Fixing the Way Work Really Gets Done: Dynamic Work Design

I can't remember an operational problem I came across that didn't fit one or more of these five things. First one is on this episode of Executive Edge, Greg is joined by Don Kiefer, a former Harley-Davidson executive and co-creator of Dynamic Work Design. Don reflects on his journey from the factory floor to executive leadership and shares hard-earned insights on fixing how work really gets done. A problem is not, I need new software.

The problem is objective to the work. Like we're at 45% sales. We need to be at 65%. Dynamic work design.

Can you just explain what that means? Static work design, like an org chart. An org chart, we need them, but they give you no clue as to how to do the work. I met Mr.

Oba and convinced him to come help me. One of the things we did just as an example was we went from 120 days in 45 machines to 17 of the same machines, not new. And you call up in the morning and it shipped in the afternoon and not from stock. Manufacturing shipped the same day.

I want to figure out how he thought. I want to be able to predict the next question that I had to go figure out. Hello and welcome to this episode of Tenzing's Executive Edge podcast. Today, my guest is Don Kiefer.

Don is a senior lecturer in operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. But before you think Don is an academic, you should know that he's a career operations executive and co-creator of Dynamic Work Design. Don started his professional journey running equipment and factories at the tender age of 17. During his career, he was vice president of operational excellence at Harley-Davidson, where he worked for 15 years.

Since 2007, Don has been advising executive teams around the globe in a range of areas, including strategy deployment, product development, and operational improvement. He's worked with industries as diverse as oil and gas, medical, biomedical, and banking. Recently, Don co-authored the book, There's Got to Be a Better Way, How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work. Welcome, Don, and thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

Thanks, Greg. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to see you and to have you on to talk about your story and the book. We want to focus a lot on the principles in that book.

But let's credential you a little bit. Let's go back. You started at 17 in a factory, obviously, then went to school during some period of your career. But let's start from the very beginning.

What were you doing in a factory at the age of 17? Well, I like to say I was too smart to go to college when I was a kid. So I had to wait till I was married, had kids and, you know, remodeling a house at the same time, working a full-time job. So I went to work.

I went to frontline work, a lot of it in factories and hung out a lot of bars and had a lot of fun the first couple of years. But, yeah, I made my living doing piecework on metal cutting lays and milling machines, that kind of thing for a long time. So very, very hands-on experience on the floor. Yeah.

That's great. Then you ended up at Harley-Davidson, right? I don't want to skip over too much, but I think that's where you spent the bulk of your career and came up with a lot of these principles. I did.

Tell us about that. I ended up going to engineering school while I was working. It took me eight years. And when I was finished, it was right at the time when Harley was starting to grow and they changed the requirement for their manufacturing engineers.

They had to be degreed instead of just getting the expediters or the supervisors off the shop floor. So, and it was right when they were beginning their turnaround in 1989, so it was a lot, When I got to Harley, the tenure there was you're either there 20 years or 20 months because in 1985, they laid off a ton of people, almost went out of business, and they were just starting to come back in 1989. So I went as a manufacturing engineer, ended up as the technical leader in the engine plant, and then later I went and led the TwinCam 88 engine project, which was unusual then because mostly guys from design engineering were there.

But I kind of talked my way into doing it because I thought I had a better way to introduce products. So I was there 15 years, did the Twin Cam project. And then they said, OK, smart guy, because the engineers were actually sick of me being around manufacturing after seven or eight years. And so they put me back in back in charge of one of the engine plants and said, OK, let's see how good you are at catching these projects and putting them into production.

And then I became the vice president of operational excellence while I was running the engine plant. So that was after Mr. Oba and a whole other story. But yeah, when the lights really went on for me about what Toyota was doing, we made a huge amount of changes to Harley, which I led.

And they rewarded me with it with bigger job, more work, and the same thing. But that's the way it goes. So you were there when Harley introduced the Toyota production system? Well, we didn't really use the Toyota production system, but I met Mr.

Oba and convinced him to come help me. And we started, we worked with him for about 18 months or two years. And we did part ways at one point because, and this is the interesting part about dynamic work design, because he wanted to put in all the rules and tools of Toyota. And, you know, at Harley-Davidson...

You know, working with those, you know, almost everyone at Harley, men and women who rode motorcycles and it was a steel workers plant and they were not about to do calisthenics and, you know, do the, do all this kind of stuff that they were doing in Toyota. They, they were partners in the manufacturing, partners in the business. They'd help save the business and they had a voice in it. So there was a certain time when I learned a lot from them.

We made a huge amount of change, but there was a certain time when Mr. Oba said, oh, you have to do this. It was more like frequent deliveries, like every 10 minutes, the car's got to come around and pick up these parts and go like, that might be nice at Toyota, but we don't really, that's not going to help us. And it's just going to tick off the operators.

So we're going to do something else. So I went more to a, what's the next thing that's going to help us? What's the problem we're trying to solve rather than let's put in the Toyota production system as the goal. Let's make the business better.

So what's the biggest problem we have to get? And that was a huge pivot for me from a way from putting in the rules and tools to like, how do we think about the work and how do we improve the business? Who cares if we're lean or for dynamic work? Is the business making money or people engage in the work or making progress?

That was the pivot point. So we went our ways, but he was a really interesting guy to work with. Yeah, he's obviously a legend in the Toyota production system. World if you know that system and you know well known but you also when you were at harley that's when you met the co-author of this book nelson is it repenting repenting can i just tell one story one or two stories yes but since everyone's podcast is all about his stories yeah well the first time we met he comes to my office he was running the toyota supplier support center at the time and he brings a couple of his people with him and they came to the office after you Six or eight weeks after I talked to him, and of course, part of it was Harley-Davidson.

That's why they came, wasn't Don Kean. He comes in the office, and I start showing him a slideshow about how great Harley is. You know, we're making all this money and blah, blah, blah. Don Kiefer and his team are, you know, knocking the socks off all the numbers, quality, safety, and cost, all of it.

And, you know, after like six slides, he stops and he says, Mr. Kiefer, would you mind if we go look at the factory since you asked for my help? Will we go see the factory? He's like, yeah, sure.

Greg, we took like a 25-minute walk through the factory. I'm sure many people who've worked with him had this experience. And of course, I'm trying to tell him all the cool stuff we're doing and all the changes we make, how great we are. He's not listening to me at all.

