Preconditions for Lean: Psychological Safety and Model 1 vs Model 2 Leadership with Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant

Speaker A: Celebrating our 20th year of lean Podcasting. Hey, it's Mark Graben. If you've ever felt like you had to be perfect at work or you're worried about making mistakes, check out my audiobook, the Mistakes that Make Us. I share stories about how owning and learning from mistakes actually leads to better results, stronger teams and real innovation. It's available on Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, or just head over to mistakesbook.com I

Speaker B: hope you'll give it a listen.

Speaker C: Hi Mark, it's Karen Martin. Thank you so much for the 20 years of sharing your wisdom and experience with people across the globe on your Lean Blog podcast. And thank you also for having me on five times because I always enjoy our conversations and you know, doing whatever we can to help people become more successful at making improvement and helping organizations perform at top levels. Congratulations on 20 years and may you have many more to come.

Speaker D: Welcome to the Lean Blog Podcast. Visit our website at www.leanblog.org. now here's your host, Mark Graben.

Speaker B: Hi, welcome to Lean Blog Interviews. I'm your host, Mark Graben. Today we have two guests joining us together. They are Thomas Cox and Andre de Marchant. We're going to have a conversation together about things they have been thinking about that I think are going to be really interesting to you about preconditions for Lean and uh, why Lean implementations often struggle or don't stick. So that's what we're talking and digging into today. Thomas uh, Cox is a self described management bench builder and co founder of the Transformative Leadership Lab. He spent 25 plus years coaching the

Speaker E: people who manage other managers.

Speaker B: Tom and I think this is meaningful to a lot of listeners.

Speaker E: I know it is to me is

Speaker B: a certified Parada method coach trainer. The approach that the uh, the late

Speaker E: Norman Bodak want to be.

Speaker B: Wes, um, we talked about that Norm and I.

Speaker E: If you want to hear uh, more about that back in episode 176.

Speaker B: So before I introduce Andre Thomas, thanks for being here.

Speaker F: How are you? Thank you Doing well today I am trying not to show the excitement I have within me about talking about this with you in front of your audience. I think this is a tremendous topic was tremendously important to me.

Speaker B: No one need the whole fact that use yet and somebody I know won't

Speaker E: be holding back his enthusiasm is our uh, returning guest Andre de Marchant.

Speaker B: The was a guest episode 307.

Speaker E: The theme there, uh, among other things was about you can't cut your way to success. So I invite you to go check out that episode if you want to hear that discussion, um, he, Andre, is president of D Marsham Healthcare Solutions Beach.

Speaker B: I'll describe you kind of informally as

Speaker E: a former Toyota guy from Canada. I mean, you're more than that, but

Speaker B: is that fair under it?

Speaker G: Yeah, I think that's a very fair mark. Uh, it's great to see you again. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you've been doing a lot of work in healthcare, uh, over time. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of. I think that we're going to be talking about different industries and I think

Speaker E: common themes, common challenges.

Speaker B: Um, but as we've come to do, and Andre, this is new. Since your, uh, appearance, I'm going to

Speaker E: ask you to go first.

Speaker B: I always love to hear, you know, what, what's your Lean origin story? Or I'm guessing, is it a TPS origin story?

Speaker G: You know, my introduction to leanmark came from, ah, the time that I spent at the Toyota motor manufacturing plant in Canada. You know, I was hired there as part of the first hundred that were hired. It was a Greenfield plant. Had no idea about Lean, had no idea how to build a car to save my life, although I was a bit of a car nut. And so my introduction there was very. I'm not sure that I really understood what I was getting into and what I was going to learn going into that environment. What really struck me and resonated me with me as I was there was how Lean. First of all, you know, this isn't just marketing. This Lean is about engaging everybody and about engaging everybody's brain and intelligence to make things better for the next person down the line, whether that's the customer or the next person that you're serving. And quite frankly, I didn't believe that when I first got there. But because I came from an industry that was always total chaos, I, uh, came from the meatpacking industry and we would sit in the management meetings and we would talk about how well things were going. Meanwhile, when you walk outside of the meeting, it is total chaos. Nobody really understood what was going. There was no standards for anything. There was no standard work, and quite frequently deadlines were missed, things were shipped incorrectly, et cetera, et cetera. And you contrast that with Lean, which, you know, I'm hesitant to say it's prescriptive, but it does have very clear pathways that you should follow. And it actually, while it does sound restrictive when you try to talk to somebody about it, it actually frees up a lot of your mind space to be able to think about not just how to make things better, but the meaning of the, of the work that you're doing and how to make things more, more valuable and more value added for whoever your customer is. In. In there. It sounds like I really drank the Kool Aid. It really took me a number of months to get there, but certainly once I was there, it's like, I don't know that I would want to work in another environment that didn't have this in it, because I'm not sure I could endure that kind of chaos and lack of understanding about what's going on.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you answered a question I

Speaker E: was going to ask as a follow

Speaker B: up of how long did it take you to come to believe it? But I would, I would like to dig into that just a little bit of like, uh, going from hearing the words. Yeah, that sounds great, but I'm skeptical. Like, do. Was, was it, was it gradual?

Speaker E: Was there a certain moment where you

Speaker B: realized, okay, there's there, there wasn't the

Speaker E: gap you expected between words and action?

