Episode 12 - Kata & TWI Summit Reflections

What actually makes change stick?

Is it:

• the tool? 
• the process? 
• the storyboard? 
• the training? 

Or is it something much deeper?

In this episode of Thoughts on Change, I sit down with Mark Rosenthal and Laurel Martin to unpack one of the biggest challenges in Continuous Improvement:

Why organizations can implement Lean tools… and still struggle to create lasting behavior change.

And honestly? This conversation gets to the heart of what real change leadership actually looks like.

What We Explore

We dig into:

• why psychological safety matters in Continuous Improvement 
• how leaders unintentionally reinforce the wrong behaviors 
• why curiosity is more powerful than blame 
• the difference between compliance and genuine engagement 
• how Kata and TWI are often misunderstood as “tools” instead of leadership development systems 
• what it really means to “integrate, not implement” 
• why unresolved disagreement at the leadership level quietly kills transformation efforts 
• and how sustainable culture change happens through repeated responses—not presentations 

One of My Favorite Moments

One of the strongest themes in this conversation is this shift:

Instead of asking:

“How do we get people to comply?”

What if we asked:

“What kind of response are we reinforcing?”

Because every leadership reaction teaches people something.

When leaders respond with:

• blame 
• defensiveness 
• pressure 
• control 

People learn to:

• hide problems 
• avoid risk 
• stay quiet 
• protect themselves 

But when leaders respond with:

• curiosity 
• experimentation 
• safety 
• learning 

People begin to think differently.

And that’s where culture shifts.

The Power of the First Reaction

We also talk about how important those first few seconds are when something goes wrong.

That moment when:

• a standard isn’t followed 
• an experiment fails 
• someone raises a concern 
• resistance appears 

Your first reaction matters more than you think.

Because leaders are constantly teaching people:

·       what is safe

·       what gets punished

·       what gets rewarded

·       and what kinds of thinking are welcome

Compliance vs Commitment

One of the biggest takeaways from this episode:

Compliance is not the same thing as commitment.

If your change effort depends entirely on:

• convincing harder 
• presenting more data 
• pushing people toward agreement 

You may get short-term compliance…

…but not real ownership.

Real teamwork requires:

• trust 
• safety 
• involvement 
• and genuine alignment 

A Powerful Reframe

One line from the conversation that really stuck with me:

“Integrate, don’t implement.”

Because sustainable change doesn’t happen when we drop a Lean tool into an organization and hope people use it.

It happens when:

• people understand it 
• it fits their context 
• it solves a meaningful problem 
• and leaders reinforce the behaviors needed to sustain it 

What This Means for CI Leaders

If you work in:

• Continuous Improvement 
• Operational Excellence 
• Lean leadership 
• manufacturing leadership 
• culture transformation 
• organizational change 

This episode is a reminder that your real job isn’t installing tools.

It’s shaping:

• systems 
• responses 
• behaviors 
• and learning environments 

Reflection Questions

As you listen, think about:

• What behaviors are being reinforced in my organization right now? 
• How do leaders respond when problems surface? 
• Are we building compliance… or capability? 
• What reactions are unintentionally creating fear or defensiveness? 
• Are we integrating improvement into culture—or just implementing tools? 

The Big Takeaway

Sustainable change is not about:

·       installing a storyboard

·       running a workshop

·       forcing agreement

It’s about intentionally shaping how people think, respond, learn, and engage over time.

That’s the real work.

Connect with the Guests

This episode features insights from:

• Mark Rosenthal 
• Laurel Martin 

Both bring deep experience in Lean thinking, leadership development, Kata, and organizational learning.

Enjoying the Podcast?

If you’re trying to move culture instead of just install tools, hit subscribe and share this with another CI warrior who’s navigating the messy human side of change.

Video

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome to Thoughts on Change, the podcast about the messy, political, emotional, deeply human side of leading change. I'm Kelly, and I believe anyone can implement lead tools until they actually have to get people to use them. Around here, we talk about how to move culture, how to build credibility, and how to influence without bulldozing. Basically, how to herd humans without losing your mind. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this very special episode of Thoughts on Change. I'm really excited for this conversation because I've brought two people on that I admire a great deal, Mark Rosenthal and Laurel Martin. I'm going to have them introduce themselves really quickly, but we just came from the Kata and TWI summit together and had some wonderful conversation. And I thought, why not actually like sit down and hit record and share these amazing thoughts from these wonderful people? So, Mark Laurel, please go ahead and give yourselves an introduction. Go ahead, Mark.