He says, can we start at the shipping dock? We go to the shipping dock. I'm like, who wants to see the shipping dock? Mr.

Oba wants to see the shipping dock. And then he gives himself a tour around the factory, and I'm kind of following him around. And my employees are laughing because no one ever, you know, Don never follows anyone around the factory. He's always leading truck.

But here's this Japanese guy dragging him around the factory. After like 25 minutes, Greg, he stops, he turns, and he takes off and goes back up to my office. And I'm like, oh, I guess I better, I should probably follow him. He goes to my whiteboard, which I love my whiteboard.

And he draws a, he makes a diagram of the factory, and he does the whole layout of the factory. Okay, here's the steel machining, here's the aluminum machining, here's the assembly line, here's the flows. And he says, Mr. Kiefer, I think this is what I observed in your factory.

Is that correct? I go, yeah, that's pretty good for a 20-minute walk through the factory. He makes a circle around the assembly line, and he puts a little note on there. And he says, Mr.

Kiefer, please make this change, and then call me when you've done it, and I'll come back and tell you what to do next. And i go like well wait a minute not not i'm thinking i don't take orders i i mean i'm giving orders i'm the i'm the problem solver i'm the guy that's how i got this job from being on the shop floor to the general manager vice president i fixed things i figured out i'm not doing something without understanding why so so i said and he gets up to leave i said oh mr mr well wait a minute, and i start asking the questions that you would ask like of a of a consultant like how much is this going to cost?

How much money are we going to save? How long is it going to take? When do we start? And he just looks at me and he says, well, Mr.

Kiefer, what's the problem you're trying to solve? And I go, oh, that's a good question. You know, I'm at Harley making all these, you know, all these changes and blah, blah, blah. And I'm coming up against a brick wall and I came in a hard time figuring out what to do next.

And I read about your article and blah, blah, blah. So I want to put the Toyota production system in this place so I can keep changing and keep on being a clever guy. He goes, oh, you want to know about the Toyota production system? I go, yeah.

He says, well, you seem like you're ready to go. I said, yeah, I'm ready to go right now. He says, okay, well, please answer this question for me. What's the problem you're trying to solve?

And I go like, this guy's playing word games. So I get mad. He gets mad. Like he comes here to help me and then I don't want to play his game.

I wanted to play my game. He leaves. Luckily his guys stayed behind and said, Don, if you want to work with Mr. Oba, you have to do it his way.

He's going to show you. He's not going to teach you. He's going to show you and blah, blah, blah. So we picked a spot six weeks later, he came back and we started.

But that was my first introduction to Mr. Oba. It was like, he walked out because I was like, no, you're doing it my way. We're going to pick a problem and solve it.

So that's my story, Mr. Elba. Probably one of the few people that ever almost came to blows with the guy. Okay, so you implemented some improvements there like that.

But you met Nelson, your co-author, and he was a pure academic from MIT, right? Right. He had a grant from the National Science Foundation. But one of the requirements was you had to have an industry partner okay so our head of quality the late Ron Hutchinson signed up he said yeah we'll partner with you come to Harley and so he was there you know learning about quality what we were doing and helping us figure out like what's the next step in quality and Nelson's basic response was well you've you've done a lot manufacturing so the place you ought to attack now is you got to fix the design make it easier to manufacture and higher quality.

And they were walking down the hallway and they said, and I'm coming the other way. And Ron Hutchinson says, oh, you got to talk to this guy. He's working in product development and he's like ripping up everything, changing everything. You need to talk to him.

So we had lunch together in the company cafeteria. And, you know, he's like 15 years younger than me and just a newly minted PhD. And, you know, I'm in my mid-40s and I'm like a crazy man. You know, I'm like doing everything and all excited.

And I'm telling him all this stuff we're doing. And one thing I did was like I took Harley's process, which was like totally chaotic product development when I got the engine project. And I interviewed a lot of the project leaders and I figured out basically a stage gate process. And I was so proud of myself.

Like everyone who, you know, comes up from the bottom, everything I do is new. And Nelson looks at me and says, Don, why don't you read a book once in a while? Stage Gate Process was invented like 15 or 20 years ago by the automotive industry. Why don't you read a book once in a while?

I go, oh, okay. So then we're walking down and I'm telling this story about another thing I did. And he goes, well, hold on. I want to hear more about that.

And I go, well, that's some stupid thing I did over there, Nelson. Why do you want to talk about that? Let's talk about important stuff. He goes, well, that is important because actually there's very little written about this thing that you did, but what's written says you should do exactly the opposite of what you did and your results are stunning.

So I want to study this, understand why. And I was like, I'm kind of, cause I was kind of a loose can. I go like, this is a guy I want to hang out with because now he can, he can help me understand where to go and where to move and why stuff works. So we, that's how we met.

And the thing about us both is we always want to make everything better. He, from a very academic point of view, and me from like a junkyard dog, fix it, let's get going guy. And we've, that was in 1996. So next year we'll be working together for 30 years.

So we would fix stuff. Then we talk about it. I fly to MIT. We talk through, understand it, make another plan and go.

And we've been doing this, go fix it and go learn from it for 30 years. And about 10 years ago, he said, we have something new here. And we need to be able to articulate it. But what we're doing is not the same as everyone else is doing.

So that's the story of Nelson and I. That's very interesting, too. I think it sounds like you guys complement each other rather well, right? Yeah, but we're like complete opposites.

He's never had coffee. I drink coffee all day long. I'm excited. He's very thoughtful.

You know, he reads books. I mean, I read books, but like he knows stuff. And so we're always kind of fighting to find that place in the middle where theory and practice meets. And that's been the wonderful thing about it.

And Don, before I get too far, the improvements you were making, I would assume, because I'm thinking, what do you think about when you're in manufacturing? You were improving efficiency, flow, quality, all the metrics that typically are out there measured in manufacturing. And is that really where things were improving? Yeah.

And the factory was quality cost of delivery. Yeah. So we were just knocking the socks off and safety too. It became the safest plan in the Harley system.

And one of the things we did, just as an example, is we, in the back of the factory, we had a place where we made aftermarket parts. So for example, a flywheel, it was out of production. You'd call up Harley and say, my 1985 flywheel, I need a new one. And it would take between 90 and 120 days to deliver that.

And we have 45 machines just making flywheels, which is the connecting rod and the rotating part of the engine, the crankshaft. A year after working with Mr. Oba, we went from 120 days in 45 machines to 17 of the same machines, not new. We threw away the rest.

