Why Continuous Improvement Programs Don't Get Funded (52 characters)

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to today's webinar. It's part of the Kinexus Continuous Improvement webinar series. It's titled why Great CI Programs don't get Funded and what to do about it. I'm, uh, Mark Graven, senior, uh, advisor with Kinexus. I'm your host and moderator today. Happy to be joined by our presenter, also from Kinexus, Jeff Roussel. He is our chief Revenue officer. If this is your first time attending one of our webinars, welcome. If it's not your first time, welcome. Welcome back. We just want to tell you briefly about Kinexus. As the, uh, organizers and sponsors of today's webinar, we invite you to check out our website@kinexus.com or you can scan the QR code there. Uh, Kynexis is the solution for your lien and improvement. Uh, work where teams can capture, implement, measure and share in one system that does it all. So if that sounds good to you, please check us out again. Kinexus.com. so let me, let me introduce Jeff. I'm really excited. Jeff is doing the session today. Uh, as the Chief Revenue Officer at Kinexus, Jeff Roussel is responsible for all aspects of sales and leads. He's fanatical about building a team that demonstrates the business value and fit of our Kinexus solutions. He has more than 25 years of sales and leadership experience in enterprise software, more than 12 years of those with Kinexus. Jeff brings a wealth of guidance to our growing company and market. Before joining us at Kinexus, Jeff was one of the first enterprise directors at Spreadfast, helping organizations create great social media experiences for their customers. He was previously with, uh, two other companies, the latter of which Google acquired in 2007. Jeff also maintains a position on the board of advisors for the Austin based social media agency, Social Distillery. Jeff, like me, is a Texan by choice. He maintains, unlike, uh, me, his roots are in Louisiana. He's got a love for cooking. He spends his free time with his wife and three step kids. Jeff has an MBA from St. Edwards University in Austin and a Bachelor of Science from lsu. Jeff, uh, welcome. Thanks again for doing this. Let me go ahead and turn things over to you.

