Sara Hanks introduces us to another method to get going with Process Improvement – Start in the Middle.

And you're exposing the critical element of change or process improvement that if you've got ownership executives that it supported, life is a lot easier. Yes. But that's a rarity. Yeah. At least in my experience, it's a rarity. And what in essence, starting in the middle opens up is kind of the Japanese Kaizen. Everybody has a responsibility in my view, but has the opportunity to improve their job, their process, their operation. whether or not there's budget, secondary issue, whether or not there's time, all of us can squeeze time somehow. And I think that your blog is kind of exposing that, isn't it?

Yes. I should actually, I should include that in the next, in the April newsletter as a book to read.

Yeah, I think what bugs you is what, you know, I characterize it as sore spots. What keeps you up at night? What wakes you up at night when you're worrying about something? Everybody's got these things.

What makes me crazy is that if there is something bugging you, why don't you fix it? Yeah. People tend not to. You remember my five things? Give me five things that you can do that'll make your job better. Give me five things that are a pain in the butt to do. Give me five things that'll make your life easier. The number of elements are on all three lists that are still there. Astounds me. Yeah. And you might see that every day.

don't know. You know, I'm hopeful always that the millennials, the younger millennials, the X's and Z's and the alphas that are coming are going to be a lot more focused in that direction than my generation has been in the older millennials. We've been change resistant.

And I have a hard time with that.

That's why I got into consulting in my early 30s. The identification of an issue, the study of the issue. exposing the options, communicating the options, coming to a conclusion, then implementing. It was like lava, painfully slow. Yeah. In the consulting world, I could spend projects, assignments a month apart. So it was not like I'm watching it every day, going in once a month. Well, there's progress. This is good.

Yeah. And I think that's one of the enemies from starting with the middle because. it's catch as catch can as a time element, isn't it? How can people organize their time to do this individually? Is there any magic that you've found?

in my brain. You're starting to think about cookies.

It's funny, you know. Have you used a trip tick at all? The AAA has a trip tick?

If you think about your project as, okay, here's where I want to go. There's the end point. So I want to drive from Los Angeles to New York. There's no point in thinking of Los Angeles to New York. As Triptych does, they take you in increments. Yeah. So you have to stop. Yeah. Well, you stop for a restroom break. You stop for a meal. You stop to sleep. You do all of these things. Gas fill up. And in a project, you do the same thing. So I'm going to drive from LA to New York. It's going to take me 100 hours, whatever the time period is. And I'm going to sleep six hours a night. So how long is it going to take me driving? Meals, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the same determination you do on the project. And now you're talking time chunking. It's amazing how that makes life easier, isn't it?

Well, it also builds pressure. It creates stress because you don't get those individual details done according to what you had originally planned. But if you use time chunks, it's much more positive.

I just completed a redo on our labor efficiency class. And the enemy to efficiency in every case is interruptions. And on repair and maintenance tasks, they say it takes half an hour to an hour for a technician who's been taken off a job that he hadn't completed to get to the point that he can start up again. So it's a really...

Six and a quarter percent to 13 percent every day. And I want a minimum of 90 percent labor efficiency. So if you take a guy off a job, that's my number one rule in labor. Never take a guy off a job he hasn't completed. And that means you never give them a task that's longer than eight hours or a shift. Right. And in project management, process improvement, the same thing's true, isn't it?

That startups and wind down. The other thing about chunking is, okay, I've just taken up 50 minutes. I allocated an hour. I can't get the next task in 10 minutes done. I'm going to move on to the next chunk. Yeah. Do you find yourself doing that?

See, it's a hard habit to break, isn't it? When you're trying to do multitasking things. Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable. On these tasks that you're dealing, starting at the middle, in the operation you're in now where you don't have funding, that gives you a license to proceed, doesn't it? Starting in the middle. Yeah. And how many are on your team doing this?

So four of you doing different tasks, are you able to do tasks that you can complete in a day? Can you break your process improvement projects down that tight?

Do you always do a process map with your projects?

So how do people who aren't used to that, so your project leader goes out to the world, to a section of the company, and they're going to deal with a group of people that aren't used to process improvement, how do they deal with the creation of a process map? Is that intuitively easy for them or is it difficult?

Exactly. That's a word that I was going to pop in. Clarity is missing on almost any process.

