lean specialists that come in and try to, you know that are part of the company. Don’t wait for them. Like own it. Make it your own. You know you don’t need a project charter or permission to do your thing instead. You know, if it’s in your control, fix it, change it. And then the fourth thing is another guard rail, and that is to check your impact. So it’s notice what is the root cause, own it and check your impact. And by that, I mean, pay attention to what happens upstream or downstream. Of your process to make sure you’re not messing it up for other people, like I would, I would hate for if I give you, you know, permission to try to change things, and you go ahead and do it, but it messes up the whole system, you know, and because you just, you didn’t happen to look behind you or in front of you as to what it’s going to do for other people. So those that’s just really simple, and that, I would say that that’s, that’s a 10 minute fix.

Catherine McDonald  20:26

Yeah, true. True. If you were to really stop and do that, you would come up with something. Now, Hmm, where could we I always think, where could that go wrong? Where could you run into Barry? How I think as well. So I think the first one with the you’ve pretty much have full control over that to notice, right? You noticed, and there’s nobody stopping you noticing. So anybody can just notice what’s happening. Notice the process, you know, really reflect, as you say, the second one, that was root cause it actually that’s probably most of that is within your control as well, because you can always ask questions, you can see to understand, yeah, not a lot there. Now the next part, own the fix. I think this is where we could get stuck. And you mentioned earlier about the importance of top down support and all of this. And I think this is where a lot of a lot goes wrong in Lean, where we say to people, yeah, lean is all it’s empowering people. It’s letting you know, people go off and solve the problems and make the changes and own it. But it doesn’t always work that way, does it? I mean, we this is where. Again, the leadership part is just so, so important, where we are. That word, again, empowering people to do this, not you know, it’s because what’s going to happen when people try and do stuff, they’re going to make mistakes. So it’s again, this is back to psychological safety, and back to, you know, making people feel safe enough to do this, not judging them when they do make a mistake. And I think that is the part that organizations are really struggling with. It’s leadership. It’s effective leadership, and we are, and I say it so much of the time, but leaders are not trained in that way to manage, to deal with people, to lead people. They’re they. They’re trained to look at the outputs and manage the outputs, but they’re not trained to be able to have conversations in the way that are needed, to be able to feel, make people feel that way, to be able to go out and do the changes. So that’s one thing that I think we have a problem with, and then check your impact is I think, also I think that that’s fine, but that needs to be done at a team level as well, which is where we don’t always have the structures and the systems and people aren’t brought together as a team to really look on a, maybe more of a cross functional level, to understand impact of changes. So talk to me just for the last few minutes about how to get around those last two because they’re where I see the most barriers.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  22:45

And what came to mind as you were talking about it is, oh, man, yeah, I’m looking at my four things. There needs to be a fifth one. And I’m not trying to complicate things, but communicate is, is, is that fifth one for me as I’m as I’m as I’m hearing the things you’re talking about, you know, communicate, communicate with, with your supervisors, with those that are above you. Because maybe, just maybe, they have something, you know, in the system that that any change that you’re making is actually going to cob up the works, you know, but they just haven’t communicated that to you. So, you know, it’s, Hey, Catherine, this is what. This is what I found. You know, I’m really tired of this happening. I think it’s a simple fix. This is what I found for the root cause. What do you think? Yep, yep. And I don’t, I don’t know where to put that. Communicate, like, Is it, is it above step two, three, or is it, you know, at the bottom, or is it just through all? Because the other thing you know for communication is, is, you know, after the check, then you then communicate that with your team, with other people, Hey, this is what I did. This is what it works. This is how I did it, and this is the impact that I believe it’s having. Do you guys have anything for me that would, you know, I’m not thinking about or maybe this could also help you in what you’re doing. I don’t know.