Speaker A: Uh, awesome. Thanks, Mark. It's, uh, interesting to be introduced formally. Uh, I appreciate that very much. I usually tell people the reason they put me on these is given 12 and a half years of selling for Kinexus, I've probably probably spoken to more organizations about their continuous improvement journey than anyone. Maybe there's Someone out there I haven't met yet, but you go through so many conversations, you start to see trends and, and whatever. So I'm hopeful that I can share some insights today. Uh, I'm looking forward to it, for sure. Yeah. All right, so today's webinar, uh, I entitled it why Great CI Programs Don't Get Funded and what to Do About It. And I don't know if I'm uniquely situated to have that conversation, but to my previous point, I end up having this type of conversation with so many individuals and organizations in my role as a sales leader at, uh, Kynexis. You know, it's our job to find organizations that need help in the technologies that they use to support their improvement programs and then kind of help them figure out whether that investment makes sense for their business. And by default, what we're really saying is whether an investment in their CI program makes sense. And so, inevitably, we talk to CI champions, and they are super excited about putting all of the energy and effort that they can into their CI programs. But they still have a huge task in front of them to go talk to leaders in order to make that investment a reality, whether that investment is in Kinexus or in something else to their program. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Hopefully I can, uh, share some m insights that are helpful for people, and I'm looking forward to it. So when I started putting this presentation together, one of the things that struck me is throughout the years, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that organizations generate real impact every day through continuous improvement. Uh, I honestly don't think there's any way you could argue the alternative here. We see cost savings, we see improvements to quality, we see safety impacts across the workforce, we see time savings like, it is all there. But to me, here's the challenge. Only a portion of that impact actually shows up in a way that executives can clearly see and trust. So we have tons of data across the Kynexis platform. Our customers track their improvements and the impact of their improvements. And one of the numbers that stood out is that only 28% of improvements that get tracked in Kinexus actually show a direct, visible financial impact. So even though the work is valuable, a lot of that value just isn't obvious on the surface. And so to me, that leads to a disconnect. The value of improvement exists, but it doesn't necessarily translate. And so when CI champions go to talk to their executives, the executives ask what I think is an extremely reasonable question. They'll say, what are we actually getting from all of this improvement work that we're doing? And most of the time, the answer that they get is complicated. Most of the time, when our CI champions try to explain the value to the executives, it involves things like spreadsheets and manual data. There's a lot of explanation. There's usually some caveats around data quality, and none of that builds confidence with executives. So to me, the real issue is not that we have an impact problem. CI does not have an impact problem. CI has a translation problem. And so to me, the part that really matters, if your answer takes a week to build, you've already lost. So I want to talk a little bit about what most of us do when we walk into these conversations. I think most of us start conversations with our executives by talking about our problems. So we say things like, this is going to save us a ton of time doing improvement the right way. It's going to replace spreadsheets. We're going to be way more organized in this work. It's going to make the program, the CI program, much easier to manage if we make a certain investment in it. To me, none of those things are wrong. In fact, all of these things are right. It's just not what executives care about. And so the tricky part is, as CI champions, we assume that the connection is obvious. We assume that if we make our CI program easier to run, that is naturally going to lead to better outcomes for the business. But unfortunately, we don't actually say that part. So why doesn't our approach work? I don't think it's because executives don't care. And I, uh, know it's not because they don't believe in improvement. Sorry, lots of double negatives there. To me, executives care and they believe in improvement. But I believe that executives are solving a completely different set of problems, and they just aren't waking up and thinking about, like, how do we make CI easier to manage? Executives are thinking about things like growth, cost, risk, outcomes. Those are the things that they are held accountable for. So when we walk into a conversation and we're talking about our problems, we are speaking a completely different language. And so to me, that's the disconnect. We're trying to get approval to do more continuous improvement. And our executives are trying to decide where to invest in the business. So let's just humor me and say they. Let's say if they don't, if they don't care about our problems, then what are they actually thinking about? So I think one of the Things executives think about all the time is can they trust the impact that the improvement organization is reporting? I think they care a lot about whether the organization is focused on the most important things. I think there's a huge opportunity to prioritize our efforts in the work that we're doing. And I think executives care a lot about that. I think they want to know, are we improving outcomes for our customers? And at the end of the day, I think they want to know, should I invest more in improvement or not? To me, that's the decision they're trying to make. And most of the time, I don't think we give them a clear answer. I don't think executives are buying continuous improvement. I think they're buying confidence. And we have an opportunity to improve the way we communicate that. So I, uh, put this slide together. To me, what stood out as I was prepping for this webinar is this is all the same work. Right on the left hand side is how most of the CI champions I work with, they talk about their program, they talk about ideas and a threes and kaizens and kaizen events and employee engagement. And then on the right hand side is what executives think about. They think about cost and risk and throughput and outcomes. So it's the same work, it's just a different language. And if we stay on the left side of the equation, then I don't think we should be surprised when our conversation doesn't land. So let me give you an example of what, what this actually looks like. This example happens to be a hospital system. This hospital system made a relatively small series of changes on how they scheduled surgeries. This was not groundbreaking stuff. This is not some massive business overhaul transformation. They set aside emergency rooms specifically for. They set aside operating rooms specifically for emergency cases. They did some tweaking to their scheduling patterns. They made a couple of process improvements down at the front line, and they documented $137 million in savings. Now, uh, in addition to that, they reduced delays, they treated their urgent patients through faster, they improved outcomes for their patients, and they avoided a huge need for a major facility expansion. So to me, here's the important part. Notice what I didn't say. I didn't say software, I didn't say a threes, I didn't say kaizen. I didn't say they increased engagement. I just described a business result. This, it isn't complicated and it's not philosophical. To me, investing in continuous improvement is one of, if not the best, business decisions that an organization can make. I'VE got another example right? This value story isn't health care. So it's not like this