SPEAKER_00 1:09

So hi, my name's Mark Rosenthal. Um, I've been in Kata land since the book was published. What in 09, 2010 or so? Uh blogged about it a lot on lolendigger.com. I've been speaking at every Cata summit since CataCon 4. We just had 12, so you can do the math. Um, so anyway, uh also a co-founder of Kata School Cascadia. We put on cool learning events and get together every Friday.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

All right, I'm Laurel Martin, um, longtime fan of Mark Rosenthal. So it's an honor to be uh on this podcast together. I'm an operational excellence and organizational development consultant, um, independent. And you know, I help companies who are feeling the strain try to figure out, you know, what is that bridge between the process stuff and the leadership development stuff. So this um topic is near and dear to me, especially, you know, a conference that brought together TWI and Kata and you know how how those merged together and you know uh really emphasize the role of people in having an impact from any of our efforts. Awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

I'll just add that thinking the history before there was a Kata-Con. Um, a couple of years before that, I got asked to kind of do, hey, what's this Toyota Kata thing to the TWI summit. So actually, uh, I may have introduced the audience to it in a way. I mean, obviously people knew what it was and they were curious. That was just kind of an overview of the mechanics. And you know, I went last because no one knew who I was. And uh, and it was, you know, it was an interesting uh time meeting the TWI community. That was the first time I really got to know them.

SPEAKER_02 2:55

Wow, that is interesting. It's it's opening up a question for me about when did the conferences right originally it was CADACON, and then it changed to Kata and TWI Summit, um, which is where we came from. And I will we will go through what is Kata, what is TWI just in case. But first I want to land on this question, Mark. Do you know when did that transition happen and why did it happen?

SPEAKER_00 3:17

Well, that goes to the the whole business model, I suppose. But um, so again, I remember the years we can do the math, whatever uh the first Kata con was just that. It was a Toyota Kata standalone summit. I think it attracted, you know, it was over a hundred people. Um I'm not don't think they broke 200, but it was a pretty, pretty big room. Uh a lot of the a lot of people from Europe because in reality the um the initial research was done in Germany. Uh, if you look in the pictures in the book, in the original book, you can see the storyboards are actually in German. Um and but there was a consultancy called uh what were they called? W3 consulting that really I think was the prime most of the speakers were their clients and most of the presenters were their people. But that was a community coming together for the first time, and that was kind of the vibe on that one. And it went through as a standalone, and you know, just logistically they began Lean Frontiers began running them sequentially in the same week at the same venue uh with TWI Summit. I'm gonna say that was probably yeah, so the third one for sure in San Diego had the TWI going on, I think at the same time. Um but what happened after 2021, which was a virtual conference, is is that the um the attendance never really came back. And last year, you know, for a couple of years they were running them in parallel so you could flip back and forth, but there was still a distinct room talking about Kata and a distinct room talking about TWI and some joint things. And then last year, um, I think was the last time they did that, and then this year they just mashed the two together into a single conference.

SPEAKER_02 5:27

Yeah, interesting history there. And I'm sure you know we could have a whole conversation about the um like lean conference industry. Um, so we'll kind of stay away from that a little bit. But to come back to right, what what are these two concepts? So let's do a quick check-in because some of my audience might know, some of them might not. So let's talk about what is kata, what is TWI? Um, so I'll give a quick kata is just a word that means like a routine that we practice to learn a new skill, often um associated with martial arts. So for anybody who has seen karate kid, that's always the reference that is used. Um, when Danielson is waxing the car, painting the fence, painting the floor, all of that is a kata. And so we use this pattern to develop the habits of scientific thinking that were developed from Mike Rothers' original research in Germany in 2009. At least that's when the book came out. So then TWI, training within industry, whole nother section of work from World War II, I believe. And I'm I'm gonna ask both of you to help fill in the history gaps here. Um, three sections of TWI, right? JR, job relations, which is how to help and support people, job methods, how to improve work, and then job instruction, which is how to document and train in those processes. So please, Laurel, Mark, what are your thoughts about the two concepts and what else would you add to you know their definitions for our listeners? Laurel, why don't you get us started?