Catherine McDonald  24:06

I think that that what you’re describing there is just the importance of interpersonal skills in all of this, in continuous improvement. Sure, the importance of being able to communicate well with one another, the importance of knowing, you know, if it’s a tiny, simple thing that’s missing and you replace it. That’s fine, but knowing that it’s okay to say to the person next to you, oh, look, that’s missing, I think I’ll probably do this. What do you think it’s just this openness and communication and the ability to have good conversations and ask questions and all of this, it just comes into everything and everything we try to do. So yeah, I really like that, and I think that’s a really good four piece kind of framework to help anybody go out and find small ways to make small improvements that don’t take very long, but can make actually a big difference, especially when you add them all up over time. So thanks.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  24:56

I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say I want, I want to change it to five. Five, because you just brought up that communicate idea, the communication, you know, is, is, you know, intermixed in there. But it definitely needs, I want to bring that out to the surface so that people know, hey, you know, yeah, this may be, you know, within my own cubicle, but I need to communicate it out so that you know everyone or those that are that can help, you know, or that can support, or that may benefit from also, no,

Catherine McDonald  25:27

yeah, it’s kind of like, if I was looking at that as a diagram, it would be like communication is always going to be an input into, you know, a lot of these, and it’s going to be an output as well. It’s just there all the time and influencing how well this is done. So, yeah, I agree. Okay, super stuff. Well, Shane, that’s excellent. I think hopefully listeners will go out and be able to just try this, even if it just starts with being more mindful, taking that pause, gathering the information, looking to see what are the frustrations starting there, and then, you know, as you said, talking with the people around making space, creating structure in their day and in their week, to actually put those thoughts together and make a small little plan around them, if they need to, or just agree. Yep, I’ll go do that, you know, but making the space to go out and make the changes. So yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh  26:19

I will say, I will also just reiterate that the two places that I find it most often is, what do you do for work around in the process, and what are you willing to tolerate? What do you tolerate that that actually forces you to do things you wouldn’t normally do, or the process that doesn’t help the process? Yeah, and who

Catherine McDonald  26:38

asks those questions? I mean, you do. But in an organization, is it people, leaders ask themselves, is it the leaders ask their you know, supervisors, is it just get used to a culture where we ask those questions.

Shayne Daughenbaugh  26:51

I mean, when I talk, when I talk to teams about this, I just try to embed it in there. I try to embed it in their psyche. I try to get them to start asking that to themselves, to each other, you know. And I’ll share that with leadership, so that leaders also ask that, you know, on a regular basis, just like you said, Yeah, I think, I think those questions, you know, what is, what do we have a workaround? Where do we have workarounds, and what do we tolerate? Are just great questions to ask. Maybe it’s on a GEMBA, you know, if you wanted to put that in your GEMBA walks, or maybe it’s at your huddle on a weekly basis. You know, one day a week, if you’re having daily huddles, you ask that question, okay, what are work arounds? Because, you know, just asking that once, I don’t know that we’re going to be able to pick it all out, you know. You know, it’s, it’s just that iteration and over and over consistency, yeah,

Catherine McDonald  27:44

consistency with all of these things is just, is crucial with with making small improvements, but we’re asking the right questions every day, every week. Yet, I agree. Shane, it has been educational. It has been practical.

Catherine McDonald  27:57

Thank you for asking questions. It has been lovely to see you, and thank you to our listeners. Please do keep listening. We have some more great episodes coming up every week. We have different guests coming on the show over the next few weeks. And we thank you, as always, for listening to the Lean solutions podcast. Thanks to Patrick Adams and thanks to the team behind us, who are doing all of the editing and all of the work. I don’t feel like we’re working Shane, maybe we are.

Catherine McDonald  28:24

We just talk and we let them take care. We’re just having a chat. So thank you to the team who do all the really hard work

Catherine McDonald  28:30

and who put this together and who put it out. You do an amazing job. So we will, Shane, I will see you soon, and everybody else, we will see you soon. Thank you for listening. Have a good evening. Thanks