is some healthcare quirk. To me, it travels across industries. On the left is a global mining company. They run their improvement system across more than 12,000 employees. Over the life of their program, they've logged nearly 284,000 improvements and counting. With $178 million in financial impact, they've got 89% of their employees actively engaged. It's a bigger number than the healthcare example we just shared. And it's in an industry that I don't think anybody thinks of as a continuous improvement bellwether. On the right, it's a global consumer goods manufacturing organization. They did $38 million in savings. They did 11.7 in new revenue on top of that. To me, the revenue stands out because it isn't just cost cutting. Improvement can't just be about cost cutting. It has to also show up on the growth side of the P&L2. This organization did 5,000 implemented ideas in a year and 57% of ideas actually drove change. So it's not like this is like idea theater. This is cases of programs that got funded because their leadership could see the impact in their own language, in dollars and cents, not in activity. So to me it's the same kind of the same story as the previous slide. It's a different industry. We had another more kind of tailored example in again a non healthcare, actually non manufacturing context too, where a fintech company focused its improvement efforts on being the single source of truth for AI driven savings. And so the rule they set internally was that if it's not in their improvement system, it doesn't count. And it created a discipline that essentially turned kind of a scattered way of saying is AI helping? We think AI is helping into a hard defensible number. So they went from a $4.5 million savings at the beginning of a year and within a year they were at 15 million in savings. So I know this organization. At the end of the year they were able to go get the budget needed to expand their program because leadership could see clear line of sight from the improvement work to the bottom line of the organization. And so now they're using the savings that they're generating to run the business. They're able to take on more work as an organization without adding head headcount. And they keep investing in their CI program because it earns its place, not just because it's a nice thing to do. So they didn't get funded for doing Improvement. They got funded for proving impact. And to me, that's the whole game. That's exactly the homework we're going to talk about as we kind of get, get into this webinar. So here's the realization. Most of the time, I believe that the CI champions that we work with are underselling the work that they do. You think you're running a program, but what you're actually doing is improving how your business performs. And that is a much different conversation. One of those sounds like support work, the other sounds like something worth investing in. So to me, if you take nothing else from this part of the presentation, you are not running a continuous improvement program. You're running a business outcome engine. Our, uh, CI programs result in business outcomes for our organization, and we have to be better at communicating that. So if that's the problem, this is going to be my attempt at communicating how we might shift from that problem. I don't know if any of you guys know Simon Sinek. I've done webinars in the past. I've kind of mentioned his book. Start with why. I really like the concept of why. How, What? The argument that he makes is that if you're going to convince someone to do something, you should first convince them why it's important before you get into the concepts of how it's going to impact them. And then lastly, what specifically you want to do. I think that this is the structure that makes CI conversations land. And unfortunately, it's the mistake that many of us make is that we start and we go in the other direction. We start at the end. We start with the what? I've seen it time and again. Like, we'll walk in to the executives and say, here's what we want to do. Here's the tool we need to solve this. Here's the solution that we've got. And to me, that's exactly why this doesn't work. Because executives don't start there. They start with, why does this matter? And then how does this affect our business? It's only after you do that that you can get in and get them to care about what specifically you're asking for. So this is where everything starts. Why this problem matters to them, right to the executive, not to you, but why this problem matters to them. And if I can give a little bit of coaching here, one important way to think about this is in terms of Advil, not vitamins. A, uh, vitamin is nice to have you take it every day. If you take it over a long period of time, you're going to get stronger, but you can skip it on Tuesday, you can skip it for a couple of weeks in a row. Whereas when you have a headache, Advil solves the real problem. Something hurts, something needs to be fixed, and Advil solves a real problem. So when you're framing your case about an investment that you need in your CI program, you have to connect it to something like this. You have to connect it to missed priorities, delayed execution, poor decision, leaky PNLs. Those are the things that leaders are actually being held accountable for. Because if you can't, if you can't clearly answer why the investment you're asking for matters, then nothing else that you say is going to land. So once you've clearly established why this matters, the next step is how solving this actually changes the business. And to me, this is where most of the people we talk to stay way too abstract. I uh, hear it's going to change the business because we're going to increase activity or we're going to increase employee engagement or we're going to do more improvement work. But I think what executives are looking for is how is this going to translate into outcomes? How is the improvement work going to translate into better decisions? How's it going to provide visibility into what's actually working and what's not working? How's that visibility going to lead to faster execution, less delay, more follow through, things actually getting done? In other words, more value? Can we take improvements and scale them across the organization instead of solving the same problem over and over again? To me that's the shift. Like we can't describe activity, we have to describe outcomes. Now this is the what and this is where most people start. And it's exactly why these investment type conversations don't land. I think we walk in and we say way too often, here's what we want to do and here's the tool we need, here's the solution, but without the why and the how, it just feels and sounds like another request. So instead of asking for something big like I think we would do ourselves a service if we would make it easier for our executives to say yes, instead of thinking about transforming the whole program. And I get it, that's what we want. At the end of the day, I think it's helpful to start with things like a pilot, a 90 day pilot. Think of this in terms of solving a problem for one team and one workflow. Choosing one clear success metric to tie this to. Not every success metric that it's that this could possibly tie to if you can focus your ask now, you're not asking for a transformation, you're asking for proof. And to me, that's just a much easier decision for executives to make. I think this is the part that most of the lean people in the CI, people that I work with, they don't really like thinking about this part. They don't like talking about the fact that you just cannot prove this with spreadsheets. Like, you can't aggregate the data, uh, into getting the decision made. You can't necessarily trust how that data is getting collected. And quite frankly, like you, we can't answer the kinds of questions that executives are answering or asking. Sorry. So, like, to me, even if the work is happening, even if the improvement work is happening at a rapid clip, and even if the impact is real, it becomes really difficult to defend

