Lean In to Learn Ep.14: How Systems Thinking can Improve Bottom Line Business Metrics with guest Paul Sparks

Join Jessica Soodeen as she discusses How Systems Thinking can improve Bottom Line Business Metrics on Lean In To Learn with guest Paul Sparks.

In partnership with Workplace Education Manitoba and thank you to our funder, the Government of Canada Skills for Success Program. 

Joignez-vous à Jessica Soodeen qui discute comment la pensée systémique peut améliorer les indicateurs de performance financière avec son invité Paul Sparks.

On tiens à reconnaître Éducation en milieu de travail Manitoba et à remercier notre bailleur de fonds, le programme Compétences pour réussir du gouvernement du Canada.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Lean In to Learn, Your Skills for Success podcast. I'm Jessica Soudin, spokesperson for Workplace Connections, Master Certified Relational Skills Practitioner, and Advocate of Skills for Success at work. Lean in to Learn is a series focused on insightful approaches and forward-thinking topics related to relational skills, which many of us refer to as soft skills. I'd like to acknowledge Workplace Education Manitoba and thank our funder, the Government of Canada's Skills for Success program. I, and carefully curated subject matter experts, will introduce you to an array of tools, resources, and personal journeys that will educate and empower to solve people-related issues at work as well as build individual skills for success. So settle in and open up your hearts and minds as we lean in to learn. Paul runs Sparks Pro, a consulting and training business that works primarily in the mining and metal space, with a lot of his work targeting place in steel mills and heavy industrial environments. He helps organizations improve safety, compliance, performance, and business results by applying systems thinking in practical, real-world ways. Paul also serves as lead mentor for Workplace Education Manitoba, WEM, supporting certified practitioners as they apply relational skills on the job. Welcome, Paul, to lean in to learn.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Thank you, Jessica. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

How are you doing this morning? That was a mouthful.

Culture Lessons From Japan

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Oh, you know, it's cold out. So, you know, and actually I enjoy the cold. So been hanging out here. Uh, I actually just got back from Japan a couple weeks ago, too. So I'm over the jet leg, but I was really, really impressed with the culture that they had there. You're always looking out for uh what others are thinking. You know, they're really conscious of, you know, everyone around them. It there's really a culture there of being considerate of everyone around you. You know, it's it's really interesting. Even simple things like not talking on a phone while you're on a on a train, you know, even when you're driving. It was really interesting to me when I I took a few road trips there. And they they have signs apologizing for traffic due to uh due to construction. Wow. So I found that really, really interesting. So uh, you know, you come back here and you know there's a lot more selfish, you know, acts that take place, you know, when you the acts of kindness are kind of like few and far between, but there uh, you know, it's it's an everyday, everywhere event. So kind of missing that a little bit, but I'm sure I'll go back.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

It sounds like a very inspirational trip and probably something that if it's something that you're missing, maybe this is the way that we have the snowball effect and we start doing things like this and other people see it. And, you know, that's pretty cool though. I like the uh apologizing for construction because in Canada, or at least in Calgary, it feels like we have, you know, two seasons winter and construction.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, for real. And even during winter, there's construction around here.

What Systems Thinking Really Means

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Oh, absolutely. Very cool. Well, we're going to dive in to today's topic because you're really the pro on working with, and especially with the engineering background, the systems thinking. So I'm gonna mix things up a little bit and start off with a question of what would you say is um the definition of systems thinking for you?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

When it comes to the definition of that, I'm looking at it a bit from my lens as well. Traditionally, when people think of systems or systems thinking, they're thinking of it more like, you know, the equipment, the systems, you know, whether it's a system of airflowing, or let's say it's your car, you know, the different systems associated with the car. You have an electrical system, the system of gas, your engine, all that. But uh when it comes to like an organization, you kind of have to step back and look at all the components of an organization and how they intertwine. This includes, you know, the equipment, the people, the processes, you know, the procedures, even like the leadership decisions and how all of those are interconnected. And when one changes or when one makes a decision or does something, how it affects everything as a whole.

Applying Systems Thinking In Heavy Industry

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Very cool. I like that. And so now let's get a little bit more specific. So, what does that look like on the ground in the heavy industry, like what you work in?

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Okay, and heavy industry, I'm you know, a lot of these industries I'm working in, they're 24 hours. They don't close. It doesn't matter if it's a holiday, a weekend, you know, nights. So systems thinking can include, you know, looking at patterns, you know, patterns that go across shifts, across departments, different levels of leadership. Systems thinking is also moving away from isolated fixes and working more towards, you know, workflows and process alignments. So, what I mean by that is, you know, there's a problem and people look at that problem narrowly and figure out how can we fix that problem. And sometimes the solutions to those problems cause alternate effects. So maybe you've given someone else more work by taking something off one person's plate and adding it to somebody else's without actually stepping back and considering how that affects the, you know, the system as a whole, right? And, you know, designing systems or processes that actually support the work that's actually happening. And this is where you see so many decisions being made from an office or a boardroom as opposed to, you know, involving the people who actually do the work and making sure solutions are practical.