Same thing with job descriptions. Ideally, the job description is the job function. What are the functions that you perform? And then for every one of those functions, wouldn't it be nice if I had a process map that everybody agreed upon? Yeah. I mean, it makes life a whole heck of a lot easier.

I used to struggle with that all the time. Job description is something that I don't think the businesses do all that effectively and probably because they don't think of it in terms of identifying a function as much as trying to police the activity of the employee. And that I don't believe I think we've got a cross purpose goal with a job description. And then you go to performance standards. It's even worse. You know, I used to have a thing I called guidelines instead of policies and procedures. And the guideline would relate to one task or one piece of a process. And there'd be an owner. There's a data element. There'd be a frequency of review when it was done, if there's financial implications or not, and all the rest of this stuff. But in one of your blogs, you talked about the challenge of data accuracy. Yeah. That's another symptom of lack of clarity, isn't it?

What do you think of? a data dictionary? Is that something that you think is important or not?

It's kind of where you and I live. You know, if I don't have data, I don't know what I've got. Everybody's got opinions. You know, it's like our nose, you know, mine's too big, you know, whatever it is. But and ownership in, you know, the data dictionary came in to business normalcy. back probably in the 60s or 70s with computers and the advent of IBM's database packages, DB1 and 2, et cetera. But data ownership, that really created, that exposed a sore spot. George owns the price of a part. Oh, my Lord. Because all manner of people were changing prices. Yeah. It's chaos.

Well, yeah, and it's also worse because every element of the data dictionary, again, I don't want to take you off track. I'm starting in the middle, but I need a definition. I need a description of what the heck that damn thing is that everybody can understand, accept, and be committed to. Yeah. And we typically don't deal well with that. When you're communicating on a process map. with the team that is involved with it, I don't imagine that it's constantly approved that that's how it's done or consistently approved that that's how it's done. Isn't there an argument in there?

And then how frequently do we want to review and make sure that's still applicable?

Yeah, there you go. I call that people getting into ruts or what, you know, I want them to look up over the wall because they get into a track. DeSoto called it Thinking Outside the Box. Just to be a pain, I call it Think Outside the Triangle. But because we get into these routines and ruts and we're, like you said, we're comfortable with that. We shouldn't

But people don't seem to have come to that conclusion yet. I think we're getting closer. I think the younger generations are much more attuned to that than my generations, the older generations. Do you notice that in companies that you're involved with?

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the presidents of the university that I've been dealing with, I asked him, what are the challenges that you face with people coming out of high school into university? What are the shortfalls? What are the gaps? And he rattled off very quickly three things, analytical skills, critical thinking skills, and communication skills. And problem solving, we can kind of figure that out. The road is closed. There's a detour. I can figure out how to get around that. Okay, that's cool. But how can I? create the process such that I don't run into that again. Yeah. That's different. Yeah. The other point that he. That's a good point. It is, isn't it?

Yeah. It's, it's funny. I guess math physics being my schooling. conditioned me differently. You know, science today seems to be a movable subject. In my world, it isn't. Science is black and white. It doesn't change. We somehow made that different. You know, momentum is momentum, weight is weight, and that's the end of that tune. And industrial engineering, like you say, there was weights, decisions, delays. Lack of resources, lack of resources being people or tools or things. And those things are pretty straightforward. And when you start listing those things off, people understand it. And they can solve that one problem. But they don't once they're so like you said, they're focused on problem solving, not problem avoidance. It's like firefighters. Everybody thinks of a firefighter putting out fires. 95% of their time is avoiding fires in the first place, preventing them from happening. We don't think that way at work.

Yeah, that's, I guess that's it.

Yeah, everybody still talks about the firemen going up in the Twin Towers. Instead of everybody else is coming down, they're going up. They're heroes. Yeah, they don't think about the fact that 95% of their time. I ask people in the company, and you might have this in your process, improvement. Are you working in the business or on the business?

And that's that, I'm comfortable in my rut. I'm in the business. I'm not looking at how I could do this better. And that seems to the majority of the people. Yeah. Sarah. I don't know if we're ever going to break that blog down.