Speaker B: because

Speaker A: without a system, you don't really have structured, reliable data. And without that structured, reliable data, what we end up lacking is credibility. And so if you can't measure it, struggle to defend it. And I think it, it causes us more of a problem than what we think. There is more of an emotional component to this challenge and to our request than what we usually give credit for. So here's the reality. If nothing changes, like, if everything stays the same and we keep doing what we're doing and we keep asking for investments in CI the same way we're asking for those investments, nothing really changes, quite frankly. Like, I don't think CI is going to fail because we don't get the investments we're looking for in the organization. I do think CI stays underfunded. I do think it stays under prioritized. I do think it stays misunderstood. And what's weird is that something else will always win,

Speaker B: right?

Speaker A: Uh, C.I. isn't necessarily. I don't think C.I. realizes that oftentimes it's competing with sales and marketing and customer experience and hr, those parts of the organization. We're competing with those parts of the organization for investments. And it's not because those things are more important to me. It's because those things are easier to understand and they're easier to justify. So then, um, the question becomes, what do we actually do about it? Like, what do we do next? I'm going to try to keep this simple. This will be the advice part. I think there's two things. One, define your current state. I get it. I'm talking to a bunch of lean people. I can't not tell you how many times I find that lean individuals have trouble turning their lean coaching on Themselves, Uh, they coach this to the rest of the organization to go define your current state. They struggle sometimes with it themselves. Right. My advice is go figure out what outcomes are you actually generating today? What can you prove? Because to me, if you don't know where you are, it's really difficult to build a credible case for where you want your program to go. And the second thing I would tell you is reframe your next conversation. Start with, why tie it to something leadership already cares about. Then tie it to how it's going to affect the business. And then you can go in and specifically say what you're asking for. To me, if you can do these two things, it's going to change how these types of conversations go. So I tried to put this in a way that might be a little memorable. I read a book a long time ago called Made to Stick and was taking ideas and trying to put them in a way that might be easier to remember. What I'm hopeful of is that this is a simple enough kind of concept that if you're going to take a screenshot of something today, like this would be the screenshot. I think this is a simple way to kind of structure thinking around how you would go. Make an investment request. Start with the pain right now. What is actually happening? How often is it happening? What is it costing in terms of time or money or risk? Then think through the impact of that pain. Why does that matter to the business? What specific metric does it affect? What does leadership actually care about here in this situation? Then you can move to your ask. Design a pilot, a clear metric to track a, uh, decision that you want someone to make. If you can answer the pain, the impact and the ask, then I think you're kind of ready to move this into a different conversation. I would argue that the work our CI champions are doing matters way more than what CI organizations get credit for. I don't even think it's close. I see the impact numbers in Kynexis. But I talk to organizations all day, every day, and I see that the work that they're doing matters to their organization. And it's not just about engagement or running a program. To me, it is about improving how the business actually performs. But that only matters if we can prove it. That's the unfortunate part. That's the challenge sitting in front of us. We're doing great work. We're not getting the credit for that work, but it only matters if we can prove it. Nobody gets funding for doing improvement work. The only way you get funding is for proving impact. So, two simple next steps. If you have a use case in mind, and if you need help figuring out how to talk about an investment with the executives in your organization, I'm happy to help. I don't care whether it's a technology conversation. Our mission at Kynexis is to spread continuous improvement. We just happen to use software to further that mission. But, uh, if me having a conversation leads to someone getting an investment in their CI program and that leads to spreading continuous improvement in their organization, I'm all in. So I'm personally saying that I am happy to talk through your situation. I'm happy to help you figure out your metrics. I'm happy to help you figure out how to frame your conversation. If you're not there yet, I would tell you, start by defining your current state. Literally write down what outcomes CI is generating today and write down what you can actually prove. Because to me, that's the foundation for everything we talked about. And so with that, I'll say thank you. Uh, I am certainly happy to open this up for questions, Mark. I don't know the easiest way to do that.