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Sure. I would say I learned a lot about the uh historical arc of these practices from Mark's talk at the conference and really showing this interplay where it wasn't just like Toyota came up with lean in a vacuum, right? There has been this back and forth uh development, uh, you know, with lots of different countries involved. But if you think about the role of TWI, um, you know, if people don't uh know on the call, that was started um really in response to World War II and this need to drastically ramp up production while all the soldiers were going off overseas. So who's going to be left in our factories? People who have never worked in factories before. And so um, you know, it was a quick and effective way to get people to do the jobs safely and conscientiously uh that they had had no prior exposure to, uh, while also keeping people on board. So it couldn't be purely mechanistic, like, okay, just you know, work harder, work faster, but um, how do we engage people as humans and uh, you know, enrich their skills? And of course, that's that's good for the company. Um, and it was interesting to see all the threads that Japanese companies picked up after the war when we're like, hey, this was kind of helpful for us. Do you want to try it too? And then kind of seeing where that's landed in modern lean, um and kind of pulling back through, like, oh yeah, that that kind of came from JM or that kind of came from JR. Um, so I like that it's always, you know, it's talking about these conferences. I feel like this community has always been very collaborative. And like we grab a book and we're like, okay, let's all go try this out and see what we learn and see what happens in real life when we take these concepts um and try them out. And it's all an experiment, right? Coming back to Kata, how do we discover our way into uh a better, a better method? Um, and I feel like we we do that on ourselves in this in this practice. Um, so I think they pair really well together because kata is all about um how do you methodically improve or how do you methodically solve a problem? Um, you know, how do you actually work through that applied very, very broadly, like to pretty much any any goal you have. Um, TWI gives us this great background of well, then how do you kind of shore up um you know the standard work that you discover in your your kata practices? Um, and how do you relate to the people who are absolutely essential to actually doing the kata, um, you know, discovering change, adopting change, sustaining change, which is you know a lot of the themes we talked about.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

Yeah, awesome. Thank you for that, Laurel. Mark, I'd ask, what would you add? And especially, right, what are you learning about um and kind of exploring with what is the purpose of kata? What is it really for?

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Um yeah, so I think the way I'm looking at it is there's an underlying thinking pattern that's behind everything, all of these things. And you know, we call it PDCA, we call it scientific thinking, we call it applied problem solving. It has lots of names. Um, but it's the it is the thinking process of methodically saying what am I trying to get done, where's the gap? And then okay, what do I need to try in order to figure out how to close that gap? And so the kata structure, just to be clear, Toyota Kata is really designed to create an environment where people learn to think that way. And so it's a structure for the con the coaching conversations so that the learner begins to think that way. But that's an underlying general model of just good thinking. If I applied that general model of just good thinking to, hey, my problem is my people are all inconsistent about how they go about doing this job, I will end up developing something that looks a lot like a training system. And an instance of that training system is what we call job instruction. If I go methodically around how do I save time, I end up developing job methods. And job relations, the pattern's exactly the same, the words are different. Kata has iteration built in, it's only implied in job relations, but job relations is from the 40s. So I look at I look at the TWI things, I guess, as or programs as specific skills applied to specific contexts that at the time it was developed, those were the problems that needed to be solved to get more airplanes out the door. And it was a very narrow focus to solve that one problem. Nowadays we have scoped back a bit, and I think we have to be careful to make sure that what we're applying to our context, um, when we're applying it to our context, that the context that it was developed in actually applies to the problem or we modify a bit.

SPEAKER_02 12:08

Yeah, I think that that's a really excellent point about context, because these two methods come from historical situations, different cultures, different environments. And I think that was the common thing that I certainly heard happening at the summit was just what is the modern context? What are we, you know, how are these evolving into what we use now and today? And what how is our understanding of them evolving? And I'd love to hear from both of you. What did you take away from that perspective? How are you seeing these evolve? We can rock paper scissors on who gets to go first.

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Well, maybe I'll just share one of my key learnings from each of you. Because honestly, you guys kicked off the conference and it was like within the first what 40 minutes, I had so much learning. I was like, how am I gonna fit anymore in my brain? But uh one of the points that Mark really made is that leaders create the conditions for any of these things to succeed. So you can be, you know, total expert at any of these models and have perfect rationale and all the results and proof points you want. Um, it's not going to work if you can't engage the people who are actually have to try it and have to, you know, change their behavior, change their processes to um to get different results. So that really resonated, you know, this idea of leadership doesn't happen in the leader's mind, it happens in the reaction in the minds of those being led. And so we have to be really conscious about where they're coming from. And this kind of merges in the key point that I took away from you, Kelly, which is before we try to bring our method, whether it's any of these things, Kata, JR, J I, J M, we have to think about what is their story? What is their lived experience right now? What challenges are they facing? What are they up against? What are their hopes? What are their fears? Um, and really get in and adapt. That's where I think the core skill comes in now for Kata and TWI practitioners. How can you adapt to that story, that situation, and add, you know, just the right um kind of nudge, I think is the word you use, Kelly, uh, to kind of infuse this type of thinking uh into the way work is done, um, without, you know, coming with the full toolkit and all of our perfect, you know, the way we've learned to do it by the book, uh, but really adapting to that human story that's unfolding right now.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Mark, what are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_00 14:33

Um, yeah. So gosh, I was listening carefully and forgot the question.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

But um you can just respond to what Laurel said, too. That's fine too, actually.