SPEAKER_00 5:40

Yeah, I think that's that whole breaking down that us and them and really realizing how everyone's point of view is so valid. And in fact, more than just valid and important, it's paramount.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

For sure.

Symptoms Of Deeper System Problems

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Yeah. So what sense kind of specific problems have you seen that are usually simp symptoms of a larger systems issue? Like give us a couple of examples.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

So symptoms, problems that are usually symptoms. Okay, a really common one is people constantly saying it's human error. Especially, you know, you go through something happens, you go through a root cause analysis, and you end up with a human error. I find that is always one of the symptoms, and we can maybe talk about that a little bit later, but that's definitely a symptom. Definitely when you have the ongoing communication breakdown between departments, uh, like when you have that finger pointing that's happening, that clearly means that these systems, these different departments, which I'm going to call systems, don't understand what each other actually are doing or, you know, how they support each other. Definitely the constant firefighting, whenever people are running around to get things fixed. And when people are in firefighting mode, they enjoy firefighting. You know, they might, it might seem like they don't, but there's this, you know, satisfaction you get when there's a problem you solve it. There's a problem you solve it. And so it's getting out of that firefighting mode. That's definitely another symptom. When temporary fixes and the workarounds all of a sudden become like the normal practice. Also when you see like safety and quality issues that keep resurfacing, even though you've like tried to do training and that type of stuff and they just keep coming back. You know, that's really a culture issue.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

That's pretty that's really interesting because you know, when we're looking at this, it's it's really easy, like you said, to get into that firefighting mode and people like it. So I assume that as soon as you're trying to get out of the firefighting mode, you still have to fill that need of the satisfaction of the solving the problem. And so would you say that some of that need could be filled by some sort of collaboration effort?

SPEAKER_01 7:42

Oh, most definitely. Especially when I talk about the like the culture aspect of it. When you when you involve like collaboration from people who are doing the work, or you know, the more people you get involved without having too big of a group, but you know, when you get key people involved, and especially those who are doing the work, you know, you really get them invested in what's happening. You get them excited that, you know, change is happening. These are actually conversations that take place as opposed to everything being closed door and then suddenly solutions just showing up one day that aren't really practical or just make your work harder. You know, really your goal is to make everyone's job easier, you know, so things can get done faster. And often solutions make people's jobs harder.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah. So I guess so, touch on where that training fits and why training alone wouldn't solve these problems.

Collaboration Over Firefighting

Why Training Alone Fails

SPEAKER_01 8:29

I had previously mentioned where you know you have safety and quality issues that keep resurfacing, you know, despite you doing the training or retraining. Training is there to build the capacity, right? But it's your systems that really determine uh the behavior. And if you're not tackling the behavior, uh, you're never really going to fix the problem. And behavior and culture are really intertwined. And unless you have the processes and the procedures and the systems in place, training is just a box ticking exercise, right? That's where even any skill you're trying to train, it will fail to stick if there's like pressures in the process or pressures in the environment that they're working in that really contradict what the training is. Even for example, I was at a client's and we did training on how to do like high-level risk assessments. And before they do certain jobs, they have to do this whole risk assessment form. And, you know, that takes time. And, you know, we have commitment from upper management that that's what they want to do. And then once that gets put in place, day one, when they're taking that extra time to fill out a form, you have middle management come up and say, why are we wasting time on a form? This needs to get done now. And then so you have these pressures that never got addressed, right? And that's where, you know, of course, training at all different levels so people understand the needs, making sure that it gets embedded in the culture, make sure that it's something that just gets done, right? And so really you need to have leadership who is reinforcing and not undermining any of this training that's taking place, right? And really, training is just one simple step. I always have the saying too: if you if you get trained on something and you don't use it in two weeks, you lose it. So it really needs to get put into practice right away.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

Right on. And that's such important, the multi-levels of training and getting buy-in so that you don't have that pushback coming from you know, middle management or whoever it is that's coming at you and saying, Hey, what are you doing? And then you have this internal sabotage. I remember listening to a panel in at a global energy conference, and one of the biggest things was internal sabotage. And that's one of them. And I think uh training every level can address that.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Yeah, and sometimes it's not intentional. You know, the sabotage isn't necessarily meant to be nefarious, right? It's just that's the way they operate. I even sometimes hear when I'm doing training, some of the attendees will think say things like, oh, you know, oh, we've been trained on something like this before, but it never changes anything. So, you know, that's really when it's boiling down to the culture, and that's when you got to really start looking at management.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Fair. So, where have you seen systems thinking uncover a blind spot in communication or relational trainings gaps? Like just the trainings for for first.