Speaker B: Thank you, Jeff. A couple announcements, and I will encourage people to continue to submit questions via the Q and A button down there. So Jeff will let you, uh, get a drink of water and, uh, relax for a second. We're going to have a great Q and A session. I know. Um, we do these webinars roughly monthly. Um, stay tuned for the future webinars. If you've registered for this one, uh, we will email you about future webinars and the opportunity to register. Uh, if you're watching the recording of this, you can go to kynexus.comwebinars and sign up to be notified. We'll also invite you to go to kinexus.comwebinars. click on the big button in the sidebar that says Webinars on Demand. And we've got over. Well, I never remember the exact number, Jeff. It's well over 100 recorded webinars. They're all free. Um, they're all available, um, through both our website and the Kinexus YouTube channel. So encourage you to, um, go and check those out. Next, we want to tell you about some other free resources we make available. As Jeff said, we all share this passion for continuous improvement and operational excellence. And one of the ways, um, we try to help people is with, uh, our blog. So you can go to blog.kynexis.com or you can scan the QR code that you see there. Next, I want to tell you also about our podcast. Go to kynexis.com podcast. There's a QR code or you can find search Kinexus on any of the places where you normally, um, find your podcast, the recording of this webinar and others. Um, lots of other content about continuous improvement and operational excellence is there in the podcast. So please check that out and uh, subscribe to get more. And then finally we all get surveyed to death anymore. Um, how many times a day do we get asked to fill out, ah, a feedback survey. I know it can be a lot, but we will. When you leave the webinar, um, you'll be given an opportunity to fill out a feedback survey. Uh, please do. Um, we do look at them. Sometimes we fill out these surveys and we wonder why does it really matter? Um, we do look at the feedback. Tell us, uh, what went well today, what could have been better. Tell us what ideas you have for content for future webinars. That really does uh, help us out. So please do, uh, click and do that short survey. It'll take just a couple of minutes and we'll thank you in advance. Okay, so with that, um, as Jeff mentioned, uh, his invitation to talk with you, his email address is there on screen. Jeff russellinexus.com I'm also happy to talk with you together, uh, with Jeff, or separately about any of the challenges or possibilities that you have, um, regarding improvement in your organization. So Jeff, here's. Let's see, let's start here. I applaud the narrative around speaking in a language the executives understand. What about the executive's timeframe focus in this language? And I'll append to the question. And David, feel free to jump in and add another question. The way I read your question is thinking about maybe short term benefits, long term impact. To me that's a classic lean conundrum. Toyota talks about long term thinking. Other organizations struggle with that. What would you say Jeff and David said that's exactly. I interpreted his question correctly.

Speaker A: Yeah, great question. I'll tell you what comes to mind there. First. I always believe in the power of the. And I'm a huge believer that kind of short term impact leads to long term impact. So it's like can you do both short term impact and long term impact? Although I know that's a little bit of maybe a naive way to think of some challenges. This is a real balancing act. I think we deal with this in all kinds of walks of life. Like you know, if, if we don't get enough short term impact and a leader or an executive kind of gets called out for it, he or she may not be there anymore to see the long term impact. And so it requires enough psychological safety within the organization for that long term horizon to come to play. I would say where possible, I would try to do both. But yeah, I think it's easier said than done. I don't know if I'm um, I'm trying not to use it as like a, um, you know, a way to not answer the question. It just the rule is to think, you know, when in conflict, choose the long term impact versus the short term impact. But I get it, that's not always possible.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, let me add, I mean, I think I agree with you Jeff, that positive short term benefit leads to long term impact. Short term benefit helps executives see that continuous improvement or however it's being framed is worthwhile to support that, to continue down that path. The problem is when it's short term only or like a counterproductive short term focus. So you think of a, you know, a company that might m make a strategic decision, oh, we're going to hit the numbers this year by slashing our R and D spending. Well, okay, you've made the numbers this year, but now you don't have future products to fund the long term. So I mean that's a high level example. We can think of gemba focused examples where something might be counterproductive in the short term. You know, we fire, fire, uh, the quality department. Well, you know, we don't have perfect quality and now we're not inspecting and measuring quality. I mean, that's going to be a short term savings with a bad long term impact. So I think it depends.