SPEAKER_00 14:44

Yeah. Um you know, I the theme that developed was it's about leadership development. And it was cool because that was my message. But what I saw was most of the other speakers were the same. Um, and that was cool. Um but you know, some of the other things that I just gonna go through some of the notes, and and maybe this is a non-sequidor, I don't know. But you know, one of Mike's research questions, right? Yeah, that was it. Let me back up. Um one of the things is that the J programs were developed as specific scripts for specific instructors to teach specific skills. Um, and where Toyota Kata came from was answering the couple of questions around we have this company in Japan, which certainly in the early 2000s and the late 90s was a benchmark for for improvement. And what are they doing that's different? Because the rest of us try to do it and it doesn't work very well. So the one of the Toyota Kata questions that Mike was trying to answer was what are Toyota's unseen managerial routines that a let enable them to be far more successful with this? I'm paraphrasing. I would even change the word because it's the unseen leadership routines. How do they lead their people? But then the I wrote down on my notes, okay, when I'm looking at when we're looking at our own organizations, what are our unseen managerial routines that are driving the results we're getting and to be conscious of why we're getting the results we are, which is a whole kata thing. But I think that is something we kind of skip over as change agents because we want to we want to jump straight into, well, let's just start changing stuff, but let's understand what we're trying to change. And we have we all organizations have unseen managerial routines, those that's the very definition of the culture of the organization. How do we respond to issues? What do those conversations sound like? And just becoming aware of that would probably be a pretty good first step if you're trying to create change.

SPEAKER_02 17:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

I think that's the first step in Kelly's start model, which I really appreciated. I think the first ask was like just systems, like look at how people are getting work done and communicating currently, and um how are leaders showing up and interacting and just what's happening there. Cause yeah, before we try to change something, we should probably understand how it's working today.

SPEAKER_02 17:30

Yeah. And I think, Mark, you raise a good point about this too, that it's I think we're pretty good as a community of you know improvement people that we do look at current state, hopefully, all of us most of the time. Hopefully more than most of the time. But it's it's it's really at that surface process level, which is good. We want to be looking at process. We focus on making process better and not just telling people to do things differently or harder or trying harder. But what we do miss is the leadership routines that you can't see that enable that current process to even exist right now. And it's that deeper dig that we're not very good at all the time.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Cheryl, and under Cheryl Jekyll, she brought up something, and I don't remember what she said. I just know what I wrote down. Is we need to map the flow of problems and problem solving, as that is more important than mapping the process, the industrial process or the work process. What happens when that process goes off the rails, when it can't be followed, when we encounter something that it doesn't account for? That process flow is really what defines those unseen managerial routines. What happens when there's a problem? If I were to go to you know the Toyota automobile plant, it's really quick, right? That's that classic pull a rope and trigger a light and start some music because I just encountered an obstacle on the assembly line, and that initiates a whole long chain of events to get that problem contained, understood, and solved. But we don't talk about that when we're looking at lean tools other than and on, well, okay, but what happens next? And what happens even when that light is out again? Because now we've, you know, we've at least restored the standard. But why did that happen to begin with?

SPEAKER_02 19:31

Yeah. And I wonder, I appreciate the direction this conversation is going, which is I had no path, but I love this point because I wonder, right, we when I think about people who get into lean continuous improvement, process improvement, a lot of the time it is engineers who are then trained on those process tools you talked about, Mark. Right. We we are taught how to analyze a process, right? Look at tack time, look at labor balance, um, look at defect rate and right defects per million opportunities, but we we are not taught to see the conversations that happen in between. And they're, you know, I think Toyota is a good example where those have become more visible. It's easier to see them happening. Where in a lot of organizations, I think that I know I've been a part of or, you know, been to, it's really hard to see them. And it takes a lot of digging and listening to even identify what those processes are.

SPEAKER_01 20:37

Yeah, I really loved how Cheryl Jekiel, who we're we're talking about, came in at the end of, she was like the very last speaker and gave us like all these tools or ways of making sense of some of these themes that we had been talking about, which is funny because I don't think she knew those were all the things we've been talking about. Um, but she had a few really useful models. One is this iceberg map. And I know we have lots of versions of the iceberg map in the lean world, but this one was, you know, the iceberg that we can see, or at least that we can measure, is the results. And that's what everyone wants is like, okay, make my iceberg bigger. Right underneath the waterline are events, which are, you know, you can think of as the things that we're actually doing, like whatever, the kaizen or the training. Um, but underneath that are the patterns. And that's what we focus a lot on in Kata, is what are the patterns of um kind of the thought process that we are really trying to ingrain in people, first through the starter kata, then through, you know, kind of letting people uh go and explore. But under that, we don't really talk much about what are the structures and what are the mental models. And it's really hard to ingrain a pattern if you don't change the mental model. And I think we we don't go, we often are like, oh, process leads to results, but it's actually like there's some deeper layers there before we can actually do that process in an authentic, uh, you know, deep. cheap and and sustainable way.

