Achieving Organizational Health

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Achieving Organizational Health Guest was Karen Martin

Sponsored by

Related Podcast: Achieving Organizational Health

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Karen Martin provides Lean transformation and business performance improvement support to industry, government, and the not-for-profit sector. Karen’s broad understanding of operations design and business management stems from her experience building the operational infrastructure for several rapid growth start-up operations that each grew into multi-billion dollar companies.

Rather than entering into client engagements with a pre-determined “program” for improvement, Karen and her team of industry experts tailor transformation approaches that fit their clients’ unique needs. They generate rapid results, while simultaneously developing deep problem solving and continuous improvement capabilities at all levels of the organization. This enables their clients to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. Whether you need assistance in undertaking a full organization transformation, jump-start a stalled program, or merely developing a core capability or two, Karen Martin & Associates can help your company achieve its business performance goals and profit through simplicity.

The Outstanding Organization website page has a downloadable chapter, related webinars on the four key behaviors (Clarity, Focus, Discipline, Engagement).

Karen has been on the Business901 Podcast before discussing Holding Successful Kaizen Events. She co-authored The Kaizen Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service, and Technical Environments and was a developer of a favorite tool of mine, Metrics-Based Process Mapping: An Excel-Based Solution.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Transcription of Podcast Joe Dager: Welcome everyone, this is Joe Dager, the host of the Business 901 podcast, with me today is Karen Martin. Karen is a recognized thought leader, and is internationally known for her lean work, and her widely acclaimed workshops on white collar kaizen. She is co-author of the Kaizen event planner, and with her most-recent book, The Outstanding Organization, she has launched herself to another plateau. I would like to welcome you Karen and congratulate you, and apologies for the pun, but for an outstanding book.

Karen Martin: Thank you Joe, thanks so much for having me on the podcast again, it's great to talk with you.

Joe: When I first started the book, I thought it was going to be clarity, let's get focused book, but you surprised me.

Karen: How so?

Joe: You had the most practical undertone I had read in a long time that was about doing, and the first half of the book had so much meaning after I read the second half, that I had to re-read the first half. I don't think I got it all the first time.

Karen: Isn't that interesting, because the concepts are so surprisingly simple, yet there's a lot of depth to the whole topic around clarity and what clarity really is, and how do we really achieve it, and all the different elements. It is interesting that it sounds so seemingly simple, yet there are a lot of layers to everything. The discipline part was the easiest to write from a prescriptive perspective because, it was much of a step one, step two, step Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems three. Clarity was tough to write about, because there were so many different elements around clarity, and it's tough to give general solutions to problems that are very specific in organizations.

My goal in clarity was really to heighten awareness and offer a few tips on what to do to get rid of ambiguity and gain greater clarity, but it was really about just start paying attention to how unclear things are and then take the appropriate action based on that.

Joe: Usually I ask this at the end, but I'm interested in finding out your answer to this.

What is the single most important message you would want readers to take from your book?

Karen: You know; I've been asked that actually a fair amount, and what I quickly said the first time I was asked it in the middle of an interview was if I had to pick one of my four children, which is always difficult to do, I would say that it's focus. It's because year and year out for 20-plus years of doing this work, I find the thing that trips organizations up the most of all four of them is they just have this prevailing organizational ADD, attentiondeficit disorder, where they keep jumping from project to project before it's completed.

That jumping around creates such a high degree of chaos, and it drains the workforce of their psychic energy and their creative potential to be able to contribute, that to me, if you did nothing but focus on focus, you would move your organization way far ahead.

Joe: You bring up my next question and lead into it perfectly. Planning seems to be so taboo. Even the lean startup version of PDCA is Build, Measure, and Learn. Planning, it just seems we're dropping the planning from the cycle. Is there still room for planning?

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Karen: Oh, yes. I'm so glad you asked that question because a lot of my content got on the cutting-room floor because I had far more words than what my contract was for. One of the things I went into in detail, that got cut, was my...I don't know...I'm frustrated with what's going on out there around planning and there are a lot of people that are playing into it. So I touch on Gladwell's comments about planning, and I touch on other people and their anti-planning, guys who are out there, and I think it's just wrong, just wrong because I think what happens, and I mentioned this very quickly in the book, is that people have gotten the plan confused with the process of planning.