Speaker G: Yeah, there was a specific moment that made me realize that this is really a serious business and that lean is for real. It's not just some kind of window dressing that we put on something. And that happened at a manufacturing meeting. And you would go to a manufacturing meeting at the meat packing plant and we would go around the table, hey, how's things going? You got any problems? Anything go. Nope, everything's good. Everything's good, right? Everything's good. If you brought up a problem there, you would be probably the biggest idiot in that room. And yet you could walk outside that room and realize that things were not going well.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker G: Contrast that with this one moment I had at Toyota when I first started joining the manufacturing meeting. And you'd go around the room and are there any problems? Everybody had a problem they were bringing to the table. And if you did not have a problem, you would be seen as the idiot. Not that anybody would say that out loud, but you would be seen as the idiot because you did not understand how your business was working. Because every business has problems every day. And so to show up at a, uh, manufacturing meeting where the, where the purpose was to understand the state of affairs, be able to move things forward, be able to solve problems together as a group, you can't show up not having a problem of some m. Kind. And so that moment, that very first meeting, and I'm honest, I showed up without a problem and uh, it became very apparent that I was not behaving properly in that room. That never happened again. And that really resonated with me and made me realize these people are serious about how this is supposed to work.

Speaker F: I need to ask a question, Andre.

Speaker G: Sure.

Speaker F: When you made the faux pas of not having the problem when everyone else had the problem, were you blamed, shamed and criticized for that?

Speaker G: No, not at all. It was acknowledged that I was new to the meeting and that, uh, I could probably learn from some of my peers, give some of the content to bring, and if I had any questions, please reach out to anybody in that room, including the executive vice president. There was no pressure. None of this, wow, what a dumb guy. I had to show up without a problem. It was about helping me understand the process and come back and better prepared the next time. It was a development opportunity, and that's how it was seen.

Speaker B: I mean, that, that sounds like a living example of no problems is a problem.

Speaker E: It was.

Speaker B: It's a problem that Andre didn't bring a problem to the meeting. But as the corollary, as you brought up Thomas, the problem is an opportunity

Speaker E: to learn as opposed to something that you chastise, browbeat, shame over.

Speaker F: Yeah. A fix, a fixed blame for the problem in order to deflect it from oneself. It's not my fault. It's your fault. It's nobody's fault. It's an opportunity.

Speaker E: Uh, yes. Right. It's there. The problem is there. The gap is there. Right.

Speaker G: Yeah. That was my first understanding that pretty much anything could be turned into a teachable moment with the right approach.

Speaker B: Final question before we'll turn to Thomas. In your quality, uh, story, what role did you get hired in as there at Toyota?

Speaker G: Oh, I was hired actually as a forklift driver when I started at Toyota and then just graduated through the ranks, uh, to become manufacturing manager, responsible for stamping shop. Uh, so again, you know, development opportunities. Even when my career at Toyota ended, they were in the process of preparing me for the next level development. Helping people get to the next step in their career was always a big, uh, item at Toyota as well as you know, it. It does support the continuity of the business and sustain to have a really sound succession plan. I had the opportunity to see lean from a lot of different aspects.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker B: And, and that, that there are so many, so many people that had that progression from team member up into various ranks of, uh, formal leadership roles. And Toyota develops people and you know, you compare that to other companies. I, you know, m not to jump ahead too far in the A3. But that idea of developing people from

Speaker E: within seems to be a missing precondition

Speaker B: in a lot of organizations. And it goes beyond just say, okay, well you know, Toyota non, uh, union environments. It's not a matter of union versus management, but when there is a union environment. I've been reading about Ford recently, like choose to progress up into their team member and they have an opportunity and if they're going to progress, they have to leave the union and they leave these protections. And Ford did like, you know, when

Speaker E: I started at GM 30 years ago,

Speaker B: you hire in the young whippersnapper engineer

Speaker E: to be that supervisor instead of up through the range.

Speaker B: That's what seems like the differences there would really compound greatly.

Speaker G: Yeah. And not being able to develop people from within your own ranks, I mean that risks the DNA of your organization because you are continuously bringing in DNA from outside the organization. And to be able to develop that strong culture and make sure that the DNA of the organization lives on and that each generation of leadership builds on the strengths of the last one, it's pretty hard to do if you're not also replicating the culture that's inside the organization to begin with.

Speaker B: So, Thomas, uh, I'd love to hear your origin story. It might be framed a little bit differently as very quality origin story or I'll let you frame.

Speaker F: I think so, yeah. Many decades ago I read Peter Senge's fifth discipline and was just galvanized by it and started trying to see systems and trying to see ways to improve things in a systematic way and might have been right before. After that I got exposed in my engineering past as a software guy, database, uh, architect, when I started encouraging my peers to try out extreme programming, which is a precursor to agile and so forth. And that was all really cool and got very little traction, which was frustrating, but I never lost my taste for it. And when I switched in 2002 into management consulting and leadership training after about 13 years in database architecture, I brought that with me. And um, about 2013 I think I got to show up at a Lean Portland event, which is a. Portland, Oregon has a lean community of practitioners who get together periodically and have. Andre's been there and I was at one of the early meetings and helped kick it off and then probably dropped out and did other things for a while. But that really wetted my appetite. And um, at one key point I started thinking about how do I use the Toyota production system as I understood it from the outside and use it to inform how managers manage and how Leaders lead. And for some reason I got on the topic of performance improvement plans and certainly like telling someone that they were, you know, they needed to shape up or ship out.

Speaker E: You, you mean?

Speaker B: Yeah, the disciplinary.

Speaker F: Disciplinary. Like you're on formal notice that if you don't improve your performance in 90 days, you, you'll be fired. And so many of those are so terribly done. And as I, I but I wanted to take a Toyota style or what I imagined or hoped to be a Toyota style to it. And what I ended up writing was like 95% of what had to happen was that the manager needed to get clear on what quality was in the job, what skills and abilities the person needed to have to be able to do it. Well, did they have the tools they had the training, the supplies, the inputs? That became a very long list very quickly of, is management sure that this person is capable of delivering quality? And in many cases they haven't. And only after you've exhausted it, then I flip the page and it's like, okay, now next page. If they don't, uh, have the skill, did we select for that skill? Is the skill trainable and did we just not train it? And it's like, oh my gosh. And so by the time you're done, it's like, if a worker's not working out, it's like 95% management's fault because they picked them, they put them in the or they either trained them or didn't, they gave them the supplies or they didn't go on and on and on. And if you haven't taken the time to really Inspect M management's 95% of it, to blame the worker for their 5% through a PIP felt premature. And I actually turned that into a product that I took to market for a little while. I call it the Ethical pip. And it was, uh, actually had several instances where I got hired to either help create the PIP and or help coach the executive to succeed on it. And that really helped me feel like I had my feet on the ground in terms of what management needs to do to make it possible for workers to succeed. And I got, after I got done out of my system and I felt really good about it, I turned around and said, hey, wait a second, instead of looking at the worker and saying, how did this worker succeed? What, what about managers? Who's got that same setup for the manager? What's the manager's output?