SPEAKER_00 22:01

Yeah, I like that metaphor. I use the same metaphor and I says put those mental models, they're not even part of the iceberg. They're the water that holds up the iceberg. And that's why it's, I think, you know, that my model that model makes it a little harder even to see that stuff because we're we're we're paying paying all this attention to the ice.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Yeah, we're swimming in it. We can't even tell.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

And that reflects Ed Schein's model of culture being the artifacts, the values and the unseen or the unseen values, you know, of the structures. And it's those underlying assumptions about what is true, which are the mental models, right? That really define what structures go into place, which then in turn drive how people behave. So that's the heart of it and where the kata just to kind of bring it back around comes into the equation is changing those mental models to be more scientific, to be a little more but also okay, this is the whole leadership piece. I think what even in Kata land what we don't do a good job of except for some folks like Gemma Jones is understanding empathy as part of that structure. We have to build it in and we and at least I have to build it on purpose. And that's you know coming back to Cheryl she put shared this thing that she called an empathy map. I've I haven't researched if that's hers or where it came from but what I loved about it is if I look at a process that somebody's engaged in even the problem solving process, yeah, what are they doing? What are they thinking? Okay. How are they feeling? And what are they saying to themselves or even to other people? And breaking down process steps so as to go back to that whole the whole coaching kata thing, right? I mean there's steps that the learner goes through have I as a coach deliberately designed the experience so that they are feeling like their confidence is building or have I somehow designed the experience where they're feeling like they're just going to have more stuff pointed out that's wrong than they're done that a long time ago. I was still we probably all have.

SPEAKER_02 24:36

And I to me like for me this count this all comes back to you know a lot of space that I've been focusing on is how we and I'm going to call like continuous improvement practitioners as well as part of this leadership group because right we are leading the way for demonstrating how change can occur and these methodologies. And I've been thinking a lot about you know when we come into situations where we're asking people to change or asking people to think about doing work in a different way, we so often neglect all of that deeper human stuff that is happening and we bulldoze in and we aren't taught to like pause and have a look at what is the current reality they're experiencing and feeling. And it's it becomes really hard to you know understand that because we we only know our own experience. But I I love what you said Mark that it's that deeper level of empathy to think about what might they be saying to themselves right now about this situation. How might they be feeling and that's a whole part of the current condition that we need to be better about even contemplating before we push forward into situations because I don't know without you know a lot of conversation and building a lot of trust and relationship, I don't know that we'll ever be able to actually grasp it from somebody else's perspective, but even just thinking about it and considering.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

I think that's really important because as change agents and most of us are most of I'm guessing most of the people listening to this are we're really fond of making rollout plans but that's not how change propagates change and this is one of the notes I took change spreads through relationships not rollouts and it's an organic social process. So we've got to engineer our understanding engineer our process to simply simply deal with that as a as a fundamental truth. We're looking at relationships and we're looking at potentially changing the fabric of some of those relationships and you know the people who have who are was it when somebody said there is no resistance there's simply ambivalence and I like that better because nobody actively resists they just okay this isn't they don't they don't get it yet or whatever. But people change their minds not as a result of some outsider coming in and giving a logical argument but as a result of the people who are closest to them beginning to shift theirs. And so if we don't understand that social network we're going to have a hard time creating the kind of change we have in mind.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

You mean just more data doesn't do it?

SPEAKER_01 27:36

No, I agreed agreed go Laurel oh I was going to say that that was the strongest theme for me as well Mark you know when we talk about leaders creating the conditions for change or change influencers um I think you use the word like how do we how do we pull people along with us or or or enroll them how do we enroll people in wanting to follow us in the change as opposed to you will attend this kaizen, you will write down your ideas on the post-it uh you will do the follow-ups and it it just it um it runs so counter that like the reality of the social situation runs so counter to how we had maybe been trained in lean or what what our leaders you know thought of us as like what's the role of the the lean team or the continuous improvement director or the or the consultant um that we're almost all having to like unlearn these method driven um you know just get to the results through force and will kind of approach um and really understand like how do you develop trusting relationships through problem solving um which is part of why I just love the kata because if you have enough of those conversations it it does that as a byproduct. But you really you can't mandate a different way of thinking or different assumptions or you know the way someone's brain works. You've really got to cultivate those conditions over time and um address that ambivalence like well what is great about the current way what are you scared about with this new way what might the implications be for your job or your reputation or you know your role on this team and how do you tap into that underlying like what do they really want from the change and what would make it worth them you know maybe taking some risks and participating in this thing and it's not your agenda you know it's got to be their agenda.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