The criticisms I keep hearing about planning is that, "Well, the world is so fluid, and you have to be flexible and agile." Of course, you do but who said that once you get a plan in place, you may not ever, under any circumstances, deviate from it. No one said that and yet that's how organizations have behaved. So once again, we throw the baby out with the bathwater on an extremely robust and necessary part of performing well and people say, "Ah, forget the plans. We can't plan," and that's just wrong.

Joe: A well-thought-out plan is going to include the ability to adapt.

Karen: Well right. That's what PDSA is or PDCA. That is about adapting based upon current conditions. There's a lot going on even in the Lean community that's smelling as though people were saying, "Well, stop with your plans, stop with your to-do list, and stop with this..." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. Don't stop with it but use PDCA/PDSA as it was intended," which is being very present with what your experiment's results are showing, alter your hypothesis, go back experiment again, and keep on adapting based on your new information.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joe: Well, you brought up a good subject in the book, and it's about discipline. Could you explain what you mean by discipline as it relates to an organization?

Karen: Yes, thank you for asking that. So in a nutshell, it would be standard work. So your standard work around decision making, standard work around problem solving, standard work around actual process improvement, and standard work in how work gets done. So it's really getting far more consistent so you can become more predictable and reduce the variation that we ourselves create so we have the bandwidth to deal with the variation. That's just the nature of the beast and part of being a business. It's a methodical approach to how you schedule meetings and how you put a team together. It's just being much more thoughtful and methodical about how decisions are made, and work is done.

Joe: Standard work always gets a bad rap, but to me, I think that is the majority of everyone's days, including leaders. Organizational health is about standard work that's really what puts groceries on the table, and what you need to concentrate on to insure what you do well and do what you are talking about, the focus and the chaos and then...

Karen: Lack of standard work is what causes chaos, and it will never not cause chaos if you don't have some degree of standardization. Back to your point about standard work getting a bad rap, I very much agree with you, and it's been getting an increasingly high number of hits from people that do, again, not understand what standard work is. I wish if people didn't understand what it was they wouldn't talk about it because they are confusing the people that are just learning about standard work and creating some negativity around it. That's just not really very helpful. So here's my take on it. Standard work; over standardization is as dangerous as under standardization. And what a lot of Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems newbies to lean that got trained and got certificates and everything when out there and thought that standard work was the be all end all well it's not. So you have to have flexibility even within standard work to handle different conditions in different scenarios, but you can still standardize those different scenarios. We could talk about standard work for the whole podcast.

Joe: You talk about discipline, but you talk about in a frame of organizational versus people because discipline is not about people it is about the organization. It is the discipline in the organization, and that is what drives the chaos out of it.

Karen: Right, actually all four of the conditions I talk about are dealt with at an organizational level understanding that the organization is a group of people. So it does start at an individual level, but it's more setting the system in place and the organizational psyche in place to enable individuals to behave the way they need to in order to get the organization to behave as it needs to as a whole. So it's definitely a holistic thing that I'm working for.

Joe: Could you name the four and briefly describe them?

Karen: Sure, the first one is clarity, and I coach that is the toughest to get and it's clarity in thought word and deed. It's clarity around what an organization's mission is, it's clarity around what the priorities are for the year, what the goals are for the year, making sure everyone understands them clearly, what they are, clarity in language so that when you have people sitting in a room together they are actually speaking the same language, and you don't have; it's like having someone who speaks French only, sitting there with someone who speaks Spanish only, and no wonder we don't communicate well. It's clarity Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems in roles and responsibilities, who does what. Who exactly do you go to if you need to get input on blah, blah, blah in those kinds of things?

So focus. Focus is sticking to a plan of action until there are very compelling reasons not to. So it's everything from prioritizing projects and improvement priorities so that in getting consensus around us. So it's not about prioritizing in one person's head. It's organization-wide consensus so that it's not as tempting to be distracted when new things come along, and you get people moving together to completion and getting things done well before they move on. So that's focus.