We only needed 17 of those machines. and you call up in the morning to get a 1985 or 1975 flywheel, and it shipped in the afternoon and not from stock. Manufacturers ship the same day. 120 days to one, 45 machines, 17.

So it wasn't just like, oh, let's get 5% more efficient. I mean, it was very eye-opening for me because - . Greg, at that time, we had 25,000 people a year coming to visit that plant and walk through it. Business people, motorcycle riders, people in the press.

We had Hulk Hogan and the Blue Angels of Roxas. But a lot of business people came to see what Harley was doing. And Mr. Oba came in and basically told me, you suck, you have no clue.

I know you grew up in factories, you've been there 30 years, but you don't have a clue what you're doing. And what I wanted to learn from Mr. Oba was, because I knew I could never catch him in manufacturing, with his experience, I want to figure out how he thought. I want to be able to predict the next question that I had to go figure out.

And that's what I did with Mr. Oba because as soon as we got that running, I wanted to switch to what I was doing now, which is intellectual work. So finance, legal, strategy deployment, all this procurement, all this stuff that happens in the office, product development. And that's where I went, product development.

Okay. So you're making the distinction between, say, pure manufacturing, shop floor to the intellectual work which is all the other work in the business that has to get done but usually in the office or somewhere off the shop floor and that's where you're helping companies improve processes and and the way they're going about doing things yeah so we made that nelson made that pivot in 2002 we said okay we got we understand factories and by the way there's a lot of people way more experienced that like coming in and doing that faster than us we understand the idea of it so now but but the mistake people were making was they're trying to take the rules and practices.

Of lean manufacturing or TPS, whatever you want to call it, and trying to take it into the office. So like forcing engineers to 5S their desk and things like that. And the engineers are going, get the hell out of here. You have no clue what I'm doing.

So they didn't know how those ideas transferred to different work. They just knew the rules for manufacturing for visible work. And it did not work for invisible work. It didn't work for executives.

Like the executives were saying, you can't convert my job into a process that happens every six minutes or something like that i'm creative so and it is the intellectual intellectual work is not only invisible you can't see it it's more creative and more highly variable and so we wanted to tackle that and that's what we've been working on for 20 20 some years okay so you left industry i think in around 2007, when you started a small con it was small then i don't know how big it is now but shift gear shift gear work design right very focused on that and then you started doing your your teaching at MIT at the same time.

And so that, that I'm sure you've worked with lots of companies and you took all those experiences and with Nelson published this book, I believe it came out in August of this year. Folks, the name of that book is there's got to be a better way. And it's got a big butterfly, I think, breaking through some glass on it. So it's pretty, pretty, pretty stunning image on the, on the cover of it and a great title.

But you know, it's, it's really about, which is considered a game-changing discipline of dynamic work design. And I want to dive into that with you and make that the focus of our conversation as we move forward. So first of all, you know, I always ask people, you wrote a book. Why would you write a book?

What was your ambition with writing this book? We had so many. First of all, the book wasn't written by going and studying Toyota or going and writing a case on something. This comes from our 30 years of working together.

And the thousands of executive MBA students who we forced to do a project. So this comes from out of our own work experience. And we knew it was different. We knew how to do it.

But we were only hitting a limited number of people because it's mostly by word of mouth and through teaching. So we wanted to get the word out, but we also wanted to get it in writing. So it wasn't just, oh, yeah, call Donnie. He could do these very cool things that you didn't see.

But how can we convert this to something that people can read a book and get an idea of how to get started themselves and get out to a larger audience? We just wanted to get that done before I got too old to remember what the hell I was doing anymore. Yeah. And I'm interested in this because this intellectual work, right?

People, a factory is a factory. And if you're a manufacturing person or an engineer, you know, you can really kind of see, oh, you know, I can walk through a factory today and I can say, oh, you should set that five feet to the left because it would be a lot more efficient. But with intellectual work, you know, it's unseen. I think you've said that already, right?

A lot of it is unseen. So, you know, with this, I guess the other question I would ask about the book before we get into the guts of it more is who should read this book? Anyone can benefit from people who just doing their own work to the CEO, to teams. So it's really about human work.

It's not about an industry or about teams. It's about how do we organize and do human work? And it's based, because I have an academic partner, it's based in a lot of theory, social science theory, brain theories, like how do we organize work based on science. The other thing is that we wanted to give people a way to think, not just tell them what to do.

How do you see the work? How do you think about the work? The people are already skilled at solving problems, but they weren't looking at work the right way. So that's really the focus of dynamic work design is to get into invisible work.

Like I used to tell people, my friends that, oh, you work in a factory is, you know, they would think, oh, you just do the same thing every day. And I would tell them stories. No, it's different every day. It's kind of wackable every day, but it's very, there's so many things happening.

It's super interesting. So I tell them, if you want to be a really good, sound really smart when you go on a factory tour, and then when you see some inventory that's sitting there, stop the tour guide and say, what is the purpose of that inventory? Why is it not moving? Right?

There's a whole thing of lean and Toyota is like, what are you moving? So you can see it in a factory, but how do you see invisible work? Where does it even reside in the office? It's in your inbox, in your email box, it's in meetings, it's on spreadsheets.

If the project gets delayed two weeks, no one can see it unless the project manager says so. So it's much tougher, much tougher to even see the work in the office area. And so that was the challenge of moving to the office area. There are a lot more inputs.

Like on assembly line, it does one thing. But if you're working in a business, you can get inputs from anyone. So to answer your question, I think primarily it works for anyone, but primarily the people who are sick and tired of putting up with this stupid baloney they have to fight through every day to get their job, then trying to make it better. This will help them, no matter what level you're at.

So it sounds like you're going after some of the bureaucratic BS we all live with. Right and and and you called it dynamic work design that sounds like a very intentional, name for this can you just explain what that means and then we'll we'll get into some of the principles the core principles yeah first let's talk about its opposite static work design this is what everyone knows it doesn't have a name but we gave it a name because now there's something else beside it static work design like an org chart an org chart we need them Org charts and organizational hierarchies were built in the industrial area so you could take small businesses and take them to scale.

So they're important, but they give you no clue as to how to do the work. It doesn't describe the org. I think about work coming in as an idea from one side, exiting as an intellectual or physical product. That org chart tells you nothing.