Yeah and you know the the whole process I what I what I said and I just wanted to you know I wanted to say it is it's it's not even enrolling them to follow you it's enrolling them to come with you. Yeah and your alternative is compliance and some people you know will say well there are sometimes we just need to give orders okay great I understand that but even compliance is a decision made by the person being led so it's still on to them there's nothing you can do to force someone to do something that even through threat of violence they still decide to do it versus some alternative. So let's come back around enrolling them in your vision so they come with you is um it's probably harder to start that way but if you want it to sustain when the you know when yeah if you want it to sustain I'm just gonna put that way when you're not there when you're not watching right leadership is expressed by what people do when the leader isn't there uh that's a whole different ballgame. And you know I do I love the you know the story that David Marquet tells in his book Turn the ship around I'll put a plug in for that where he's the captain of a submarine in the US Navy about the last place I would expect um to let go of the the classic give the order I give the orders you follow them structure. But in the last chapter he is basically telling a story where everybody on the crew knew what to do and they knew more about what was going on than he did. And what struck me about that story as a former military officer so I obviously understood you know the culture was he stepped into the bridge misread the situation gave an order and a junior sailor said on the bridge no captain you're wrong and to have a junior sailor call out the captain of the ship but you know what Captain Marquet did was he took a step back and realized that yeah that sailor was right and the lesson he learned there was they got this which was really cool. So that's what you want to create right where you know the boss doesn't have to have all the answers.

SPEAKER_02 32:13

Yeah and I think that comes back to this it is about building relationships. It's about building a condition and experience for people. It's not about us coming in and saying you're gonna do it this way or here's a tool or here's a method. It is about that bridge and connecting to their emotional experience, their actual experience it's it's hitting all the layers of that iceberg.

SPEAKER_00 32:36

And creating those environment where people receive extraordinary support and are feeling that not just from the boss but from their peers, from their teammates, uh from everybody around them. And that's what you know that's what makes a championship sports team.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

Yeah I've been thinking a lot about the oversimplification of this idea we have in mind that leaders get results through others. Like okay that's a little better than leaders get results by elbowing in and doing it themselves. But it's like well how what is that chain? Because it's not just give order the other person executes so many things have to happen to your point Mark we can't just compel people you know maybe occasionally we can threaten people and they do it. But um so I've been kind of mapping that out of like what is the chain from okay I hear that intent from the leader, you know, if we want to put it in David Marquet's terms. And then I act in a consistent aligned fashion with what that leader had in mind. There's a lot of steps in between to uh kind of unpack um that I think you know uh lean leader standard work and and JR and all these things kind of kind of help address um but yeah it's a complex system to get from point A to point B.

SPEAKER_00 33:54

So Laurel you're triggering one of my little JR rants so yeah give me TWI guards. But one of my objections is that the language does reflect the attitudes of the times and the of the 1940s plus it reflects the problem they needed to solve and that was not a problem of developing people that was a problem of keeping them at work. It's a fundamentally different problem. And so I think that whole you know gets results through people but really the supervisor in their words doesn't get any results. The people get all of the results the supervisor is responsible for making sure the environment is there that the tools are there that the knowledge and skills are there such that the people are enabled to get the results that are needed. And so just looking at another piece you know they say you know good supervision is I think I'm gonna paraphrase here because I don't have my notes but um you know a good supervisor uh gets his people his people that their people um you know to do what he wants done when he wants it done the way he wants it done because they want to do it which just pushes me back. But really what we're doing is we want to enable people to do the right thing to do the it to do it the right way at the right time. And that's a fundamentally in my mind fundamentally different attitude to bring in so if I were to rewrite job relations that would be one of the places where I would make a major change. I don't need to change the objectives of doing the right thing the right way at the right time but I do need to say it's not it's because we've created and enabled people to know what to do, know how to do it and know when to do it and that they're in an environment where they're supported to do those things.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

Yeah to develop their judgment and back them up.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

Which coming gonna bring us all the way back to right thinking about um practitioners out there, leaders out there, right? I think the lesson or maybe the message we're talking about a lot is put the tools down. At least I'm gonna say that put the tools down. Just stop put them down and instead think about what is that environment and when a problem happens map out instead what do you want them to respond? How do you want them to respond? What does that look like? And then it is about come back to where you are right now. What are your unseen routines or maybe seen there's probably a gap there. And then this is the beauty of PDCA in that thinking model what's the next step to close the gap and how what's the next condition and experience you need to create to enable that team to move forward.