Discipline we talked about a little bit already so I would just add that disciplined problem solving is probably the ripest area I see. From most organizations, they need to have methodology that everyone in the organization uses so that you get consistent critical thinking around, and you eliminate or at least reduce the possibility of Band-Aids and the core solutions not really being the solutions because the problem was incurred to begin with and there was no methodology for achieving that.

And the last is the one that doesn't belong with the others, but it's a result of the others, and that's engagement. So this deep implies engagement where they are actively involved in all the decisions that are being made not strategic decisions but daily decisions. They are using their creative potential much of the time versus the opposite that usually happens.

And they are the ones that are solving problems at a tactical level versus; those quote solutions being dictated to the front lines, from managers who really don't do the work.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems The other thing about engagement that's critical is to get people looking at the whole organization holistically, allows all the inter-departmental tension that exists to melt away.

I see it over and over and over, and it's a beautiful thing when it happens.

Joe: Well, just to mention the part on engagement, when I looked at the book, I couldn't wait to get to that section because I thought, here's where Karen and I are going to really butt heads.

We're going to have some different opinions here, and I am not sure that I've read a better forty pages on engagement.

Karen: Thank you Joe. Joe: I know you spoke at the human-resource conference in Atlanta. Have you received feedback, from human-resource people on that chapter yet?

Karen: I have, not from that chapter in the book. But I did from my talk, which was based on the book. The HR folks that were in the audience loved what I had to say, very much believe I was spot on, but they don't feel they have the ability to affect change within their organizations. So I may be developing a new mission. My new mission may be to get HR departments positioned within organizations in a more effective way than they currently are. So that they can regain some of the leverage, that they used to have decades ago and to play that significant role in an operational performance improvement and business performance improvement overall.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Somehow they've gotten relegated to being order takers and transaction based people about benefit plans, and performance reviews, and hiring and firing. Somehow they've been left out of the improvement loop in a not so helpful way.

Joe: One of the things that really caught my eye is because I use Zappos and Zingerman as a couple of companies, when I talk about building culture and people. They go through great strides on who they hire.

That's root cause just about, isn't it?

Karen: Yeah, I think it's really tempting, and I've been in the hiring mode a lot. It's common to refer to people in a disrespectful way as a quote warm body. But what I mean by that is it's very tempting to get a warm body in the door, because you've got a need that you need to fill, and not take your time to make sure it's a good match. And that person comes into the organization, as full complement, of the thought process that's in place that you need for the organization. It's tempting to try to, get the numbers filled.

Joe: When you talk about the engagement, you bring pair programming into it. Briefly describe pair programming. But then, can that practice be done outside of software?

Karen: In fact, the reason why I put it in the book was that I've been applying it in almost every industry there is, and it's so successful. So pair programming, for the listeners that may not know about it, it started in software development. It's taking two developers sitting side by side with one keyboard and one monitor. One person's Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems designated as the driver, the other person's designated as the observer or the navigator.

The driver is actually coding while the other person is watching it, looking ahead, looking for problems, and they are together actively problem solving real time. It's the two minds are better than one philosophy.

The problem most organizations have with it is at first glance it feels like your doubling your labor expense. But you're not, not even close. You're actually reducing expenses, because when you count the number of labor that goes into rework and delays and delivering and all the different things that happen when you got one-person writing code, it's a significant benefit to pair programmers together.

Joe: Does that help, bring more people together?

Because once you have two, isn't it easier to engage four?

Karen: Well, it's interesting. I never tried it with three or four people together, because I do think; you get too many cooks in the kitchen. What's being done sometime, when I suggest pairing, isn't really what's meant by pairing. It's not taking someone with a very well developed skill set, pairing them with someone with a very undeveloped skill set.

That's not the primary use of pairing. Although you can use it that way to build skill sets, and you do develop skill sets when you pair any two people together. But that's not its primary purpose; its purpose is to problem solve real time, catch errors as they're occurring and get a more robust product out as a result.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems So the people that are working together get this greater sense of confidence in their own ability, cause their producing better work and their learning as they go and their learning problem-solving skills. You're getting a significant long-term benefit in developing the work force that way. Their fully engaged, they can't be disengaged when they're in a pair.

Joe: When we talk about current employees and the current organization is this one way of creating and introducing engagement to them?

