The Sweet Spot

Show Notes

What You’ll Learn:

In this episode, hosts Shayne Daughenbaugh, Catherine McDonald, and guest Patrick Gaughan discuss the balance of structure and creativity in continuous improvement. They emphasize the importance of leadership, data-driven decision-making, and empowering employees through rapid improvement workshops.

About the Guest:

With 33 years of experience at a Fortune 100 company, he held various leadership roles in Engineering Management, Supply Chain, and Quality. His work spanned continuous manufacturing improvements, global MES deployment strategy, and Lean Six Sigma methodologies. As the first Lean Six Sigma Black Belt in his Business Unit in 1996, he trained professionals worldwide and led over 50 rapid improvement workshops, influencing hundreds more. His focus was on plant, process, and product design, with a strong emphasis on root cause analysis. He developed an automation tool that reduced cycle times from 3.5 days to 5 seconds, solidifying his belief in the power of data. Throughout his career, he received numerous corporate accolades, including multiple Meritorious Achievement awards. One of his most impactful projects involved leading a team in India to transform a 36-hour manual process into a fully automated 90-minute system, which became a global standard.

Links:

Click Here For Patrick Gaughan LinkedIn

Click Here For Axiom Manufacturing Systems LinkedIn

What is The Lean Solutions Podcast?

This podcast offers business solutions to help listeners develop and implement action plans for lean process improvement and implement continuous improvement projects, cost reductions, product quality enhancements, and process effectiveness improvement. Listeners come from many industries in both manufacturing and office applications.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 00:04

When it comes to continuous improvement, leaders often chase that sweet spot, you know, where structure meets creativity, where process meets the people. Every organization

Catherine McDonald 00:14

needs rules and policies and structure. You have to have, otherwise the scales right? But at the same time. We know people need freedom, flexibility, autonomy, so it’s finding that balance, and that doesn’t mean equal balance all the time either. So it’s tough.

Patrick Gaughan 00:28

I am a big believer at my core in the value of standard work. One standard, all standard also have to have the ability to recognize that I can change the paradigm around that process and I can come up with a new standard However, while we put creative thought and intentional design into that, we also have to have the ability to say, I’m going to move the standard work to go along with what we re imagined. So now I have a new standard work.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 01:02

Hello and welcome to this latest episode of the lean solutions podcast, where my host Catherine and I will be talking about all kinds of things lean today. Catherine, how are you?

Catherine McDonald 01:16

I’m great. Shane, I’m great. Just back in my old days, nice and relaxed. I’m great. How are you? I am

Shayne Daughenbaugh 01:22

doing well, and am very envious of you being able to say, just coming back from the holidays. So I’m, let’s talk about holidays real quick, because one of the things that I love about holidays is coffee all day long, because I don’t have to worry about, you know, not being able to sleep at night, so just having coffee all day long. But what? What I want to ask you, ever tried to make that perfect cup of coffee where it’s not too bitter, not too weak, trying to find that, you know, that balance between strength and smoothness? How well does that go for you?

Catherine McDonald 01:57

Yeah, not so well. I’m taste taste different depending on the day, but yeah, you’re you’re right. It is kind of hard to get that balance. And some days you taste it and go, Oh, that’s lovely. I wonder, Is the water different today? Or, you know, so sometimes it’s too strong, sometimes it’s too weak, it’s hard to get it right. It is, yeah, it’s challenge, right, right?

Shayne Daughenbaugh 02:15

Yeah, yeah. So today, we’re going to be talking about kind of that same idea of finding that balance. But this time, we’re going to talk about it in the workplace. When it comes to continuous improvement, leaders, I will say, often chase that sweet spot, you know, where structure meets creativity, where process meets the people. You know, where improvement doesn’t turn into resistance, instead, it turns into acceptance and adoption. But that’s that’s kind of a rough spot to be in sometimes. Now,

Catherine McDonald 02:47

I think it’s a spot that all organizations find themselves in, because every organization needs rules and policies and structure. You have to have, otherwise, it’s chaos, right? But at the same time, we know people need freedom, flexibility, autonomy, so it’s finding that balance. And that doesn’t mean equal balance all the time, either. So it’s tough, definitely. Yeah, make a cup of coffee sometimes,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 03:11

right? Isn’t it? Yeah. So we have today, we’re going to have an expert kind of break that down for us. We’re talking about strategies for keeping your proven efforts, you know, engaging, avoiding the classic too much process or too much freedom trap, like you just mentioned, you know, how to use Lean tools to make sure that people and process can actually work together and find that sweet spot. So, so Catherine, can you please talk to us about our guest today?