Yeah, I say we have to be chameleons. We have to be what our audience expects us to be, which means we've got to fit into them. They don't need to fit into us. But, you know, it's like you say, we find things that we read. The data scientist side, they know what we're doing. This is cool. So I don't let's go. You know, we're in a freight train when I'm to the management trying to figure out what we're doing. And the other guys, they're in a bullet train and let's go. And that's part of the problem, isn't it, though?

don't teach that as parenting either. No. You know, I taught a university for five or six years. I've taught for 50 years of my life. And I say this quite nakedly to people. We are taught as people to be obedient. And it starts at home. Don't touch the stove. You're going to burn yourself. Look both ways. You're going to get hit by a car. All of this stuff. This is cursive writing, which we've dropped. But this is how you write. This is number theory. This is how you add. Then you get out of the business world. And most people get hired. They're onboarded, whatever that means. They're trained on how to do the job by somebody. And it's the old-fashioned, like, learning how to fly with assistants to assistants solo. And in teaching, I used to call it show, tell, show, try. I'm going to show you what I want you to do. Then I'm going to tell you what I just showed you. Then I'm going to show you again. And then I want you to try it. And I'm going to be here while you try it. And that ends with the statement from the leader, whoever the trainer was. Well, do this now because I want you to be able to do it with more accuracy and faster. And that's how you get rewarded. And that's kind of. So if I'm a blacksmith, I'm going to be using a blacksmith theory that's a thousand years old. Makes no sense whatsoever. We completely disable any thinking that the employee has about how to do the job. Yeah. That's our approach. Yeah, that's our culture, isn't it? And Japanese culture is totally different. How do they do that? I still don't know because I've worked over there a lot. Every single person seems to be driven to do it better.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, and it's a Western European style too. You go along to get along. We get criticized if we, you know, you're walking outside the lines here. Don't do that. Get back here. Right? Yeah. And what did we do in production lines, Sarah? Didn't we start having this moving line that moved at a certain pace? And if we wanted to make more cars, we sped up the line without the employee knowing about it. And all of a sudden, I realized they weren't able to keep up. Keep up. It's really remarkable. So starting from the middle allows people to start, allows people a taste of the improvement. Yeah. When you do that, do you find that they start? questioning and challenging more things or does it change at all?

Yeah, I call those sacred cows. Those things they've been doing forever and don't. One of the U.S. Olympic teams had a clinical psychiatrist involved, I think in Mexico City. And he wrote a book, Sacred Cows Make Better Burgers, was his book. And this is 40 years ago or more. And he had what he called sacred cow hunts. He would create a group of people, two or three, in a company and say, okay, go find something, anything. And paper forms. Have you ever gone through a process improvement that takes an inventory of every pre-printed form that a company uses? That's pretty sobering. Yeah. And then the frequency with which they're used, that's even more sobering. One of my friends and colleagues, his name is Alex Schuessler. He started Smart Equip, a smart guy, PhD, written a couple of books. And he says, all we've done is we've taken a piece of paper form and put it onto the screen. So he calls it paper to glass. We haven't changed the process at all. We just made it faster.

three fingers, you know? Yeah. It's remarkable. Every single corner you look at, forums, hours of work. Why do we do it this way? Why do we have eight to five or whatever the hours of work are? Why don't we have five to three?

In Asia, the kids are going to school five days a week, but 10 hours a day.

And they're tutored on Saturday. Everybody.

My grandson, like I didn't like going to school. I was doing too many other things. But so I'm a bad example. But somehow you could have caught me. You needed to attract me to do something. Same thing with an employee. How do we attract people to make things better? Well, first, it starts with asking them to. Yeah. And they're going to look at you funny. What do you mean? Do it better. How do I do that? Isn't that faster? No, it's not faster. How do we equate? How come we equate fast with better?

It's not a race. It's not a race. We had the Honolulu Marathon was yesterday,26 miles. And there's some people that take 10,12 hours. They walk it. But how many people, you know, that are going to walk 26 miles? Not very many. That's kind of a cool thing. There's one couple that have done it for 50 consecutive years.

And the people that do it fastest are running at 10.3 miles an hour. The average speed in cars in London, England today is 15 miles an hour.

So continuous improvement, like you go back 50 years. We didn't have a four-minute mile.