Karen: By the pairing?

Joe: Yes. Karen: I'm not sure that I use it as my primary or my first approach to engagement.

Actually kaizen events are usually what I turn to show how deeply engaged they can get the workforce and how excited people get, around work and an improvement as a result of a kaizen event participation. I actually always turn to pair because of a quality problem, and the engagement part of it happens to be a side benefit. But it's very tactical to solve a quality problem. So for example, in a hospital setting I was working with, these nurses in doing medication reconciliation at discharge. High stakes, high-risk process, often done poorly, and people can die as a result of it, so it's a pretty big deal. Nurses were in my class; they were always doing this alone, and it's a very complex process to look at all the meds someone came into the hospital on, all the ones they had while they were in the hospital and what the physician or physicians are suggesting they're on, when they leave the hospital. So it's a complex process. First of all, it's complex so one person has a hard time seeing everything and getting it done well.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems But then there were always these interruptions and by pairing two people together and putting them in a cone of silence, as I call it, then they're able to have two eyes on a complex task, and they are able to do it without interruption. The quality of that task then goes through the roof. That's just one example. I've used it in financial services; I've used it in engineering design, for different pieces of a process, and it's wildly successful.

Joe: Well you have hosted and facilitated as many kaizen events as anyone, I would imagine, and they seem to have a bad rap at the moment. Are they needed? Are they a good way to introduce something?

Karen: Yes. The bad rap, just like the bad rap for planning, I think a lot people give things a bad rap when they haven't really experienced, what's good about it. So the bad rap comes first from people who have never experienced a good kaizen event, and also from those who have grown up with a very pure view of Toyota Production Systems. And Toyota does use them, but they don't use them extensively, because they've got a culture that can solve problems and get rapid results in another way.

Organizations that aren't Toyota, and didn't grow up with the Toyota thinking and management style are starting from a deficit position. And so kaizen events to me are first a way to shape behavior.

Yes, you get rapid results. I consider the shaping behavior as a bigger benefit to kaizen events than the rapid results. I just don't understand the nay saying that goes on around kaizen events because they are wildly effective.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems I guess one thing I will say about the nay saying, one thing that people are correct about, is if organizations become what I call addicted to kaizen events, where they only make improvements during a kaizen event? Well, that's of course just wrong.

You want to build daily improvement into the culture. But that's not what I use kaizen events for. I use them to build daily skill sets, so the organizations can perform that way in the years to come, without having kaizen events. It's to teach those behaviors.

Joe: So I could use kaizen events to get out of organizational chaos.

Karen: Absolutely. Actually, every kaizen event I have ever facilitated helps reduce chaos. It may be a very local level, but it absolutely reduces chaos.

Joe: You mention a lot of lean terms, Toyota, and PDSA in your book, but do I need to be a Lean company to benefit from the book?

K. S.: No, no. In fact, if you're a Six Sigma kind of company, then you could easily replace PDSA with DMAIC, although there are certainly some benefits to PDSA and PDCA in that they're cyclical and DMAIC is linear. But we won't go into that.

Joe: No showing of partiality here.

Karen: No, no, no. There are good reasons for my partiality, but that's another podcast.

But you don't even have to be a Six Sigma company. You could be a company that doesn't have a formal methodology that you're using, and you're just using common sense to make improvements. The challenge is making improvement on a cracked foundation.

Businesses are trying to do that, and it's why improvement isn't any more successful than Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems it is. So you have to rebuild that foundation, seal up those cracks by infusing greater clarity, focus discipline and engagement in the organization. And then any improvement will be far, far, far more successful.

Joe: Well, I was quite surprised with your Blue Angel ending; I was more surprised when I got to the appendix, the reference to the Socratic questioning and Richard Paul because I spent about two years of my life in a deep dive studying his work and other related work about it. I thought it was a very interesting twist to bring that in at the end. Why did you do it?

Karen: The questions are actually a sidearm of the coaching piece that I talk about in the engagement section, because coaching is the ability...and actually during discipline as well...coaching is the necessary step in order to build the discipline process for problem solving into an organization. You can't just learn it by reading a book, people need to be coached by someone who knows the process; it also is a way to get deep engagement, by having a coach and teaching people a skill set.