It's also pasted on the wall. It doesn't move unless you're changing the org chart every 18 months. Same thing with a process sheet. A process map tells you what's supposed to happen, but it doesn't tell you what is happening, nor does it tell you what to do when something goes wrong.

So we usually think in these kind of static type of models. So dynamic work design is based on a couple of things. One is that we only recognize human beings as performing value-added work. We don't, machines don't do value-added work.

Computers don't do value-added work. Suppliers, it's only human beings. So the nodes on all of our diagrams are always individual people, not departments. And the second thing is the way we interrogate the work is we take one piece of work and we watch it go through those nodes.

and see what's happening, all the issues. Is it moving or not? How many loops back? And so then from that, we start to understand what's really happening and we can make the intellectual work more visible.

So it's about keeping work, intellectual work moving, basically. Same thing as in manufacturing, but people don't know how to think about intellectual work the same way you think about physical work. I can go see the cars moving down the line, but can you see a project moving? No, you only get a report or you get statistics on the wall or a spreadsheet two weeks later, get all these kind of lagging indicators.

But who knows how to go see if the work and the project is actually moving today? That's, that's what we worked on. So I'm starting to get more of a grasp of this now, because I don't know, I mean, personally, I always still feel like I can feel when inefficiency is happening with my own work, right? Like I should have had two screens open there and I could have done this, you know, two minutes faster than the four minutes it took me, right?

Like, oh, you know, what a waste. I think that's sometimes it's growing up in a lean in a Six Sigma environment for me, but I've applied this, and I'm not even trying to say we came close, but I left the manufacturing to go to an internet-based company, but we had processes, and I ended up in the market operations area, and I was noticing that some people were overworked, staying late. Other folks didn't have anything to do, and were bugging out right at the closing time, so to speak.

And I'm like, we got to balance this workload more. So we did some work there with visual management, but broke the work down into logical steps as well. So I think I might have done a little bit of this, maybe by mistake, but more out of necessity, because I said, look, I can't scale this business or this function within the business unless I do something to make it a more balanced workload and apply some of these principles. So let's get into it now.

Let's get into the core principles. There's five, and I'd like you to explore each one of those and pepper this with as many stories as you like, please, Don, to illustrate these points. Yeah. First of all, I think what you said is really important, Greg, which is we didn't go like, do some scientific research and pull some new concept out of the stars.

It's like, this comes from what we found that worked. So people are doing these types of things all the time, but they just do it when they come across it naturally. There's no framework. When we describe problems at work, there's no real framework to describe a problem.

It's like, oh, communication or incentives or training. But we don't really have a framework to say, here's one of the structural problems with work, but this has come out of our experience. So if you don't recognize some of these behaviors, then they're not right. What we've done is articulate them and we've boiled them down to five things about work.

It's not about leadership. It's not about your attitude. It's not about the hat you wear, the uniform you wear, the air conditioning or the country you're in or the culture you're in. It's about is the work moving or not?

And how do we as humans do work to keep that work moving. So, so here they are. And I've been at this a long time and I can't remember an operational problem I came across that didn't fit one or more of these five things. So I think now we might come across a sixth one or add on to it or someone else might, but right now we don't know if any outliers are that don't describe these.

So the first one is solve the right problem and solve it the right way. So a lot of times, because of the way our brain works, we just jump to a conclusion. More experienced people will do it faster. Like you said, you're experienced with Lean and Six Sigma.

You go in a factory, you go like, oh, that should move five over. It's your natural reaction. But what we say is sometimes that part of your brain, I don't know if you've read Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. There's a pattern matching part of your brain.

It's based on your experience. It's a logical part. So what we want to do is make you turn on your logical brain and make sure you're solving the right problem before you go into action. Like a problem is not, I need new software.

A problem is not the marketing people suck. The problem is not, why aren't you doing my favorite solution? The problem is objective to the work. Like we're at 45% sales, we need to be at 65%.

So a whole big thing about, let's get the problem clear. And I'll tell you what, I've worked with a lot of executives and they meet with me and say, we got to do this. The problem is we need this and we need a new plant. We need that.

I go like, oh, wait a minute. Those are all solutions. What's the problem you're trying to solve? The same question that Mr.

Ova got me is like, let's get down to brass tacks. And a lot of times they don't really know. And it's hard for them because they're so good at problem solving. They just jump to what they think is.

So we use the A3 like many people do. And the reason the A3 or Damaic, any of these things work, we're not religious about which one you use. The reason they work is they take them out of this experience quick to decide they push them up into your logical brain because you have to write the problem statement down and do the scientific method and put the data so that's the first thing is solve the right problem get the right problem statement and then go do it like a signed use a scientific method to go run an experiment that's the first one okay okay the second one is called structure for discovery.

So just to show you this stuff comes out of normal human behavior, like what happens when there's a crisis? Like everyone goes in a room. We get the most important people in a room. Doesn't matter what level they are.

You know, they take the stripes off when they come in a room. You can have an operator. You can have a technician. You can have the CEO.

They get in a room. They agree on what the problem is. They write it on the board. They write down the data.

They decide what they're going to do. Then they go run the experiment, see if we can fix it. They meet constantly during the day, see if those activities are working or not. They learn, they find out the issues, they solve them, and they're working constantly to discover how to solve this problem.

But think about how we manage the business. We get these numbers that are a week, two weeks, a month old, several months old at the end of the quarter, and we look at spreadsheets, numbers, not looking at any work. And people start telling stories of what the numbers should, you know, let's move the financial numbers. They have no clue what's going on with the real work.

No clue what's going on in the real world. So that's a management style. So if we make those meetings a little bit more like a crisis management, like we have four elements we need. We need a clear target and we need to understand the intent behind those targets.

I don't understand why. Two is we need supporting metrics. You want me to go faster? Okay, what about quality and delivery?

Oh, go faster, but don't let quality drop? Don't let delivery drop. These all sound familiar, right, the way we work, but it's not the way management works. So then we want to see not just, oh, Greg, what are you going to do?

Don't worry, Don, I got this. We'll go fix it. No, Greg, we want to see the activity set. So we can match the activities to the target and see if everyone believes that's the best plan of action.

And maybe we can coordinate it. So we see the activities and then we need clear feedback loops. Not like I'm going to give you your performance review next month. No, like when I pull a door close, I hear the latch click.

I know the door is closed. So we did the activity. Did it produce what we want or not? What can we learn?