You go back 50 years, we didn't have a seven-foot high jump, a 16-foot pole vault. All of these things constantly in athletics change. I don't know if you noticed, but Alex Kraft and I did, he did a blog on getting better. And we did a podcast about it. He's athletic. He played basketball. He's used to, you know, practicing, training. trying to get better, measurable things. And then he goes to work and it's not there anymore. If you aren't involved in athletics, you don't notice that. If you are involved in athletics, you do. And remarkably, the hits on that blog were one of the highest that we've ever had. Wow. It's just everybody's acknowledging, oh, darn it, that's true. Yeah. Continuous improvement, getting better. Yeah. At work, at a process, getting better as a person, employee development. seeking your potential. All of these things are related, aren't they?

So I'm taking you away from the article. Other than starting in the middle and realizing success is to be encouragers, what are some of the other things that you'd like to highlight?

How do you think we should deal with technological change? Is that something that we should maybe have a session with everybody in the company or everybody in the department say, you know, let's just look at telematics or let's just look at sensors in componentry or let's just look at fault codes. In my opinion today is our technological capabilities are so far outstripped what we've actually implemented. It's scary.

Yeah. How is it scary to you?

Yeah. Yeah, the ripping off the artist. Think in terms of Spotify or iHeartRadio. Or here's something that's relatively current. You realize in an electric vehicle, you don't have AM radio.

Because of the electromagnetic fields that interfere with the signal coming from the AM radio. So what's going to happen to traffic reports and weather reports and those things? Are they going to go FM? Obviously, it's going to have to. Does this mean the end of AM radio stations? Wow. We electrify. It's a rather overpowering statement, isn't it? Yeah. Did you know you couldn't get an AM station in an electric car?

Now, recently, Google, who owns Waze, is putting the two of them together. Yeah. I don't know that that's good or bad because you open up the same thing, the scary aspect. Somebody puts a frivolous comment out there, there's a traffic jam on exit 20B, and there isn't. All of the people are going to go past a store that they wouldn't see if they got off at 20B, but they do see if they get off at 19A.

Yeah. So you wrote a song like the argument between John Lennon and Paul McCartney about who wrote Imagine. You know, it's kind of it's really weird where we go with these things. Look at the mess that the world is in, according to the people that have been on Twitter forever. Now that Elon Musk has bought it. Yeah. It's going to be really interesting. He spent 44 billion of his own money to supposedly bring free speech to a platform that is causing all manner of problems. Yeah. So here comes a person that's involved in process repugnant. That guy is a pain in the butt. He's always coming through trying to change things. Makes my life really difficult. How do you overcome that?

What that's trying to point out, at least from my point of view, Sarah, is that there is built-in resistance that at some point in time is going to say enough.

There's a Mexican proverb. You don't make a door by hitting your head against a wall. No, but you can walk around it. Yeah. It's remarkable, isn't it? This is a tough subject. Change is a tough element. I tease in classrooms, if you think change at work is hard, tell your wife you're going to sleep on the other side of the bed. Oh, no. Ain't going to happen.

That's right. So, you know, tell me how the couch is, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

It's the same thing with clock radios that are at your night table. Yeah. You know, the more recent ones have an automatic dimming. It's only when they sense movement does the light come on. Because I'm like you. I like darkness, total darkness. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's at work, making process improvements is critically important. If only because of the changes in technology, they're forcing us to make changes. We have to make changes if we want to live. The whole, you know, look at what Amazon did to bookstores. Look at what Walmart did to shopping centers. All these things have changed. Walmart identified something. Bezos identified something. Zuckerberg identified something. Bill Gates, Elon Musk. So there are these inventors. There's fewer or there's more innovators, but there's still fewer innovators than there are workers. Any hope, do you think, to create a common worker as an innovator, how to turn them into innovators?

The creativity statement you made is, I think, really powerful. Everybody is creative.

We think of creativity as artists or musicians or sculptors or something, but we're all creative. It's a function of human behavior. And creativity in that sense, from my perspective, is that we all are capable of identifying solutions to problems we're facing. Yes. You know, we don't do enough training in business anymore. We don't do enough adult training, re-education. It's becoming more common. But one of the things that would be really nice would be to have a continuous improvement training session once a month, just carving out some time that we're going to, we're just going to take this thing on, whatever it is. We're considering making the start time of the company optional. As long as you're here between the hours of six to nine and you will leave eight hours later, two to five, we're okay with that. And having a discussion about that would blow people's minds.

not joking. It would blow people's minds. Think in terms of Los Angeles traffic. I don't know if you've ever seen the five, seven lane, eight lane highway to Los Angeles.