The coaching methodology that I learned had a lot of appreciative inquiry as part of it, so that you could break a coach's habit, and I was absolutely one of these people, type A personality; I've got the answer, when I was an employer in my early career, I absolutely was guilty of telling my employees what to do.

Fortunately, I had some good mentors who told me, no-no-no, you need to help develop them, and you don't do that by telling them what to do. What I found in teaching coaches, for example, with A3 problem solving, the way to keep someone from telling people what Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems to do, is to teach them how to ask better questions, and to use questions as a teaching methodology.

Not questions just for the questions' sake, but questions that help the person realize that they are maybe on the wrong path, or they maybe want to look over here. When I got into the questions, that's how I bumped into Richard Paul, I actually had never heard of him until I did this book. That's fascinating that you studied him.

Joe: Karen, why don't you just expand a bit without giving the ending of the book away, about the Blue Angels?

Karen: I looked for organizations outside of business that I felt were outstanding, because to be frank, I had a very difficult time finding a large number of businesses that I considered to be outstanding based on my definition. I looked to the arts, and sports, and military, and the Blue Angles just jumped out at me as being the organization in my world view that is just consistently outstanding. I found myself a Blue Angel pilot and started getting a deep dive into their world, and he spent so much time with me; he was very generous in helping me understand exactly why they're so outstanding. Sure enough, they have this impeccable clarity about their show, and what they're going to be doing every second of that show, and they have clarity around their mission, and all of that.

They're extremely focused, there is probably no other organization as focused. I've heard that as a team maintains and demands the level of focus that they do from their pre-show and post-show briefings where no one is allowed in and how they go about this whole routine they've got to stay focused on the show and then dissecting it afterwards. Then the disciplined approach they have towards training, there's nothing like it.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems They are very, very engaged, of course, is necessary in what they do. I am bit of a Blue Angel's fan. Not a bit, I'm a huge fan of what they do.

Joe: Is there something that you would like to add that maybe I did not ask?

Karen: I think one thing it's important for every listener to understand is that while we're talking about organizational performance and organizational clarity, organizational focus all starts at individual level and to a department level or team group level actually, department level, and then division level. So it doesn't have to be the CEO of the organization to clear we're going to become more outstanding than we are and this is how we are going to do it. It doesn't have to be a top-down driven approach.

It could be anybody who has any stake in organization starting at their local level. Even if it's just an employee who doesn't have an employee's reporting to them, asking questions to clarify and drawing people's attention to the fact that having a little bit of ADD going on that type of thing.

Supervisors are managers, or in an ideal place to start driving these principles into their departments and their work teams. And then, of course, further up the organization you go the greater the gains will be but it all starts one step at a time. Everyone can play a role in instilling clarity, focus, discipline, and engagement in their organization.

Joe: What is upcoming on your agenda?

Karen: I have my next book already in mind, and it is an off shoot of this book. I haven't really started sketching it out in detail yet, because I am busy promoting this book and Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems frankly, need to take a bit of a rest. I actually have another book in the works as well that will be more of a how-to book with Productivity Press.

Joe: How can someone contact you?

Karen: My web site is KSMartin.com; that's S as is Sue, KSMartin.com, you can find all the different ways to connect with me on social media straight from the home page on my website.

Joe: Is there a book website?

Karen: It's actually part of my website, so it's KSMartin.com/the-outstanding-organization; you can click right on the home page and get straight to the book page.

Joe: I would like to thank you very much Karen; I think it was an outstanding broadcast.

Joe: I look forward to hearing more about what you're up to.

Karen: Thanks Joe, it was really nice talking with you again, thank you very much.

Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901

Business901

Podcast Transcription Implementing Lean Marketing Systems Joseph T. Dager Business901 Phone: 260-918-0438 Skype: Biz901 Fax: 260-818-2022 Email: jtdager@business901.com Website: http://www.business901.com Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and organizations, purchase related tools, use some free ones and receive feedback from your peers.

Marketing with Lean Book Series included in membership Lean Sales and Marketing Workshop Lean Service Design Workshop Achieving Organizational Health Copyright Business901