When we get that style going in management, it's a learning discussion. It's not a blaming about you or me. It's about the work. Is it work moving?

What are we learning? So the structure is so we are discovering and not just executing somebody's idea of a plan. Do you have any examples where that discovery process, you know, maybe throw something out here? Is it asking a lot of questions?

Is it like five why? No, we actually, I'll tell you one story. We got called into an organization that was trying to build a new plant. They were out of space and they were building a new plant like five miles away.

They were six months into the project and they were three months behind and they called me for help. So after a day or two, I went to the CEO and said, the problem is you've got like 50 people in this project team and they all think they're working on something different. And I talked to your executives and they're not clear what you're doing and what the targets are. And he gets mad.

He's like, are you kidding me? I've communicated this so many times, Don. And he was like a good conscientious leader, good communicator. I said, I don't care how much you've tried.

They're not on the same page. He said, what should we do? Well, first, let's get your team together, clarify what this is all about. And then we'll go in front of the other team.

So he says, OK, we'll do it. Whatever you say. We get the 10 people in the staff and room. Here's the meeting.

okay guys i want you to write down what the targets are for this project what you want the team and and why just write down a little piece of paper and then put them on the wall so they write them i put them on the wall they're all different great they're all different including the cfo who admittedly said i have a secret goal of like productivity for workers like what what kind of a game are you playing here so so they got clear and i said okay here's what i want you to do Mr.

CEO, I want you to put one slide, prepare one slide with what the targets are and why this is important for the business. I'm going to give you 10 minutes to explain it to people in the room. We get all 50 people in the room. He does it.

It took them about a week or two. He does it. One slide explains why. And then I said to the people in the room before he starts, usually when the boss talks, boss says, everyone clear about that?

They go, yeah, boss. Or you get a softball question. I said, no, I'm handing out post-it notes. Everybody has to ask three questions.

Everybody. And if you don't have, can't find the first one is, I'll give you the first one. Can we have every Friday off work with pay? The answer is going to be no, but it's going to get you right.

And they all laugh. So now talking for 10 minutes, they're listening really carefully. And the questions are calling them out on bullshit. Pardon my French.

It's like, what's this one teams mean? Don't you think we're working as one? What's that even mean? We have to be agile.

What's that mean? What's wrong with the project? So I call them out on these kind of buzzwords that he's using. And they also asked him like, you know, why is this important for our customers?

What about this supplier? What about that supplier? And they also said, we haven't all these problems. So they put them on the wall and then we come back in and he has to answer every single question.

So now there's a conversation. So now the leader and the people doing work are clear about the targets and the intent behind it. It's a human conversation. Now we can start running the project and discovering how to get there with frequent stuff.

So we set this up as a scientific experiment, not an implementation. And it all starts with this kind of human activity of it's in my mind. The targets aren't the whole story. Are we clear?

And what's in the way? How can I help you? A very human conversation to discover how to get the work done as an experiment, not just implement a program that some consultant dreamed of. That's the big difference.

Okay. So when you say structure for discovery, you're really trying to. Drive that clarity, right? So everybody's on the same page.

Everybody knows what the target is. Everybody knows what their role in achieving that target is, how they fit into the process and make it happen. Okay. And then we use the last principle was visualize work.

We put it on the wall. So you can't just tell me what you're going to do. You have to write what you're going to do on a post and hold on. Don't worry.

I know what we're going to do. Okay. Write it down. And then people go oh that's hard yeah but you have to write it down simply so we can see it because we want to all get exactly all get on the same page and so when we stand in front of that board it's like we did the activity did it have the result or not if it did how can we get it go faster if it didn't what can we do to fix it so now it's about the work and discovering the best way in real time not just did you do the are you are you did you hit the right milestones and are you on target financially?

No, is the work actually delivering the results? And that's our normal conversation, not the typical management conversation we have today. So the structure, the management structure in conversation is built for discovery. That's two principles.

Okay. The next one is connect the human chain. One of the things I learned from Mr. Oba, one of the most, probably the most important thing I learned from him, and one of the few times he told me something without putting in the form of a question and making me dig for it was, Don, this is primarily a human system we work in.

And that just blew me away because I had come from the shop floor, known all the people, and then it got to manage you. You'll lose the sense about these are real people trying to do work. Don, it's a human system we work in. So that's a main tenet of dynamic work design.

And we want to connect that human chain. So work travels through those nodes of people. That's how we get work done. And there are basically two chains.

One's the work chain where the work is kind of like a regular process diagram. Call it the work chain. We draw it horizontally, left to right, like you do in process mapping. But then we call it a management chain, which we say vertically, which supports that work chain.

And we recognize only two kinds of human work, a huddle and a handoff. A handoff is something that we do all the time. It's known, it's very predictable. It's like, I'm going to mail you your paycheck.

Okay, we don't need to have a meeting about the paycheck. It's like an assembly line here you get this thing i don't need to have a meeting about it's this is normal we used to it all the time it's a handoff you're the next in the process it's repeatable the other is a huddle it's like from the let's go to the toyota example i pull the andon cord what happens we switch from this repeated work from my from my repeatable pattern matching brain to like boom we need a meeting because now we have a problem to solve or a decision to make and the team leader comes running over.

So think about it, not just as the team leader, but the management system responds immediately. And we changed the form of work from these handoffs. So now we have to have a huddle. We need to talk.

So these whole chains are made up of only those two types of work. And if you get them in the wrong place, the work goes crazy. For example, have you ever been part of a very long email chain? It goes on forever with like 10 people on it.

More than I care to admit. Yeah. So is it just like a bad personal habit? Nah, it's a design problem.

And how do you solve it, Greg? When that happens, what do you do when that email chain hits you and you just say, okay, that's it. What are you going to do to solve it? I would say either take me off this chain because it's irrelevant to me and it's wasting my time and other people's time.

Or I would say, look, we're going back and forth too much. Let's just get together and talk about this and come up with a plan, move forward. Right. This is too much back and forth, too much cover your ass with an email.

So we moved to two different designs from the handoff of email to like, come in my office and we're going to settle this. And how long does it take? Like five minutes. Right.

It's the wrong design of communication. you're trying to do something with a handoff that should be done in a huddle. So whenever you see this kind of back and forth and chaos, a lot of times we just need to put a quick meeting in there to solve all the issues and the flow starts. So when people start understanding handoffs and huddles, they can quickly decide, oh, this should be a meeting or this meeting is a handoff.