SPEAKER_00 36:55

I hear people say if people would simply follow the standard work which is yes and um so let's just say that your worker is doing their very best to follow the standard work and then they run into something that stops them. What do you want to happen in the next three seconds because that is going to define whether or not you have standard work because oh I have to work around the problem congratulations there's no longer a standard or are they going to say hey we've encountered an obstacle put thing in syncata terms and then work together with that first responder okay yeah we're gonna have to do the workaround to get things going again but somebody knows and we got to write it down and do something about it. If you want standard work to work you have to be constantly looking for those sources of friction in your system and systematically honing your system so that those sources of friction are reduced or eliminated otherwise the friction builds and you know one of my metaphors is is you know we do a kaizen we do a classic one week kaizen event and what do we have on Friday is a a target process that has not been robustly tested. So a lot of to-dos and big action list yeah and we we have pizza and go home and then Monday morning we start robustly testing it whether we like it or not. So have we equipped those first line leaders not with a long laundry list of stuff to do but with the tools to know how to respond to those problems. And then it's just here's the next obstacle here's the next experiment um and so that's the difference I think between six you can run a one week event that's an awesome way to kickstart Kata but my objective on those now is what I have at the end of the week is I have a functioning storyboard and I have coaching cycles happening every day. That's if you want change to sustain, you use the process improvement to stand up the conversation about process improvement.

SPEAKER_02 39:09

That's the objective yeah and this is now triggering maybe an I don't know if it's a new thought or it's just a thought that is finally forming into this way that that that routine that scientific thinking routine that we call kata that practice is teaching leaders how to respond in the way that we want them to respond.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

That's exactly what it is what we should be focusing on as a you know a KATA TWICI lean community is not what's the next tool I go implement, what's the next shiny new thing that I'm going to get these people to practice, but it's what are they doing right now to respond and how can I shift that towards where we need to be it reminds me of Raghavan does you know he quoted Peter Drucker which is you know anytime you quote Peter Drucker you're probably doing some good thinking but I love that only three things happen naturally in organizations friction confusion and underperformance. Everything else requires leadership and this is entropy wins right you know if for those of us with any kind of technical engineering background entropy wins every time and we tend to think we can put in an improvement and my metaphor is okay now the freezer's cold enough we can unplug it that it's not going to work you have to keep putting improvement energy in even to keep it the same. And that's the leadership role is to be conscious of those things that are adding entropy back to the system so that we can be actively removing it.

SPEAKER_01 40:47

Yeah I really like how you mentioned the importance of the the first reaction in the three seconds which you know we've got to just train ourselves and practice like okay how how do I want to respond when I notice the you know the standardism being performed or you know whatever it is and kind of modifying our idea of this you know classic motivation theory of like what are the positive uh and negative you know immediate reinforcing consequences uh it's kind of a version of that but it's not like oh give them a pizza party when they do a good job it's there's there's such a subtler way to reward almost the right thinking pattern that we want people to take like when they encounter an obstacle or when they when they can't do the the standard is performed. And I feel like often uh the leaders I observe are unintentionally giving reinforcement to things like complaining about the problem or taking shortcuts around the standard work or whatever it is. You know, I I think of the classic like how do you sustain 5S well no one should ever walk by a piece of trash on the floor without like picking it up, throwing it away and maybe looking around to say, where did this come from? And uh one theme I've been noticing and actually a lot of different podcasts on different topics, you know, like family and relationships and everything is how do you rewire that first reaction to not be blame or defensiveness, but just curiosity. Like I wonder I wonder why that standard work isn't being followed. And again going back to let me get the story from this other person whose mind I couldn't possibly pretend to understand. And let's see if we can unpack what's really going on there.

SPEAKER_02 42:28

Yeah or even huh I wonder why this person is so nervous concerned about this change instead of just immediately saying oh they're resistant. Yeah they're an antibody either give them another presentation convince them harder.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

We do that and we see that go mark Laurel one of the things that is interesting you know what's in it for them right we we always like to ask that but that right there is a transactional mindset and we have to get away from the transactional mindset and get into a teaming mindset and get into a supporting mindset. It's not what do I have to give them in order to get what I want yeah because the minute we're thinking in the transactional terms in those transactional terms we are moving toward compliance and if you want true teamwork you have to you cannot rely on compliance to get it. So it the those that that compliance language is embedded in so many things that even even even those of us who like to think forwardly we ask well what's in it for them and the minute we do we're asking what do I have to give them to get them to do what I want and that's the wrong question to ask.