Speaker A: I'll say usually when I am building out business case models with people as they're trying to figure out whether an investment in Kinexus is worth it. You know, uh, the longest term horizon that we're typically going out before a payback is three years. Although that even feels like in this environment, in this day and age, three years feels like a long time. You know, and quite often we're kind of shortening that time frame because I do think every organization is different as to what long term is and what short term is. Um, most of the time we're trying to figure out a payback within 12 months and if it takes longer than that, then, you know, it's still a worthy conversation. But again, it's just easier said than done. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Well, let's move on to Another question, Jeff. Um, when you talk about funding, should a CI program be self funding beyond like the initial startup funding, which might include hiring someone internally using a consultant, putting software infrastructure in place?

Speaker A: Great question.

Speaker B: So

Speaker A: I believe, I'm just going to caveat this my opinion. I believe that a CI program needs to be, it needs to be able to fund itself over time. I think that if it is a drain on the finances of the business and it can't fund itself over time, honestly, I would really think it's a good question as to whether or not it's worth doing. You know, I don't think it should just be a philosophical decision. However, I think it's a very similar question to, uh, I work in startups. Should you bootstrap your startup or should you go get venture capital investment in order to accelerate the growth of your startup? That's a much more difficult question. Right? Should you make a big investment in your CI program and that accelerates the opportunity to see the results that you want, or should you bootstrap your CI program and then it might take longer to get those results, but you're taking less financial risk to get there? Uh, to me, that's a decision for every organization to make individually. Um, I, I would say that if the organization can afford it. Yeah, I mean, I think subsidizing the, the speed of growth in CI is going to return huge benefits to the bottom line. And so if you can afford it, I think it's an excellent opportunity. Not every organization can do that.

Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. Um, thanks, Jeff. Here's another, um, question. How do I put a dollar figure on improvement work when a lot of what we do is, uh, soft benefits like you mentioned, engagement, morale and quality.

Speaker A: Great question. I think let's start with just the premise of it. So to me, the first premise is that those things have value in the organization. Yes or no? I think yes. Right. I think you have to start from there. If you don't believe those things have value, then why do them at all in the first place? The next question is how do you calculate that value? And I think really what's being asked here, I'm not trying to put words in someone's mouth, is how do you calculate that value in a way that the organization trusts the impact of it? That's really tough. Right? It's like, how do you calculate the value of email? How do you calculate the value of training a new employee when they come on board? How do you calculate the value of reducing turnover, whatever other metric in the organization? How do you calculate the value of increased employee engagement, increased employee satisfaction, safety of your employees and your customers. I don't know if that's just like bigger challenges than what my brain can handle, but like, that is a scientific question of how do you prescribe value to that? There are tons of resources online that try to do that. That will help you try to figure out what is a percentage point of employee engagement worth to an organization. I think everyone's a little different. There's. To me, calculating it early, calculating it often, and watching the changes in those numbers is extremely important. The actual number might be less important, the change in the number might be more important. And doing it in an honest way that doesn't over inflate the value leads to trust. Lastly, I would say the organizations that we work with that have developed the most trust in their impact numbers include their finance and their executives. In the process. They are validating the numbers, they're approving the numbers, they're making changes to their process when the numbers seem off and then they're trying to go back and correlate that to their P and L. And it's not always perfect. But the exercise of involving finance, involving executives, and doing it in an honest and transparent way matters a lot.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I've seen in a lot of organizations that you end up getting more cumulative financial impact by not focusing only on financial impact and roi. I think it's counterproductive to demand an ROI threshold. You can only do an improvement if it has a certain ROI threshold. Because people are not just ROI machines. We're human, we have emotions. And if we have an improvement that we want to do, that makes our work emotionally better, you know, it's a little bit less frustrating, a little bit less monotonous. Could that flow through into quantifiable or monetizable benefit? Well, sure, but the time spent trying to calculate that isn't worth the juice, isn't worth the squeeze, to use that, uh, terminology. So like when you shared early on, you know something like, what was it, 28%, 28% of improvements have a known ROI impact. I'd say, okay, great. Because the ones that do have the knowable financial impact basically fund everything else. And I've just seen that work so well in different industries, including healthcare. Joe Schwartz, my co author of the Healthcare Kaizen book, Their Health System in Indiana, I think their number was like 10% of their thousands and thousands of improvements had a stated ROI impact. I mean it was like quite literally optional to propose or calculate an roi. Now they did work with finance. Like you were saying, Jeff, sometimes, you know, like, yes, there, there is a big impact. We made a change that was in the name of patient satisfaction. And guess what? Oh, okay, well, yeah, um, the material we're using now is cheaper. And let's add up and. Okay, well that was $30,000 a year. Well, absolutely, yeah. Claim that and add that up and put that into the tabulation of impact. But impact goes far beyond the finances. Uh, there's different types of impact.