There's so boring. Just send me the slides. So we can begin to automatically begin to see work in a different way and begin to optimize it. You know, without a big educational thing or without a big process changes like oh no let's have a meeting oh no that should be on email so handoffs and huddles and then the thing about managers is most of their work is done in meetings making decisions solving problems the problem with them is they there's two ways you can have these huddles, one is on a schedule so we have a daily stand-up we have a weekly staff meeting blah blah blah but problems don't happen on a schedule.

Right. So does the fire department drive past your house once a week and say, hey, Greg, got a fire going on? That's kind of like a weekly staff meeting. Right.

It doesn't work. What do you do with a fire? What do you do? Get on the.

What do you call 9-1-1? 9-1-1. Everyone knows what to do when they see smoke or flame. Right.

And what happens? That signal doesn't just go out to like all the fire departments in the region to say, hey, y'all, someone's not too busy. day. Could you come over to Greg's house and maybe work on a fire with us?

There's one that's trained to respond right away and they come to help. They don't give you a lecture. They don't tell you you're an idiot. Why did this happen?

Whose fault it is? No, they just put the fire out. Later they come back. So this is called a trigger based on an event.

It's very well known in manufacturing as the and-on cord, which is just the stop cord. We're going to ask for help. But try to find those in the intellectual work, in the office area. You're not even supposed to ask for help.

You're supposed to have enough initiative, leadership training to get - you're supposed to work through this tangled bureaucracy. We think that's a skill. That's what the leader says. Instead of the leader making the tangled web clear-cut so people can do the work.

So managers work with huddles events based on schedule and then based on event. If this happens in between me you call me i'll respond right away so that puts management in touch more in touch with the reality of the work and they work in huddles in these two ways so that's connect the human chain two is work chain and the management chain and yeah i can i can think of many cases especially in my prior job where i would would call one of my reps or talk to them and say, hey, no more emails, pick up the phone and call that person and get it solved.

I don't want to see that. It's just, it's like watching a ping pong game that I don't care about. Go, go resolve this now. So it's, it's similar principle, right?

And, and I think it's just intuitive. You see it, but some people will love to continue that chain and, and see how many replies they can get on it. So now you see it as a design piece and you go like, oh, we should design the work to happen this way. So now there's a requirement.

When you hit this, you have a meeting. So then we don't need a six-week training program. You have to learn all about these Japanese words. It's like we teach people how to solve problems and to get work moving as the problems come up.

And that's what's different about dynamic work design. We don't do training. We do maybe an hour of orientation. And then we say, let's go to the most chaotic problem-prone place, and let's show you how to put these principles to work.

And once you see it in one place, Greg, then you start seeing it everywhere. And then it starts, you know, it just kind of wires itself together. The next one, everyone's going to recognize as pull, but pull is a specific technique, and we're going to take it to a principle. It's called regulate the flow.

What we want to do is regulate the amount of work we put into a system so that work keeps flowing. Now, a pull system does that, but what's the idea behind it? The idea is we want to push the system for the maximum amount of flow, and we're going to do it by regulating what goes in it and also optimizing the flow. So think about the - you've been on an airplane once or twice, I assume.

Yes. So what's the last thing that happens? They shut the door. They shut the door before you take off.

Once they shut that airplane door, there's no more changes to who's on that airplane. That's one thing that happens. Airplane's going and it's going to go on time. The other thing that happens is management is cut off.

Control of the plane switches to the pilot, not the management on the ground. So now the deal is, I don't care if the plane's half full, got the wrong people, whatever. That plane's going. And your job, pilot, is to get there safely in the least amount of time without stopping and don't call us unless you have an emergency.

That's not the way we run projects. We change the passengers on the train all day long. So think if we did that on - if we kept changing the requirements of the project and the management kept fussing with the project leaders instead of just responding when they had help. Or if they gave them two planes to fly at once.

Okay, we've got everyone on the plane. We're going to pull out on the tarmac down the runway, get in line. And then the CEO of the airline calls up and says, oh, Greg, my nephew needs to be on that plane. Come back to the gate.

And we're going to take Kiefer off. He's an asshole. He's a jackass, whatever. And put my niece on.

Okay. Or we're going to provide that service to our VIP customers. Think so what would happen now. You know you don't have to be there on time because they're going to pull the plane back for you.

Right. So everyone takes their time. The whole system will fall apart. But we do that intellectual workers and the project work all the time so that's the idea of intellectual work is regulate the flow by using the airplane door and make sure work is moving and we then we give them visual ways to see if the project work is moving or if there's too many projects in there and then how to get them out we're going to regulate for like you regulate the flow on on a highway it's like i didn't make this up it's a rule of physics but too much work in there, everything comes to a standstill.

Got it. Great. All of a sudden, again, we don't need a lot of training. Just from that 10-minute explanation, people go back, where's our airplane door?

We need an airplane door because we've got multiple priorities and all this kind of switching errors and productivity and then long lead times or lead times at long tails because we're just expediting, blah, blah, blah. Let's get the airplane door and boom, away they go. Okay, Number five, let's stick with the airport. Visualize the work.

Imagine if you're an air traffic controller. You get like 40 planes in the air within a 50-mile radius you're trying to manage. Okay, but we're not going to give you a radar scope. What we're going to give you is a really cool spreadsheet.

We're going to print out that spreadsheet every two minutes. It lists every plane, latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, call sign. For 50. You're going to read that spreadsheet of 50 planes every two minutes and decide what to tell them to do.

No, it's not going to work, is it? But that's what we try to do in meetings. Instead, we're going to put a radar scope and get a digital twin of the actual work, not the numbers, not the percentages, not the blah, blah, blah. We just said the actual status of the work because visually we can understand it.

We can decide in real time what to do. So that's what visual management is. It's a digital twin or a physical twin of the real work. It's not a, what do you call it, a dashboard.

we're 50%, done. No, like how many invoices are at this station? How many are here? Are they moving?

Where are the issues? Actually post representatives of the work on the wall because our brains as humans are meant to work that way. And now we can all stand around that visual representation of the work and get super clear on what's happening, who's doing what, and then what we need to do and then go do it. That's great.

Coming back to that example I talked to you about, But we had a digital way of tracking who's working on what and where is the work, right? It was always moved to the station, the next station, if you're done with yours, and help out. But we also backed that up with literal manila folders, right, in a rack. And we moved them the same way, right?