Speaker E: Are we their tool input? When they quote, unquote, say, yeah, and

Speaker F: you take it on up and you go up to the C suite. And that's how we got to the A3 that we're here to talk about today, which is the preconditions of Lean. Because as I'm, I'm reading Deming and I'm reading some of the old early stuff on Lean, and he would say, get rid of slogans. And then he would say, get. Don't do X. You know, get rid of fear, substitute leadership. And I stand everywhere I can find. It's like, okay, what does that mean? And at no point does he actually say what he means by that. It's a slogan. And it occurs to me that if you can't blame Joe on the manufacturing line for not putting the bumper on correctly, unless you've made very sure that he's got a bumper installation process that's pretty flawless, but we turn right around and blame management for not installing Lean correctly. And our explanations are things like, well, you didn't establish a Lean culture. Okay. You can say you don't have a bumper, bumper installation culture.

Speaker E: I mean, come on, popular definition, right?

Speaker B: You don't have to lean culture because you didn't unsolve.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker F: And so we can't. If we, if we can't do finger point and blame to resolve things for frontline workers, why can we do it for management or for executive leadership?

Speaker E: Yeah, it's had, uh, everybody works as part of a system.

Speaker F: What Lean doesn't have, I would claim, is an install. It doesn't have an installation system. It doesn't have, I claim, measures here

Speaker E: or you jump to the counter version, maybe.

Speaker F: Well, let's just say that I'm noticing there, there isn't. I'm noticing Lean doesn't install cleanly and, well, reliably. Sure. And if a bumper was installed badly, 70% of the time, you'd go, there's a problem with our installation process. But Lean seems to struggle a lot more than it succeeds, which for a problem solving methodology is a bad sign, it seems to me.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, I'm GLAD you mentioned Dr. Deming,

Speaker E: Thomas, because you, you were making me think of him when you talked about

Speaker B: the role of leaders.

Speaker E: You know, Deming, I think one of his expressions was the role. I'm going to paraphrase.

Speaker B: The role of a leader is not

Speaker E: to judge, but is to help people see compare.

Speaker B: Like, once clear annual review.

Speaker E: You're being versus.

Speaker B: I think part of the substitute leadership is what are you doing every day

Speaker E: to help somebody succeed?

Speaker B: And, you know, the, the, the other

Speaker E: thing, you know, I think about PIP is the Cynicism that understandably builds.

Speaker B: When people say it's not about improving performance. PIP is the documentation so we could fire the person without getting sued. What do you know? Statistics, I wonder. But what percentage people on a PIP actually survive and are allowed to improve?

Speaker F: It is completely variable on the industry and on the individual company. But I can say with confidence that I have a track record of getting people to beat their pips. In part because the very first thing we do is examine the thing and discover how badly it's written. And we negotiate a better one that's actually well defined and sets them up for success. And then we do the work to actually help them succeed, which, by the way, improves the entire organization. Because if the organization isn't providing Fred or Janet with what they need to succeed, what are the odds they're not doing that? They're letting other people down too? Pretty high.

Speaker B: Let's talk about this A3. So when we. I know you and Andre have been, you know, thinking and talking and I

Speaker E: think writing about this, uh, a lot. When we went together to talk about how do we want to structure the episode here? I don't know, we kind of fell into. It seemed natural. Uh, let's structure it like a verbal A3. You've created, uh, version X. So of an A3.

Speaker B: I'm almost willing to kind of. Should I give the reins to you, Thomas, or Andre? Like, I'm, I'm almost happy to be

Speaker E: kind of a bit of a spectator

Speaker B: and like, not to necessarily read, but I, we, we.

Speaker E: We have this scripted out.

Speaker B: How should we go through this A3?

Speaker F: Well, I, I want to start by giving credit to my business partner, Jim Prinzing, who's not on the call, but he, we got very excited by the A3. He's from outside of the Lean tradition entirely, and I've not seen him this excited, I think, in years. It's never. To see the A3 as a problem solving tool was a, uh, delight. And he got very into it. And so between Andre's contributions and Jim's and mine, we created, I think, a very good description of this problem of getting Lean implementations to stick. I think that let's see if we can frame the problem statement up for the listener or the viewer. Um, so we know Lean works. We know that Lean doesn't install cleanly, reliably, nearly as often as we'd like it to. So try this on for problem statement. Lean requires people to surface problems and admit mistakes. Stop the line. All of that without fear, which in turn requires Psychological safety as we know. Uh, but psychological safety has to be a precondition not provided by Lean. It has to be there before Lean gets rolled out. And as it's being installed and as it turns out, we've got very good research that says that most humans and especially leaders will default to when they're under pressure, which happens a lot in business. They'll default to something that Chris, ah, Argyrus referred to as Model 1. And Model 1 is controlling, self protective, blame oriented and closed off from learning, which is I believe you'll, you'll find that as the exact opposite of Lean. And so I've got this methodology going to be installed, but the people at the top who are outside of that and responsible for its installation and success are have inside of them by default, according to multiple sources of research, a way of responding to pressure that is inherently anti Lean. Controlling, self protective, blame oriented, closed off. It's the default state of humans under stress. Which means if we're going to install Lean successfully, we're going to have to address that thing, that Model 1 behavior at the executive level. Yeah, that's the base of the problem statement as we've formulated. And the opposite thing that our gyros just kind of muffled.