SPEAKER_01 43:44

Yeah and I think that connects back to your you know maybe modern critique of job relations is it it doesn't feel copacetic with respect for people to say well our job is to get you know the most uh activity or production or you know compliance with this standard out of our people but to make them think that it was their idea it's like oh that seems a little shady actually I remember a presentation from a guy I heard years ago and he was a man you know in the consulting business uh you know you realize that empowerment means your people can make the decisions right oh I didn't say I wanted them to be empowered I said I wanted them to feel empowered and we have to be genuine right we have to be genuine which means that there's a safety net that um somebody there's no fear around bringing something up about making a suggestion um even you know and that's why we say in Kata we right run the experiment but keep the blast radius small make sure that the consequence of failure is relatively benign that we always have learning. Yeah had a a great Kata moment a few weeks ago and we were just starting on a new challenge and the leader actually volunteered to take the first step like to to implement the first experiment which at first I was kind of like oh I don't know shouldn't you let your team step in and then we come back the next day you know what happened? How did it go? What'd you learn? And they said I was going to try XYZ here's what I expected. And I was wrong. I was like yes round of applause and it was such a perfect first experiment to have the leader say it's perfectly fine if you you don't really think you're right when you have your hypothesis going in and then we get back together and you know what it was super tiny. It was like I don't know I was gonna go like try to fiddle with the design in this way and see if I could get this thing to fit or um and and to just say oh I was wrong. No big deal what's the next experiment you know what do we need to learn next so I really appreciated that for setting the tone of the rest of this Kata where now the team is is running the experiments. I don't know if they did that on purpose but well it doesn't matter it happened it doesn't matter so for that safety.

SPEAKER_02 46:02

And that's a great demonstration of the response that we want to instill right whether or not that was on purpose or accidental that's exactly what we're looking for. So amazing did you give that leader praise afterward?

SPEAKER_00 46:17

I did indeed yes excellent excellent all right so to wrap up the conversation honestly I could probably talk to both of you for a very long time about all of these things but to honor and respect schedules and timing um I would love for us to just wrap up with you know what is a single lesson a single takeaway for our listeners um whoever they may be out there what's the one thing that you want to make sure that they all leave with I think it is developing leaders if you're and if you're not doing that on purpose that you are gonna you can end up with a rote process that nobody really mentally engages.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Yeah and I'll I'll uh steal one of your lines Kelly okay how do you go about that integrate don't implement how can we get into that the mindset the assumptions the real you know what do they care about what what would be a meaningful improvement here and help them do what they already want to do versus saving the day with your tool they've never heard of and then they won't be able to actually sustain and use long term because they don't understand and it doesn't make sense to their context. Yeah I love that yeah and the second you walk away that board's not getting updated.

SPEAKER_00 47:43

So yeah I think one other piece and I'm just going back to my notes from Cheryl Jekyll effectively address lack of agreement. And yeah that's a tactical thing but that is one of the places like one company that I think we all know well and I'm not going to mention who it is but that's one place where they don't do a good job. And it results in some frustration and it's resulted in them being probably kind of stuck where they are for the last couple of decades. They've reached a level they've plateaued because they haven't yet effectively addressed or they're maybe they're beginning to that not every senior leader actually supports what it is they're trying to do. And that's a very common problem. I've seen it in almost every company well yeah I mean certainly every company I've ever worked for um had that problem of wanting to talk around disagreement or isolate the people who are disagreeing or whatever it is in an effort to mechanistically control that disagreement rather than organically address it. And having that mechanism of dissent going back to David Marquet how is it that you are encouraging people to bring up their concerns?

SPEAKER_01 49:09

This is what gives me confidence that AI is never going to take over our jobs as change influencers because it's that ability to productively surface the real like what are people really thinking and feeling here and where are the disconnects that and that's that's the magic of of lean and and getting these things to quote unquote work is how do you move people into enough alignment over time that yeah we can move forward in the the same direction.

SPEAKER_02 49:39

Yeah yeah and this comes so beautifully together for like my big takeaway from this conversation which is our jobs are to look at what are the systems and how are people responding and what is the ideal response we want in all of those situations. And that's what we need to slowly work on and shift in our organizations. It is not about go put a storyboard in place go use TWIJI. It's okay when this thing happens how do I want people to respond to it what does that look like what does that sound like experience that you want people to have and you have to keep that in mind.

SPEAKER_00 50:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 50:23

All right Mark Laurel thank you both so much for coming on and spending time with me and having this really fruitful conversation I am really grateful to both of you for everything I have learned from you two over the duration of my knowing you and again just really happy that you were able to come spend some time with us today. So thank you.

SPEAKER_01 50:44

Thanks for the opportunity Kelly I it's always fun to step back and learn even more from what you think you already learned by talking through it.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

Always always yeah thanks for putting this together made me go back and look at my notes.

SPEAKER_02 50:56

There you go. All right thank you all have a great rest of your day that's a wrap for this episode of Thoughts on change. If you're also out there trying to move culture instead of just installing tools hit subscribe and share this with a fellow CI warrior and remember progress beats perfection curiosity beats control and culture beats everything. See you next time.