Just so in case somebody didn't have a chance to log on and look at it, they could just look there and say, okay, there it is. I know what to pick up next and go with, right? And you just make it, you make it so visually obvious, I guess, that it's natural. You know, there's no, there's no question about what to do next.

There's no stopping. Right. I had, our accountant for many years was a family friend who'd grown up. It took over the business from his dad.

So he'd been running this accounting firm. Been working since he was like 12 because he'd go in with his dad. And he, he's my age and we'd go out to dinner occasionally and he was handling my accounts. So he'd see these companies come in, all these companies.

And he'd say, well, what's that? What are you doing? And then I'd tell him what I could. He could share some things.

But you're like, so one year he calls me up. He says, or it was at dinner. He says, Don, I just had the worst tax season of my life. April 15th, it was just a total disaster.

All the returns came into the last minute. He says, would you just come over and just kind of take a look at my shop and see if maybe you could help me. I spent one day there, Greg. Now, I know nothing about tax accounting, but they were going digital, but they still had folders.

This is what reminded me. They still had a folder. So even if it was digital, they had a folder with the name so they could track visually where they were. The problem was, so like, there's like six stations of getting a tax return done.

So like, I'm going to, I'm going to bring yours over to him. It'd be 40 returns a day to do the first step. Okay. 30 of them are easy.

They're going to get done. 10 of them are hard. You're going to put them in a pile. And that happened every station because I can't call the accountant to call the client because they don't want to be bothered till like March.

It's like January, February. So what happens is they're getting all the easy ones done and they're piling up all the hard ones on their desk. So I drew a little pencil diagram of this It was showing the inventory And the guy, his whole life 50 years he's been working He goes like, is that what we do? I go like, for one day I'm telling you that's what you do We made a simple policy change, You get 40 today, they have to move within 48 hours.

So get the easy ones going. You can put them to the side, but they have to move in 48 hours. And then you're going to call the accountant right away, and the accountants are going to agree that they have to start working in January. They can't wait until March.

They have to answer the phone, call the client right away to resolve it in 48 hours. They still had the big rush in April when everyone sends, but they didn't have the additional 50% of work from all the hard ones left at the end. It changes. Now they could see them in a simple rule to keep them moving so you could walk through and see how many were piled up and why and if there was an issue.

Yeah, easy. Yeah, it's easy to see the log jam if you make it visual, right? If it's not, if those files are buried or stuck in a drawer somewhere where nobody notices, it looks like everything's great, you know? Yeah, that's, boy, you're bringing me back to some things I've done.

So, yeah, I think I've unconsciously done some of this just because it made logical sense to do so. And the output, and we had periods of high demand as well, and we had to prepare for those and get ahead of it. But that's great. Yeah, so once people in the office area get the concept and they know, like, how do I see work coming at me?

Where do I know to look at it? Then it becomes natural. They want to keep it moving. And then you're playing the game.

Then you can tell them, okay, where are the tricks, leverage points, where do we start, and all that experience stuff. But it's easy. It takes a couple hours to switch them over to like seeing the work and then knowing it should flow. Nice.

Great. Well, these are great concepts. Think about an organization that wants to implement dynamic work design. Any tips for how to get started, right?

So I'm sure I'm going to encourage people to read the book because I think that gives them a good underlying understanding of how this works. But where do you start, right? How do you get started? The first thing I'll say is what not to do.

Do not turn this into a dynamic work design program and initiative that you roll out and force everyone into and train them, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do not do that. It's not about dynamic work design. It's like, we don't want to be lean.

We don't care about Six Sigma. We don't care about Toyota production system. We want the business to do better. So we don't do big programs.

In fact, most of them fail. And here's why. you go learn something man that really worked we're going to explain how we did this and we're going to go train people the thing you loved about fixing it was discovering how to make it work better that's what motivates you as a person so now you're going to turn it into rules and say greg i don't care what you're doing here's what you should do now you're just going back do what i tell you to do just like taylor did you turn those great ideas into these tayloristic programs which people hate and usually are not exactly fit for their work it's like just go change everything Start using hijunker chart instead of line balance.

Start using Kaizen instead of improvement. I mean, it's like stupid. To me, it's crazy. Why don't we get more approachable?

So the first thing we say is we always start with the problem. Small-scale scientific experimentation is all we do. Now, we take those experiments to scale and we wire them together. It's not wordy.

You start where the business problem is. You put points on the board in 30, 60 days fast. The training should be a quick orientation. Then we're going to go with coaches and show you how to see this.

And then pretty soon you're going to get up on scale. So the first one is, you know, start with a problem, a small piece of an important problem. Not moving flowers, not the new parking lot or the cafeteria. Take a small part of the sales problem, the productivity problem, the product development problem, the innovation problem, whatever it is.

A small piece of that, run an experiment so you can figure out how to work. So boil a small bit of water in a thimble. Don't try to boil the ocean at first. Water boils at whatever temperature.

You solve a small problem. As you know this from Lean, the same problems exist everywhere. Where its scale is show up slightly differently, but the same dynamics are through an organization. Go put points on the board.

Then think about getting it bigger. Lead with discovery, not train and roll out. Read with an experiment, not an implementation. Go figure it out.

And when you do that, when you get close enough to the work, you know this from Lean and Six Sigma and any kind of manufacturing. When you actually go see what's happening, you find innovation, discovery. You make work better for people. They like it better.

So the same thing is in intellectual work. Not a program, discovery, lead with discovery. The third thing is, and this is a little bit different than manufacturing, is respect the underlying cadence and variation. Not everything can run like an assembly line.

I guarantee if I've worked with thousands of people all over the world, as soon as you say process improvement, they think, oh, no, you're going to turn me into an assembly line. That's exactly what they think. But it's more like a restaurant. Okay, you call up a restaurant They say, okay, we have a table for you at eight o'clock.

On Friday, but they don't know who's, who's coming, but they know the turns. They know about when, and pretty much with, they, they understand the variation of who's going to call and how long they take to eat. And they can operate within that variation to nine times out of 10. You don't have to go sit at the bar and wait for a table.