Speaker B: Probe that a little bit here.

Speaker F: Yeah, yeah. I want to make sure we know what the two models are so we know where we broke. So if model one is controlling, self protective, blame oriented, closed off, and I think we've all experienced a senior leader who's like that at least some of the time at some point in our careers. There's also model two of being calm, curious, empathic, non defensive, you know, willing to share. It's like, huh, huh. I wonder what the answer might be as opposed to I know what the answer is and we're going to talk until you see it my way. And so this model two positive opposite of model one that our guy was described is the operating mode that the executives have to be in the vast majority of the time if they're going to make Lean install and persist. We believe that's the claim. Proba.

Speaker B: Uh, so the Model 1 behaviors would

Speaker E: hurt people's sense of psychological safety.

Speaker F: You would crush it.

Speaker B: People would learn to speak to not speak up. Model 2 sounds like those behaviors are more likely to build psychological safety.

Speaker E: So trying to think of a question, I don't want to jump to countermeasure.

Speaker F: I think we can illustrate Model 2 with Andre's story of showing up without a problem. Right. And he was met with calm empathic curiosity.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker F: There was no blaming, no judging, no criticism. No one was controlling. Like, okay, I, now I need you to come up with a problem right now.

Speaker B: I mean, you know, I mean, I,

Speaker E: gosh, I, I was swimming in a sea of Model 1 behavior at General Motors at first year there.

Speaker B: It was bad, but, you know, um, how often? I guess the question I wanted to ask is how often will senior leaders agree with that problem statement and that gap as something to work on as

Speaker E: opposed to, oh, hey, no, no, no,

Speaker B: no, come in and fix my people or cycle times are too long or defects are too high. No, look, that's the real problem.

Speaker G: Well, I think part of the problem, Mark, is that at the earliest engagement when you're going to, uh, work on a transformation with an organization, we talked that organizations need a couple of things. They need to have a burning platform for change and they need to have leadership commitment. But in those early days, we don't really talk about what that leadership engagement or commitment actually is. And so then the default position becomes, yeah, I know this leading stuff's going to go on. And I support that again without defining what support means. And you know, the conversations I've had with Thomas have led us to believe that while most of the transformation installation pieces are actually effective, that miss at the beginning of, uh, making sure that those technically responsible for leading the work, the executive leadership, making sure that they understand what kind of commitment they're signing up for. That's a big miss. That's where an opportunity sits, where we really haven't fleshed it out, where we've just said, hey, uh, is the leadership engaged? Oh yeah, they're engaged. They're talking about it. They're letting everybody else, yeah, they're letting everybody else do it without actually understanding, holy cow, the way I behave, the work I have to do has to change as well. And it's more than just the simplicity of, of standard work. It's the mental models that they use and how they apply them on a day to day basis.

Speaker F: If you're up for a vignette, like an illustration, if you will.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker F: So apparently when Mulally went to Ford, Ford was in deep trouble. And he comes in and one of the first thing he does in his C suite meetings is he bans sarcasm like that. Worth kidding. He okay.

Speaker B: Heard that one yet?

Speaker E: Sorry, yeah, he banned, um, sarcasm.

Speaker F: He banned, he banned sarcasm. And he's telling his people, look, uh, you can't be telling me that everything's green and we're hemorrhaging the billion dollars a Month. Come on, we got to talk about reality here. And finally, this one guy, Mark Fields, the first guy to step up, said later, he wrote in his journal that he kind of expected to get fired that day, but he reported. And Mulally said it, started applauding. He's like, yes, this is excellent. Okay, everybody, Mark isn't the problem. Mark has a problem. What can we each do to help Mark?

Speaker E: Yeah, his program was behind schedule, and so it wasn't green.

Speaker F: And everyone's getting that, like, uh, so culture is created by what the person with more power than you pays attention to and how they behave.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker F: And what this new guy, what Malali is doing, is saying, if you report red, I will applaud you and I will help mobilize resources to support you. That reminds us most the, uh, prior administration, clearly you would be seen as an incompetent. And it was a career limiting move to admit out loud in public that you had a problem, which is, I think, the opposite of Lean, which is where we talk about problems openly. So it starts at the top.

Speaker B: Yeah, and, and what? The way you're, you're telling that there, I've heard everything about. Nobody was reporting, uh, anything other than green. Mark Fields was the first to do it. Mulally applauded. Fields ended up being his replacement as CEO.

Speaker E: Ah,

Speaker F: years later. What happened in the weeks after that is everybody started reporting yellow and red, and they were sort of having constructive conversations. So now if I come in, I won't be defenestrated. I won't be, like, thrown out the window if I report something other than green. And I'll get help. Holy heck. And so what he created in microcosm, um, is exactly what we're trying to create on the front line with Lean in the first place, is we bring up problems so we can solve them together.

Speaker C: Duh.

Speaker F: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: Well, and the, uh, part of the story is you told that if Fields was really afraid to speak up, I mean, Malali had been encouraging them to speak up and he still felt fear.

Speaker E: That reminds me of your experience, Andre, at Toyota, that it took you a

Speaker B: while to realize, okay, they really meant

Speaker E: the things they were tough,

Speaker B: um, it's understandable that, that you might not, you know, you know, believe about evidence.