Communication Pathways And Escalation

SPEAKER_01 11:13

So where systems thinking uncover some kind of communication or relational skills blind spot. You can often see that when when you're teaching about systems thinking, you'll find that there ends up being some sort of lack of like an escalation pathway for communication, or how do you let people know when something needs to be fixed or addressed? And how does that information get to the right people? Because a lot of times these communication are just dead-ended. You'll say, this is a problem that needs to get fixed, but that information goes to the wrong person or maybe someone who's not a decision maker, and there that's where it ends. And then where does where does your culture go? If you every time you ask for something or said there's a problem and it never gets fixed, how is that going to affect you and your job, right? So definitely, you know, you there needs to be some sort of escalation pathway for communication. Who do you talk to? When do you talk to them? Who needs to know? You know, what information do those people need to know? You also also often have some sort of system you try to put in place saying, oh, we want everyone to give their opinions. We want to encourage people to speak up. And you put something like that in place, but without any clear like response mechanisms. You know, all of a sudden now you might get middle management, they get a bit defensive. You know, all of a sudden they feel like they're being attacked by problems as opposed to, you know, maybe making sure that they have the tools they need to, you know, take this information and, you know, maybe use that escalation pathway to make sure that things get, you know, brought to the right people, right? You often see like that misalignment between uh departments or what the priorities are for departments. That's a big one that you find in systems thinking. Each department has their own goals, as opposed to the goals being all aligned from a higher level. You'll have this person, this one's goal is, you know, how quickly they can produce. This one's goal is producing quality. This one's goal is to produce. And so, but all of those need to be completely tied in together. You know, producing quickly doesn't mean quality, right? And so if those goals aren't aligned, you you do get, you know, some headbutting to be between departments.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah, you want it fast, good, and cheap. Pick two.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, you can't get all three, right?

SPEAKER_00 13:14

But it it's interesting, you know, and thinking about building the culture so that that suggestion box, you know, I I remember seeing a graphics, and this was probably 30 years ago, but it was that little suggestion box, and it had there was no bottom to the suggestion box, and there was a garbage can underneath it.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Yeah, you know, that's how people feel.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

But that's how people feel, right?

Goal Alignment Across Departments

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yep, yep. And it's it's a lot worse when in these these heavy industry environments when it comes to mining and steel. You know, when you look at a lot of even other manufacturing, uh, especially with automotive and that type of thing, they're really ahead of the bar on a lot of these. And so, especially when you have people who've worked for some of these organizations and then moved into steel and mining, you really feel like you just step back 20 years, right? So they're they're in a tough spot. And you know, resources aren't always there, especially with the current economic climate, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:06

Sure. So tell us how systems thinking has where you've seen a really positive culture shift, like one specific example or a system or something that you put in and you saw like the actual real high five and hugs and cultural bonding, you know, like something that was that was a real positive shift.

Turning Skeptics Into Allies

SPEAKER_01 14:28

So it takes time. So I have been involved with a project that that spanned over two years. And it was really about a total restructuring of an organization. And, you know, that restructuring meant people's jobs were changing, the the stakeholders who were involved, you know, they were worried about what was going to happen with them or their investments. And same with the employees, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty. And so, really, what made the difference between that project being successful and being a total failure was communication, constant communication through town hall meetings, through uh providing visuals that were showing current state to future state, giving people their the the understanding that, you know, their job might change, but they're still going to have a job, right? So some of the duties and responsibilities might change, uh, but ultimately they weren't going to get let go because there wasn't a lot of trust in the process in the beginning, you know, especially when people hear restructuring, that ultimately usually means layoffs, right? And so trying to convince people otherwise was difficult. So it was really about having non-stop communication, um, letting people know, getting them to ask questions. Actually, a big uh success there was talking to management and finding out who the bad actors were. So we said, who are the people who are the most outspoken? Who are the ones who are the leaders of stirring the pot, right? Who are the ones who are always going to say something negative? And we found out who those people were. It was a list of 12 to 15 people and met with each and every single person one-on-one. We had one-on-one meetings, brought them to a nice environment. Here's coffee, here's some food. I just want to hear what possible problems you can think of with this. And they blasted us, they told us everything that could go wrong, and we're like, great. Then when we held the next town hall meetings, we made sure there was an answer to every one of those questions. And when we held the town hall meetings and gave the presentation of what was going to happen, everyone seemed happy with it. Everyone seemed okay with it. You know, we answered all these questions up front. The people who would have normally stood up and had all the negative things to say, they already felt confident in us because we talked to them one-on-one. We already answered all their questions. They kind of sat there. And um, you know, those are the people that when they start saying things, it starts seeding, you know, that negativity in everybody's mind, right? But when then when you, you know, when you deal with them ahead of time, I think that would probably be the number one thing we did to make that project successful.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Wow. And it's interesting because sometimes those quote unquote bad seeds are the people who are negative or what have you, they're negative because they've got a deep understanding of the business and they can see how things go wrong. And they're the most frustrated because maybe they care the most.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Pull them in, pull them into the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

Okay. So part of this topic has to do with bottom line business metrics. So let's let's switch gears in. Well, gears, haha, motorsports engineer over here. Let's switch gears and and talk about, you know, metrics, KPIs, things like that when we're when we're looking at improvement. So for the leaders that are listening today and other practitioners as well, what sort of metrics are we really looking at? Some good leavers when we're talking about improving systems.