Speaker A: There's a completely different kind of webinar on the ROI of the data, uh, of tracking impact. But one thing that always stands out to me, Mark, is of the 28% that, that had a financial impact to them, only about 2% of those had a financial impact of more than I'm going to make up a number, $10,000, something like that. And so 98% of the financial impacts were low impact, very rapid improvements. And we've had more than $10 billion billion dollars with a B tracked across our platform. So it's like the little things add up. And I think that's a huge kind of part of this is I try to tell people, track impact and do your best not to make it the goal. You're gonna want the impact. When you have to defend your program and you have to ask for investment, etc, do your best not to make the impact the goal because improvement should be done outside of the impact that it creates. But again, I'm say it again, if it were easy, everybody would do it.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the risks is that you lose the funding. You know, I've seen organizations take short term cost savings from laying off their continuous improvement people. So I'd say, well, that sounds counterproductive. Uh, we have to demonstrate value financially without only focusing on that. So I think I remember vividly one hospital I visited. They were five years into a continuous improvement journey. Um, they were not just using lean tools, but they were um, kind of impacting management at a closer to the front line level, even if it wasn't really the full culture. I don't remember talking to the leader of the CI program. I meant it, it wasn't meant to be a gotcha question, but just out of curiosity, like, hey, you've been doing a lot of great activity for five years. If an executive asks you so what's the impact been? How would you answer that? And he thought for a minute and he didn't think real long, he didn't think too long, but he said, if it's not A direct quote. It's very close to it. He said, oh, I'm not worried about impact. We've been building capabilities. And I did think for. I thought longer about how to respond to that. And I think I tried to sort of caution him. It's great to be building capabilities, but that's not going to guarantee your survival. You got, you. You gotta have. You gotta have something to point to. I think that's just gotta be business outcomes. Another back to questions, though. Um, this one question says, basically, I want to have these conversations. Uh, but my executives don't even give us the meetings. How do I get in the room in the first place to be able to talk about things in their language?

Speaker A: Great question again, asking all the hard ones. I wish I had easy answers for these.

Speaker B: That's right. I mean, that's why. That's why we're doing the webinar called Jeff Roussel's Easy.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, look, this is. You're essentially. I don't know if you guys have ever read To Sell as Human, Right. But you're essentially articulating the, uh, the sales conundrum is that everyone is trying to sell their ideas and their challenges. I would. I don't know if the right answer is an email, a, uh, presentation, you know, whatever. I would tell you to focus on defining the problem and defining the cost of the current state. Those are the things that executives listen to. This is the problem that I want to solve, and this is what it's costing our organization. The way we're currently doing it. That is the way to get attention for. Is this worth the time for our organization to focus on it? Uh, it's weird that lean people struggle to take that step and define the problem because that's what they teach. Like, if I go around an organization, you know, they're showing people how to do an A3 and they're focusing on the problem definition, and they just kind of struggle sometimes to point that teaching at themselves in this type of an instance. Um, there are, you know, lots of ways of trying to define the cost of the problem. But if you can figure out how to define it and define the cost of it, that's going to. I think it'll get you the conversation more often than not. And then I'll just. I'll caveat that one. One thing I think a good technique is if you can say, this is the problem I think we should solve, this is the cost of not solving the problem. What would you need to know in Order for you to tell me, yes, let's go solve this problem. Like, what else can I tell you for you to make the decision that this is a problem that needs to be solved.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think there's also, uh, when it comes to persuasion, we can talk about, here's the benefit of doing something. It can also resonate to talk about. Here's what you lose by not doing it. That resonates with people sometimes, too. Not to back our way into the solution we want by defining the problem statement that way. But I think when it comes to psychology and sales, there's, um, someone I've been reading and studying recently, Rory Sutherland, who's the head of the Ogilvy Ad agency in the uk and he writes a lot that's really compelling about, you know, framing the pain of a current state, the pain of a situation, to then build the interest in talking about, what can we do about it? If you just start by talking about, well, here's what we want to do. People might not want to talk about that, but if. If you can help them acknowledge and recognize a shared pain point, that might help spark that conversation internally.