Speaker G: Well, exactly. I mean, when you come from an industry that is not structured that way, that doesn't have that culture, and you hear that for the first. Well, I would say a few times, you know, acknowledging that I'm a bit of a slow learner, you're just Kind of waiting for the punchline, right? You're waiting for the shoe to fall where somebody goes, I knew you were incompetent, but. And when it doesn't come, you know, it takes a few cycles of that before you can actually believe what's going on. You know, we talk a lot, especially around lead. We talk a lot about culture. What is culture? How do you drive culture? You know, culture is basically a bunch of people who are exhibiting more or less the same kinds of behaviors. But what a lot of people don't realize is I cannot influence behaviors directly, right? Because I only have a carrot or a stick. I can make Thomas do something if I dangle a carrot or I can whack him with a stick. But as you know, Mark, the Japanese have a saying. When the donkey is full or the donkey is hurt, the donkey stops walking. Meaning if it's had too many carrots or been hit too many times, it's not going to do anything. So the thing that actually drives the behaviors is giving people a different experience to what they're used to. The different experience changes the behaviors, which ultimately, when you get a force of numbers behind that will change your culture. And a lot of people don't understand the mechanism by which that works.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: M. Quick, quick detour.

Speaker E: I'm going to indulge myself as the host.

Speaker B: Like, you dig into the carrot or the stick is the way you described it. You know, you're feeding the donkey or you're hitting the donkey. I've read the the or. The original phrase really was the carrot and the stick, because the stick is what you use to dangle the carrot out, uh, in front of the donkey and that. And I've never really been around a donkey, but if you hit a donkey, it locks its legs and it like that. You can't hit the donkey and make it move forward. So somehow that whole weird analogy. And why are we comparing people to donkeys anyway?

Speaker E: It's just. It's just a, uh, weird history around that.

Speaker F: And I think it speaks to both the fear that the person in charge has that if I don't make something happen, bad things will happen to me. I must now try to make. Make people do what I need them to do with carrots and sticks rather than like, whatever the longer road is of understanding how people work internally in. In partnering with them, finding, like, hey, what. What makes you feel fulfilled at work? Uh, would you like to help co create some success here?

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker B: Authorship, that model one that you're describing of. I. I have to make people do

Speaker E: something through uh, rewards or punishment. Right. That seems very controlling.

Speaker F: Controlling, protective, blame oriented and closed map.

Speaker E: Maybe not perfectly. To a different framework of Douglas McGregor's Theory X versus Theory Y.

Speaker B: Theory X is like, oh, let's lift our own devices. We'll be lazy and sit and do nothing.

Speaker E: Therefore you have to motivate people. As opposed to theory Y which is

Speaker B: more like the Deming approach of uh,

Speaker E: you know, realizing people want to do good work. They have intrinsic motivation.

Speaker B: If you hired people who don't want

Speaker E: to work, there's that system problem. Why. Why are you making that hiring decision system?

Speaker B: Um, problem people. It's easier to blame individuals.

Speaker E: Sure. That's a common cause.

Speaker F: I have to share a. I believe this is probably copyrighted, but it's funny so they call it fair use. This is a screen grab from a Weird Al Yankovic.

Speaker E: Oh, great video. Eric is on for uh.

Speaker C: That.

Speaker F: Yeah.

Speaker E: We're providing commentary to it. I think it's.

Speaker F: But it's uh. Yeah. We got the guy on the treadmill and with a carrot being dangled in front of him and a guy in a suit with a gun right behind him. And the guy is both dangling the carrot and threatening him from behind. So he is incentivized.

Speaker E: Yeah. And he's running in floats and he's running up again.

Speaker F: Going nowhere. Running, sweating.

Speaker G: Yeah.

Speaker F: It's one of those lovely little images that captures so much of what we all hate. Yeah.

Speaker B: I forget the Weird Al song is

Speaker E: all about corporate buzzwords and it's in the yes style. Lacrosse calls Nash and Young. I forget the one.

Speaker F: I'll have to go find it. But yes.

Speaker B: Do we want to talk about causal analysis?

Speaker E: I mean you frame problem statement and

Speaker B: a gap in some of the current condition. Is this.

Speaker E: I was kind of picturing like my gosh, this is probably a very big fishbone diagram.

Speaker B: Or does it did like. I'm curious how much discussion the two of you have had about all of the different potential causes and is what three looks like you sort of narrowed the problem into a particular sub problem

Speaker E: that you've dug into is that

Speaker F: I would say that it was our root cause analysis currently on the A3. Section 4 is probably about a week of back and forth mostly Jim and me and Andre of course contributed and I don't recall him correcting us. So I. I think he must have been okay with what we ended up with. That when lean is failing, it's because people at the front line aren't doing lean. They aren't reporting problems. They Aren't stopping the line. And point number two, because it ain't safe. They don't feel safe. And they don't feel safe because there's at least intermittent punishment. Doesn't have to be every time, but even one out of five is too many. If I occasionally get smacked around, I. It doesn't take very many of those to make me shift my behavior. And so intermittent punishment is going to come from people above you falling into this Model 1 pattern of controlling, self protective, blame oriented and closed behavior. That's the definition. Okay. And if that's happening even occasionally, the only cause I can think of for that, and I'm, um, open to more, this is why we publish A3s, is to get more people thinking about it, is executives haven't got a method, a method for putting themselves into Model 2 and staying there routinely as a matter of course, and helping each other get back into Model 2 when they drift out, as they will from time to time and really reinforcing.

Speaker B: Is it worthwhile?

Speaker G: Maybe.

Speaker B: Is, is this a section where it might be helpful to literally read through all of those whys?

Speaker F: I think I kind of paraphrased him, but yeah. Why? One, frontline workers stop surfacing problems because. Why? Two, experience teaches them it's not safe. They're having career problems, costs, uh, scrutiny, blame dimmed, future prospects, whatever. The risk is too high. Uh, the why is that the risk is too high because there's at least intermittent punishment. Why is there intermittent punishment? It's because the people above them, the executives ultimately who set the tone, are blame oriented, defensive and self protective. At least some of the time. Because only a blame oriented or defensive or self protective person would punish anybody or engage in a behavior that felt punishing when they surfaced a problem. Yeah.