They understand, they design to the variability. They don't say you can only come on Tuesday at six o'clock because we have to have five people a day at this restaurant. And, you know, no, they go, they go with more people show up on Friday and saturday and they design around that that variability and cadence it's the out of variance that puts them into trouble that's it's like deming's like a normal or not normal variation we have to account for that variation not try to get rid of it we can get it lower but so anyway that's that's the third thing and the fourth thing is system productivity first yeah i know in hr they're really slow at this but how's that affecting the business let's go to the knothole at the business and fix that and get the and get the flow better okay and so when the when you get more flow of work with the same amount of people objectively everyone's more productive right you do that enough you get everyone's going to be more productive and you're going to find all the redundancies and the gaps you're going to fix them and you get everyone more productive we don't care about individual productivity we care about system productivity the i think the mental model that most managers have is if everyone's working, then I'm productive.

Okay. But did you ever go to a symphony? Okay. Okay.

When you, they're warming up, they're all tuning up their instruments. They're all playing, right? And they're playing hard, but what's the sound? It's garbage.

It's noise. Right. What happens when the music starts? They go to the same pace, to a leader, and to the same sheet of music.

And it's music now. And if you watch, sometimes the violins aren't even playing. They're quiet. Right.

But we think everyone's got to be busy all the time. Wrong. We want to get as close as we can, but we system productivity first. Right.

Right. So systems thinking plays here as well. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's actually, system dynamics is my colleague's specialty. That's his, works in the system dynamics department. So the system dynamics thing and then the improvement things really go together. You can understand complex problems and fix them, not by making them more complex, but by making them simple now, breaking them down, making them simple.

So anyway, no matter what the big problem is, it's never a big implementation. It's always start with a small experiment, go from there. Right, right. It sounds like a lot of incremental improvements and proving out the concepts.

And then people will just naturally learn this and learn how to apply it. And we'll be able to see things maybe differently and approach these challenges. And if you put the feedback loops in right, then it's like what happens at Toyota when it's done the right way and lean when it's done the right way, is an improvement is in the job. Like the add-on cord is there.

You have to pull it if you have a problem. And that's how we find what's wrong and what's good and how to make it better. So it's integrated into the job as opposed to an add-on lean department It's going to come in and fix you. No, once we get started, it's in the job.

So we know when you're in trouble, we respond and you're gradually improving. Yeah, exactly. Fantastic. Well, Don, this has been great.

It's been a great preview, folks. I want you to know the book is out there. It's called There's Got to Be a Better Way. And it's Don Kiefer and Nelson.

And where can people get that? Amazon, all the normal outlets? Yeah, All the Normal Outlets. It's on Amazon and I think a lot of other places.

We've been finding it in the, you know, when they ask us, what's your target audience? What do you want to do? And of course, Nelson, the academics around book publishing all the time gave a very fancy answer. And I said, I want it on the serious shelf of the airport bookstore.

And so now every time we travel, we go see if it's on. And actually, it's showing up without us paying to be there. So that's kind of cool. That's great.

That's great. Hey, last thing I like to do on my podcast as we wrap up here is offer a moment of gratitude. You know, you're a seasoned veteran, but I don't think you were probably always as, you know, smart and as effective as you are today, right, after all this experience. And is there anybody you'd like to recognize for helping you to grow as a leader and as an expert in this field of dynamic work design?

There are two things I want to mention. One is Mr. Oba, Takashi Tanaka, and a bunch of guys at Toyota. When they saw what I was doing, they actually came and learned from me, and they invited me to Toyota.

So a lot of the guys that started in the 60s, the old retired guys now, and they brought me to Toyota, and they opened up to me. As I said, Don, we love Toyota production system more than we love Toyota. So anyone's willing to do the work. We'll tell them whatever we need as long as they go use it, not just like write a book.

So there were a bunch of those guys which just changed my entire life. But there is one guy who had a pivotal point in my life. His name is Larry Scott. He's passed away now.

When I was working as a supervisor on the shop floor, after a seven-month strike, I took a job as a supervisor at Westinghouse Airbrake. And I was going to engineering school, and I was pout on the aisles of the machine shop. 12, 10, 12 hours a day and trying to go to engineering school. And it got to be a certain point.

I told my wife, I can't do this. I'm going to quit work and just finish up. I had like a year of school left to do, finish up my engineering degree. So I turned in my letter of resignation in the morning.

I was on third shift. And so I came in the next day and they said, you have to go see the president, Larry Scott. I go like, why? Just go up and see him, Don.

So I walk up into his office. he sits me down. He says, well, what do you want to do? What job do you want?

I go, pardon me. I, you know, I'm frontline supervisor. He's like four layers up, five layers up. I go like, I just, I just, I don't know if you know this, but I just resigned.

He goes, yeah, I know Don, but what job do you want? I go, I have no clue what you're asking me, Larry. He goes, you shouldn't quit and go to school. You need to keep working.

It's going to be way better for your career to keep working. So what job can you have and would you like in this company so you can keep going to school. And it was right in the beginning when the plant was half CNC machines and people from the union rules had a two-week break-in period to run these new machines from manual machines. And a lot of guys, the programmers would go home on second shift.

And a lot of these guys on second and third shift were just lost. It'd be something that, and it's on PeaceWorks. They couldn't make money. So I said, let me go on second shift and help these guys train them.

I write some programs. Mostly I'll troubleshoot when people get stuck and I'll keep your production running and I'll let them make money. and then when it's quiet, I'll study. He says, done.

That guy saved my life, saved my career. And that's what I did. Some days I worked eight hours, some days I worked none. I think I worked on average like 25 hours and the rest of the time I was able to do my studies and everyone won.

And it was an unbelievable piece of help that he gave me in my young career and I've never forgotten that. That's a great story and it's a great lesson for our listeners. To hear as well, because they clearly saw something in you, you were worth keeping and they didn't want to lose you. And, and they found something that, that was a win for both parties, which is very rare to find something where all the parties win.

That he even knew about me. I didn't even know how he even knew about me. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, you're obviously doing a good job or they wouldn't have made that move. So good for you. This has been a fantastic discussion, Don. I appreciate you spending time with us to, to tell your story and to talk about the book and to talk about dynamic work design.

Thank you very much for being here. And I really appreciate it. And I look forward to, you know, maybe staying in touch. It's great to follow the work you're doing.

And I'm definitely getting the book. I haven't read it yet. I'm going to grab that book because it sounds like it's super interesting. It's got lots of stories in it, Greg.

Okay. Yeah. Great. Yeah.

Thanks for having me. It's been great. Stay in touch. And thanks Thanks for helping spread the word about the work and the book.

Awesome. Yeah.