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I do think missed opportunity can be a pain. You know, uh, that can be part of the calculation of the challenge of the current state is the missed opportunity.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it kind of feels like trying to prove a negative of, like. Well, prove to me that we're losing. Prove to me that we have that cost. Okay, so, um. All right, a couple other qu. I think we have time for a couple other questions. Um, I'm trying to find the ones that have easy answers. Jeff. All right, well, here. This is a lot of people in this. In this situation, I'm, um, one person with no budget and no analyst. What's the realistic first thing I can do Monday morning?

Speaker A: Good question and not an easy question again. So I still believe that. What do they say? That the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step. I do think there is an opportunity to improve or get better in a local area, a local team, a local part of an organization, etc. Like, I. Yes, it's better to manage it at scale and to manage it across an entire organization. I still think you can take the disciplines of defining the problem, defining how an improvement would impact the organization, and then creating a plan to go and do that improvement at a really small scale. Even if it's a scale of one, it's still possible. I get it. The impact of that is not going to be as large, but that would be, I think my advice, if you really have no investment opportunity. Right. No budget, no people, anything like that. Yeah, I feel for you. You know, that's a tough situation to be in, but, um, that would be, I guess, my, my. Where my mind goes in that kind of situation.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we kind of touched on this a little bit in the session. But question, I think, related to software and what we do, uh, it's only fair because that is. That's what we do. We track everything in spreadsheets already. Why isn't that enough to make the case for continued CI?

Speaker A: So I have tons of questions on top of that. I certainly don't think spreadsheets is the answer, nor would technology be the answer. To me, the root cause of what you're describing is do we trust the impact that we're tracking? Do our executives really trust that the impact that we're tracking is affecting the bottom line and the P and L of the organization? I don't know how to answer that for you, but, like, if that's the. Let's just say for the sake of argument, that's the root cause that you're tracking the impact, but they don't trust how you're tracking it. That's what I would be focused on trying to solve. That might include bringing your finance team like we talked about. Having your executive be part of validating the impact, articulating the current state of the problem in a different way. I don't know the answer. And in order to do those things, like the spreadsheets may or may not make it more difficult to organize and manage all that work. And if that's the case, well, then you've got a technology problem that you would need to focus on. But technology alone is not solving that problem. Like, technology might make it easier to bring the finance team in, to bring the executives in to share impact. So then other people can say, oh, we had the same challenge, we're going to do that too. And now the impact's worth twice as much. So I think technology can play a role in making those things easy. But it is not going to change the fact that you're using spreadsheets or not using spreadsheets. You have got to figure out a way for the organization to trust the impact that you're calculating.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's the trust factor, there's the accessibility factor, there's the problem with spreadsheets breaking in ways that, um, software doesn't get corrupted the way shared spreadsheets

Speaker A: can,

Speaker B: um, get messed up. Uh, we've got some blog posts about that if people want to go, uh, search for that or email us, and I'd be happy to point you to those. So I share Jeff's passion for, uh, improvement, and as he was saying, the role that technology plays. Technology, it's not a silver bullet. We've never said that in 15 plus years of, uh, being on the market. But we want to work with you and we want to support you in what you're doing. So, um, Jeff, thank you for doing the webinar today. I didn't say up front this is, uh, like a version. It's not even a 2.0. It's like a version 1.1 of a talk that Jeff did at our annual Connexicon event earlier this year. So, Jeff, um, thanks for accepting my invitation to come and share your thoughts here, here. Thank you to everybody who joined us today and thank you for sharing your questions.

Speaker A: So, Mark, thank you. I appreciate you continually hosting this and the passion that you bring to continuous improvement. So I appreciate it. I think a lot of people do.

Speaker B: Well, thanks. So guess what? We'll see you next time.

Speaker A: Next time.

Speaker B: Thanks again.

Speaker A: Bye, guys.