KPIs That Matter For Culture And Safety

SPEAKER_01 17:34

In the industries I'm working in, in heavy industry, manufacturing, you know, we're really looking at things like reducing your unplanned downtimes, reducing any of the reworks. You know, that's when you have a quality issue and you now need to bring that back into the process. So, you know, improving your quality or reducing your reworks or any emergency repairs, ultimately improved overall effectiveness or productivity, big time lowering any safety incidents or near miss rates. Those are, you know, a KPI that's always looked at. And some of the ones that are a lot harder to identify and really take a full project to figure out are uh measuring things that include a workplace trust or culture. Measuring those two can be very, very difficult. There's ways to do it. You know, that's where you really need a project to identify what parts of the culture are you looking to change, and then you know, which KPIs can you tie into that? Or usually you have to look at a series of different KPIs to understand where the culture is shifting.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Ooh, that sounds juicy. So KPI, just in case I did not say it, key performance indicators. So that's really interesting to think about how looking at a few can point to some cultural opportunities, cultural improvement opportunities. So, give can you give me an example of what that could look like, what you've seen in your experience?

Mean Time Between Fires And HR Signals

SPEAKER_01 18:52

So, one of my clients, you know, we we ended up coming up with a really interesting one. It had to do with the way things were being operated, the way things were being maintained and cleaned. There were so many different elements that went into this one problem that would happen frequently, and it was a piece of equipment catching on fire. So we ended up coming up with a KPI called Mean Time Between Fires. And, you know, that's not the only thing you can look at. That one told us quite a few different problems. You know, when you couple that with other KPIs, uh, you know, maybe even some of the HR ones, such as turnover, absenteeism, uh, the usage of overtime, you know, when you look at those, usually the poorer the culture, the more frequent you have turnover and absenteeism, right? You know, more often people are quitting, more often people are calling in sick or not showing up to work. When you have that lack of accountability at work, you know, or if you don't care, you know, if you don't feel like showing up, sometimes you won't, right? You'll use up your sick days. You know, you can't just look at one single thing. You have to tie it into a few different KPIs. You know, you can look at the safety ones coupled with HR, coupled with something that's that could be very niche and specific to your mail, like the meantime between fires. You know. It's really uh something that needs to be assessed with a small team and to figure out, you know, which parts of your of your process need to be looked at to determine, you know, where the culture is moving.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

This is awesome. I can uh speak from experience of having you as a mentor while I was getting my practitioner designation, everything. And you really provide an excellent practical level of assessments and looking at corporations in that top down, you know. And I think it's real special when engineers who understand the technical side of things are able to go into that culture side and able to go into the soft skills and really that human side of things. Because we all talk about the hugs and high fives, and then a few months it just goes back to normal, which really highlights how you know projects like two-year projects, these are big shifts in companies. Like these are game changers.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Thank you, Jess. You know, it's really, I think what I what sets my business apart from you know what I've seen some, you know, other people do is I relate with the the ground floor, right? Any project I start, I I tie in that there's a day or two where leave me alone and let me be with the people who are doing the work. Walk around, talk with them, find out what the real problems are. And when I bring back a report, you often have them go, Whoa, how long have you been here? You know, like you're talking our language. And I find that working with those, with the people who are actually doing the job will actually let you know what the real problems are from their perspective, of course, right? And and allow you to talk the language of the organization.

Ground-Floor Discovery And Trust

SPEAKER_00 21:34

So cool. So cool. Well, my last question. This has been like super practical, which I knew it was going to be with you. Um, so tell us where we can find you on socials, on your own website. Do a little self-promotion, Paul.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

All right. I am oh I never self-promote, so I guess I'll take the opportunity here. But you could go to sparkspro.com. That's my website. And you could also find me on LinkedIn, Paul Sparks, or you could search Sparks Pro 2 and you can find me there. You know, I always say advice is free. It's usually the opposite for everyone else, but with my clients, I say you call me with any problem and I'll give you free advice.

SPEAKER_00 22:12

So that's amazing. That's super generous as well, considering that time is our most precious commodity. So thank you so much for joining us today, Paul. Um, it's been a fantastic uh podcast here. For all those that are listening, I'm Jessica Soudin, and thank you for taking the time to lean in the