Largest parking lot in the world.

pretty dangerous. But again, we almost become immune to thinking about that. Why the devil don't we have alternate hours for work? The reason we have those traffic jams is because everybody starts at the same damn time. Yeah. I thought working from home with the pandemic was going to change people's thinking. Not really. Some, yes, but it's the young folks. There was a statistic I saw the other day. 14 million people between the ages of 20 and 34 are not looking for work or working. They checked out. They've had an epiphany. They don't like what they see. They're not going to participate.

They sit at home collecting unemployment or welfare. And they're happy. And I had to, it's different, right? Yeah. And an individual I was talking with the other day and she said to me, well, that's always been true. I said, really? She said, well, hasn't it always been true? I said, well, where are you getting the statistics? She said, well, I thought that a lot of young people didn't want to work. Not the generation that I grew up in. Everybody, when you finish school, you went to work, period.

You were trying to get away

You're trying to get away from living at home. Today, they're very comfortable living at home. The parents put up with it. Wait a second. It's really interesting to me. You know, what you're looking at with start with the middle is I think just like get better, getting better. I think it's a very provocative thought. You've got to make change.

You know, I used to say if things are changing, you're dead. If you're not learning, you're dead. If there's nothing else but just to sit back in a rocking chair, look at this horizon, you're dead. Maybe I'm the one that's wrong. God forbid. Never happened.

So thank you for this discussion and your patience with me as we go through this. But I think it's a very important subject and a very critical subject for everybody to come to grips with. We need to make change constantly. We need to improve things constantly. The world around us is changing fast. Like Walt said, if the world around you changes faster than you do, the end is near.

Yeah. Yep. Do you want to give us any sage closing comments?

Taking the fear away, isn't it?

Do you think it's fundamentally fear or comfort with how we're doing it now?

It's a very challenging subject. And I'm glad you're, you're, you're facing it head on with the start with the middle. I think that's valid. And your starting point as to how that became important to you, the leadership of the company is in favor of continuous improvement and approves it and supports it. That's one thing. But there's an awful lot of leaders that don't. And if they don't, you can't sit on your hands and continue to do what you've always done. The end is near.

Just find an opportunity

Again, I think it's accepting the fact that you have more potential than you're currently showing through the fact it's kind of like actual gross profit versus potential gross profit. There's always a potential that's greater than the reality. And technology is the thing that's driving this more than anything else. You know, in the 50s and 60s, when the computers first came, there was a cartoon that had a button and a machine that was going to replace people. Not true. And that's kind of how it was presented. It almost, you know, don't get involved with technology. It's going to replace your job. Don't let that happen.

It'll improve your job, make your life easier.

It opens up a completely different vista. Ed Gordon, who did the job shop series, saying that 50% of the American workforce,80 million people will not have the skills to be employable, he says, by 2030. So I give them 10 years. But societally, that's a pretty scary thing to consider. But it's coming. My granddaughter,21, just, not a fan of capitalism. And she and my wife were chatting about it. So, well, what would you like instead? She said, I don't know. I just don't like this. What is it you don't like about this? Now, this is a kid who's going to get a master's by the time she's 22. So she's no slug. But, you know, so I'm talking to my daughter, her mother, about that very same thing a couple of days after that. And she said that she's weird because the schools here are really capitalist. It's an agricultural community where she teaches and they're capitalists right from the get-go. They're workers. She said, I don't know where Niamh got that. So this whole thing, like you just list it out, having the courage to improve things, recognizing that there's opportunities to be better, personally and professionally, recognizing that getting better is more happiness. It's not just more money. It's not necessarily more work. It might not be recognition. I tease people. Have you been thanked too much?

And, you know, think about bosses and companies. They always identify things that are screwed up. They see mistakes. You have to change your perspective to find good things that people are doing. And that's part of where, gosh, that's really good, George. Or Jack, when did you start doing that? That's fantastic. We don't do enough of that, do we? It's all part of the package, I think.

I'm really pleased you brought the subject up because I think it's very pertinent and very valuable. So thank you. And thank you for this discussion and your patience with me as I try and walk my way through it myself.

Thank you, Sarah. And thank every one of you who's listened to this. I hope you enjoyed it.