Speaker B: Now, and a lot of these. Listen, then the answer to that, why are those executives that way? I had a conversation as I was

Speaker E: leaving GM and I had Lester here. You know, I asked the number two

Speaker B: in our plant after he was quitting on a show, chewing out one of

Speaker E: the area managers over speakerphone and another, ie we were in the office and was not like, I mean, this was his typical behavior, you know.

Speaker B: And I finally sort of asked him

Speaker E: like, at least one why.

Speaker B: Um, like help me understand why that

Speaker E: was what you chose to do to the area manager, that situation.

Speaker B: And he basically traced it back to like, well, that's how we are here. My boss yells at me, his boss yelled at him, blah, blah, blah, like he blamed the board of directors. That's the way it's always been here at General Motors.

Speaker F: There you go.

Speaker B: I'm not saying that's a constructive like

Speaker F: it's almost certainly a subjectively accurate summary. And by the way, I, I, I was listening to Andre relate one of his stories about Kimberly Clark where they tried to do lean organization wide and it survived only in pockets. And those pockets were defined by geographically separate plants with a top person who was able to protect the people below them and so that, so that when the chain of yelling hits that person they didn't pass it down. Uh, and they had people responsibility and enough power to deflect that well.

Speaker B: And then I think at some point, you know, that plant where they've created that protective culture, that protected culture, um, is going to perform better. And then the ones up above might leave that plan alone because they're busy

Speaker F: or feel threatened by it and are in come and attack it because remember, if the person above is sufficiently blame oriented, defensive and self protective, they might feel a high level of competence and somebody else is a threat to them stupid. But it happens and people suboptimize all the time.

Speaker E: It's a whole different dynamic.

Speaker F: It's uh, it's all Model one, baby.

Speaker B: Oh yeah, talk us through the, you know the next why I took it down a branch that might be accurate list bring us down a path where it might then lead to a countermeasure.

Speaker F: So you would have to find a way to engage this executive team CEO, maybe the board and the rest of the C suite would have to go along with this. That we're all going to learn how to get ourselves into the brain chemistry in the brain configuration of calm curious empathy as our routine stance. And we have to, we're going to actually learn physical things to do practices that make that occur because you can't think your way into that. You have to practice your way into it. There's some neuroplastic change that you have to undergo and then we're going to have to agree as a group that we're all going to keep doing that moving forward. And even further than that we're going to say and when one of us falls out because we're having a bad day. The default for humans under stress is model one. One of us will pop out and start doing Model 1 stuff and the rest of us have to rally around them, um, and say dude, we love you. You're doing the thing. We need you to come back over to the, to the side of the light, come away from the dark side and return to the light. And do it in a calm, curious, empathic manner and practice it even. And that's what I would have. I uh, would want to sell a senior executive team on is the incredible importance of that as the foundation of the rest of what they're going to do. They wanted to have lean or problem solving or a learning organization be how they go forward together.

Speaker B: So would, would, would you.

Speaker G: Um.

Speaker B: I'm going to make a supposition that if yeah. The same outside help call it consultants

Speaker E: and what have you professors get brought into. I'm going to oversimplify it. A Model 2 dominant organization with a Model 2 thinking, behaving CEO and like

Speaker B: the lean success rate would be higher

Speaker E: in an organization that.

Speaker B: Because I'm sure There are Model 2

Speaker E: organizations that don't know anything about lean and practices and methods and a three problem.

Speaker F: They're still. Yeah.

Speaker B: When they are modeled to people by

Speaker E: nurture or nature or organizational.

Speaker F: Yes. The strong founder who embodies it and insists on it and everyone eventually absorbs it so strongly that it just sticks.

Speaker B: That doesn't seem like a wild guess

Speaker E: that lean success rates would be higher in a Model 2 or I think

Speaker F: that our claim about cause and effect would require that to be true.

Speaker B: Do either of you have a sense

Speaker E: or do you know, is there data of like what percentage of organizations might even be categorized as mostly.

Speaker F: I haven't found a source for that yet. And oh my gosh, am I looking

Speaker E: forward to finding something because if I've

Speaker B: heard some people talk about like consultants

Speaker E: and if they're good at what they do. Not to make this all about consultant but um, what was we were talking about. So it was play a uh, role usually in sparking and helping and educating and pushing.

Speaker B: But you um, know I've heard some

Speaker E: people say, you know, because they're very

Speaker B: successful because they're very busy, they get to very carefully pick and choose their

Speaker E: clients and those organizations are probably better served given a choice. Choose an organization where the executives are

Speaker B: at least wanting, you know, they, they might not be quote unquote, perfectly modeled

Speaker E: too, but if there's a gap, they acknowledge it and it starts with them. And those organization, those consultants are going to be more successful, which helps you

Speaker B: get more work or you get more collective.

Speaker F: Uh, so many of my clients succeed with lean. Yeah. Yeah. Because you cherry picked them. I mean it ain't dumb to. To find success. Find. Take the projects you're most likely to succeed with. Right. And I get that.

Speaker B: Take helping organizations go from good to

Speaker E: great if you will, to Steal the Jimmy Collins raise there, you know, going,

Speaker B: taking, uh, I mean, I don't know, like being a tutor.

Speaker E: Do you want to tutor a B student to help them become an A student or do you want to tutor

Speaker B: the student who's lucky to earn D

Speaker E: minuses because they don't show up to school or um, over simple.

Speaker F: I sense that there's a point behind

Speaker E: your point or there might be.

Speaker B: No, but anyone just kind of thinking through this question of, you know, the, the quote unquote lean failure rates, you know, like I've seen part of my point.

Speaker E: There's a bunch of different ideas bouncing

Speaker B: around in my head, but one is like, you know, these consultants that are very successful and I don't begrudge them that. Um, I've been part of teams that had a very successful track record going back to days of Johnson and Johnson because there was methodology and you know, pick your, pick your, your clients, um, carefully. But some of these consultants I think fall into the trap of well, because I've been super successful, everyone else is doing it wrong, which might not be the right model analysis. That might be model one and A suqated. We're the only ones who do this right.

Speaker F: I think it's fundamental attribution error I think is the technical term for that, that when, when other people fail it's because of their character and when I fail it's because of special circumstances.

Speaker G: Yeah.

Speaker F: But when I succeed it's because of my character. That's classic human foible. And speaking as a consultant, I am not immune to that. Although I try to have countermeasures.

Speaker B: So it are the more powerful countermeasures about finding better finding the model two people that you can work with or getting more successful at trying to influence the model one. Because uh, again like a lot of those model one leaders by definition of not Model one are probably not going to be real super self reflective about. You want to hear transformational leaders John Toussaint and others over time who kind of came around to see, hey, I'm looking in the, I'm looking in the mirror and the problem starts with me. Not everybody has that humility and, or strength to say that yet alone mean it, right?

Speaker G: Well, I think that being able to as uh, a consultant in the wild, being able to find the client who already has some Model 2 behavior embedded in it is certainly helpful. It's probably the easiest road. But I also think at some point in time you're going to run out of that. Right? You're going to run out of those types of clients. Um, and you're going to have to face the fact that I have to be able to go into an, uh, organization that's fundamentally Model one and convert them, or at least get them on the road to conversion to Model two. You know, obviously there's some prerequisites to that. They have to want to change or have to see the value, et cetera, et cetera, because, you know, we're where all the hyenas try to eat the same zebra at some point, and we can't all be going after the Model Twos. And, you know, certainly, Mark, in your career and my career has been very much the same. You know, I have worked with D minus companies that ticked all the boxes. Otherwise, they had the burning platform. They wanted to make the change. The senior leadership was engaged, quotation marks, and they had the money to want to do it. And it's not until you get in there that you realize, oh, my goodness, that executive leadership really wants somebody else to do this. They have no intention of changing how they think or anything that they want to do. And to Thomas's point, if we don't have that psychological safety that is part of really that lean formula, we are never going to get this to work. And so we could look at other consultants that have had success in the marketplace, and not to disparage anybody, but my question would be, how many of them, once they've left those companies, have sustained results, or have they gone back into their Model 1 once they weren't being poked consistently about making sure that they were following their Model 2 behaviors? I don't have any data on that. That's just me speaking kind of rhetorically. You know, certainly I'm working with a client, uh, here on the West Coast, Salem Health. I'm very fortunate that, you know, when I started here, the CEO at the time was definitely Model 2. The current CEO is definitely Model 2, has influenced their executive team to be Model 2. It's not perfect every day, same as it wasn't perfect every day at Toyota either. But they're certainly wanting to do the right thing and trying, uh, to change the behavior to create that environment. And so I think having the material to be able to work with, to convert is certainly, certainly going to be the key thing. And I also wonder how many consultants out in the wild even understand. Certainly until I started talking to Thomas, I certainly didn't understand clearly the Model 1, Model 2, and what that meant. Uh, because if I had understood that, I would have done a much better job engaging that executive team up front in some of the other transformation work that I've taken on. And it would have been a lot less laborious, uh, because we could have made a decision that yes, this is a, uh, absolute, a rank and we're going to go or this is going to be a complete waste of time for everybody and we're going to stop.

Speaker B: So to recap, Andre said, I don't want to disparage anybody, but he called consultants hyenas. Thank you.

Speaker G: Well, we are, we're all trying to eat the same Hebrew, man, but I'm

Speaker B: so sorry to poke at you my

Speaker E: friend, but it's okay.

Speaker B: The more serious point I was going to bring up is, you know. Yeah, I mean there is that dimension of like, well, you know, given a

Speaker E: choice, you want to pick and choose

Speaker B: clients that are going to be, you know, fun and engaging and interesting to work with. And we want to make a difference. And I think a lot of us do want to make a difference for our economies, for an industry, for a society. And that means figuring out how to deal with the Model 1 organization.

Speaker F: I will take a stab at that. And that is I, I think everybody has Model one and Model two and all the time they're all, we're all capable of both. And when we're not under extreme pressure, it's easier to get into Model two because you're not feeling the pressure. Right. Your amygdala is like clamoring like, ah,

Speaker E: we got a good scythe.

Speaker F: Because scared people do stupid stuff. There's not a single strength that anybody has that doesn't get turned into a self defeating pattern as soon as your, their fear takes, grabs the wheel. And so I think that maybe the, the path forward is speaking as a consultant, uh, make this the first part of the sale and say, look, I can only work with you successfully if you guys are willing to commit yourselves to a Model 2 transformation at the top. And that's going to be the first part of the engagement is a, uh, training, let's say a neuroplastic training like positive intelligence, which is the one that I use, which is to be followed by an agreement that this is the way we will operate in the, in the greater the pressure we're under, the more we're going to be deliberate about staying calm, curious and empathic. And there's techniques for that. And if they're not willing to tackle that as the first part of the project, maybe you say, you know, there's really no, it's not ethical for me to take your money and go through a big song and dance pretending to teach stuff that you're just going to sabotage as soon as you get scared. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: I mean it's a Different but related A3 if we were framing it in terms of I am a consultant and I have limited time in my year and in my life and help me better filter out or to use clients and you know I think you talk about contributing factors and you know we're, we're going to run out of time and not be able to give this all justice. But the people who talk on um, contributing factors, I'm going to paraphrase, there's a couple of these bullet points that I think are in a category of like sometimes people talk a good game making behaviors or they're saying the things they think they should say but they don't.

Speaker F: I, we need commitment. I'm committed. He said defensively proved I'm not.

Speaker G: Wasn't the fake Lean.

Speaker B: But you know, sometimes, you know, uh, employees choosing a company to work for, uh, consultants choosing a client so sometimes feel misled. Well you said you wanted, you said change starts with you but when push comes to shove, boy, you really didn't mean that at all.

Speaker F: And the person saying it may be saying it in an angry defensive way as well. So you got model one from one person calling up model one from the other and it's just saboteurs all the way down. Yeah, everybody gets to self sabotage now. Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, one, one question I was going to ask. Are you willing to share in some form, whether it's read only or a way people can comment and interact? Share uh, at least this draft as

Speaker E: it stands for people.

Speaker F: Yes. In fact we've set up a page, Jim Prinzing and I have a page on our website txl lab.com lean uh, and if you go to that page you can download the PDF of the current version of the A3 for free. Click the thumbnail and then we're setting up a uh, a little like two two field form where you can give us your name and add email and we'll make you a contributor to the Google Doc. That is the live version of the A3. You can make suggestions there that way. Yeah and we'd love for folks to do. I'll add a third thing. You've come up with a um, a simple assessment that anybody who has visibility into the C suite could fill out to assess how close that C suite is and where their gaps are.

Speaker G: Yeah.

Speaker F: So it's a diagnostic to try to Give you. It's not like all, it's not a, not a binary. Right. It's all degrees. And so what the assessment tries to do is tease out how close that C suite is and where they need to get even better in order to have the preconditions in place that they need to succeed at Lean.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker B: So I hope people you know, there'll be a link in the show notes. Go check out the A3 as it, as it stands. As it stands is here we're recording on June 4th.

Speaker E: Might be released a couple of weeks afterwards. When you're listening to this there is that on the website and as Thomas

Speaker B: mentioned on um, the live document. But you know going through proposed um countermeasures, evidence this works, implementation path, uh, confirmation of effect. How would you confirm and then reflections and next steps. We, we spent most of our discussion mainly on the left hand side of the A3. We get a gold star for that I hope.

Speaker F: I think yeah, staying in problem space is absolutely appropriate.

Speaker B: M But maybe later this summer we come back and maybe you know, as you, as you're continuing to think about this and talk to people and get

Speaker E: input from others, maybe do a part

Speaker B: two that focuses more on the right hand side.

Speaker F: Absolutely make myself available for that because this very important work.

Speaker E: Great.

Speaker B: Um, we'll go ahead and wrap up the episode here. A ah lot of food for thought. People can also add comments on the blog post for this episode and um, let us know um, what your thoughts thoughts are.

Speaker E: I'm going to share you know the episode on LinkedIn, see if we can prompt some discussion there.

Speaker B: So again our guest today, Thomas Copps, Andre DiMarchant, thank you for taking on this challenge. You know really when you reached out to me about this, you know I think the, the connections with psychological safety and Deming and I am not real familiar. I am going to go do a lot of reading.

Speaker E: Uh, Chris Ardiris.

Speaker B: Uh, and I always feel like I'm not saying his name correctly.

Speaker E: Argyros.

Speaker F: I if it's, if it's arguous sound like arduous and then I just say Argyro because software gets it right when I call it that. And I'm sorry, him and his family. If I'm mispronouncing the last name I,

Speaker B: I, I, I am being very prompted and pulled now into reading more of his work and I, I know it's influenced a lot of people and let's continue pulling together different influences from, from you know that's why I loved hearing about Your background, Andre, and your background,

Speaker E: Thomas, and these different influences.

Speaker B: We can kind of look at this problem through different lenses.

Speaker E: And I think we. That's why, you know, John Schick says

Speaker B: it takes two to a three. But you can also. You can. You can have more.

Speaker F: Yeah.

Speaker A: Involved.

Speaker G: Absolutely.

Speaker B: So is there.

Speaker C: I'll.

Speaker B: I'll leave either one or both of you.

Speaker E: Is there anything that you want to say? Just kind of, uh, wrap things up from your perspective?

Speaker F: Andre?

Speaker G: No, just, uh, Mark, thank you for the opportunity to present the information. You know, it feels to, uh, Thomas and I that there's a bit of a breakthrough in there. Certainly there is for me, and I've been doing this type of work for more than a couple of decades. Uh, thanks for the opportunity, and of course, as always, it's great to see you again.

Speaker E: Great to see you.

Speaker B: I love your glasses, by the way. For people that are just listening, you cannot see those.

Speaker E: Those are some very cool glasses.

Speaker G: Oh, thank you.

Speaker F: I'll add one thing, and that is if we can figure out how to get lean to succeed more often, it will lead to such better workplaces and such an improvement for society. Separate from the process improvements and the efficiency improvements and the societal, physical wealth improvements that would result. There'd be psychological improvements where people wouldn't hate going to work and. Oh, my gosh, that is so worth doing.

Speaker G: Uh-huh.

Speaker F: Please, if you had even a thought of helping with this, act on that impulse. Please help us make this take its next step.

Speaker B: Well, thank you both for sharing and thank you for that invitation to others for input. So again, Thomas, Andre, thanks so much.

Speaker E: Look forward to seeing you before too long.

Speaker F: Excellent.

Speaker G: Thank you.

Speaker D: Thanks for listening. This has been the Lean Blog podcast for Lean News and Commentary. Updated daily. Visit www.leanblog.org. if you have any questions or comments about this podcast, email markastmail.com.

Speaker A: Let's be honest. The old wooden suggestion box is where great ideas come, go to die. And trying to manage continuous improvement in a chaotic maze of spreadsheets, that's not much better. It's time to digitize your daily Kaizen process. This episode is sponsored by Kinexus, the platform designed to empower your team to capture, implement, and measure every improvement from the front line to the executive suite. Stop letting innovation slip through the cracks. See how to spread a true culture of continuous improvement. Today at www.kinexus.com.