Catherine McDonald 03:37

I would love to so our guest today is Patrick gone? So with 33 years of experience at a fortune 100 company, Patrick has had various leadership roles in engineering management, supply chain and quality. His work has spanned continuous manufacturing improvements, global mes deployment strategy and Lean Six Sigma methodologies as the first Lean Six Sigma black belt in his business unit in 1996 he trained professionals worldwide and led over 50 rapid improvement workshops, influencing hundreds more. His focus was on plant process and product design, with a strong emphasis on root cause analysis. He developed an automation tool, wait for it, that reduced cycle times from three and a half days to five seconds, solidifying his belief in the power of data. Throughout his career, he received numerous corporate accolades, including multiple meritorious achievement awards. One of his most impactful projects involved leading a team in India to transform a 36 hour manual process into a fully automated, 90 minute system, which became a global standard. Now, in his second post retirement venture, he has teamed up with like minded engineers to revolutionize the systems integration space. He focuses on high end consulting, helping manufacturers navigate and implement their industry. Four. Point Zero digitalization strategies. His goal is to challenge traditional approaches and empower companies to achieve excellence by thinking bigger and embracing innovation. He and his team consider themselves digital Sherpas, guiding organizations through the complex journey of digital transformation. Patrick, you are very welcome to the show. How are you? I’m

Patrick Gaughan 05:22

doing fantastic. Thank you very much. And I love that intro I was I was so intrigued by this person you’re describing, I couldn’t wait to meet him. And then realized, well, just me. Thank you. Yeah, appreciate it.

Catherine McDonald 05:34

Yeah. No, you’re very welcome. Shane, you’re sitting there going digital shirts I see.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 05:41

So please, please talk to me. Tell me. Tell us about what what you mean when you say digital Sherpas.

Patrick Gaughan 05:49

Yeah, it’s a it’s a term that was coined by my partner Ryan, and is is part of our ethos as axiom. So all of us on the axiom side are very seasoned. That’s another way for saying we’re older, right? We’ve got a lot of experience, as you pointed out, and in that experience, especially with the larger corporations, the fortune, 50 fortune, 100 companies, along with that comes a lot of rigor. You have people who are best in class, whether that be it ot networking, process, engineering, project, engine all around, right? And we could draw on those specialties as we executed projects internally. As axiom we chose to work with the small and mid sized manufacturers. And what we came to realize is that when we approach these folks, they know that they have to do the digital journey to stay relevant, right, but instead of sitting around a table with the 20 of their top folks to be able to talk about that strategy. It’s the owner, and he’s got the hat on that says, Okay, here’s my morning hat, my midday hat, my afternoon hat. And they become overwhelmed by all of this information coming at them. And so how do they start to make the journey down the digital transformation? And so we liken that to to having a Sherpa that can guide you in any way possible. You can either take all of the gear up the mountain with them, or you can simply lay the ropes in place and show them where they need to go to be able to do that. So our preference is to be teachers, much more so than doers, but we can do both. We have a very talented team that can do a lot of things, but we feel that in learning about the process along the way, it enables them for their future success.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 07:24

That’s awesome, that that that speaks to a respect for people and a respect for a client that you have, that they may have everything they need. You just need to give them a little bit of guidance or framework, or they may just be lacking in some things, and you guys can still give them that guidance framework, but also that other support to kind of lead them through. So I love I love that. I wish I could use it, but I’m just not digital enough to be able to say, Oh yeah. I call myself a digital Sherpa. I

Catherine McDonald 07:52

agree. It’s a very responsible and ethical way of working. So well done. Love to hear that, Patrick. I also I have a question, so I’m going to transport you back to 1996 so you mentioned you’re the first lean black belt in your business unit in 1996 now I when I read that, I was wondering, What must that have been like to be the first lean black belt in your Unit? Were people aware of lean? How did you cope with being put in that position, and how did people respond to you? What was it like, and again, back in 1996 as well. So what was that like? Well, it’s

Patrick Gaughan 08:30

interesting that you bring that up, because I really do have to think back to what was, what were times like back then, right? And so lean was a word that we had never heard of collectively before, and we had a very innovative plant manager at our facility. It was the flagship facility for the world, so we carried a lot of weight within the organization. And this plant manager, Bill Silvestri, he he recognized the need that if we were going to continue to move with the market and where it was taking us, we had to do something different. And so he asked for four volunteers to be able to participate in this lean manufacturing process. And at the time, I was managing an engineering group at at the company that I worked for who shall remain nameless, I suppose, and and we participated with, actually, our own digital shirt was folks who came in and said, We will teach you how to do the lean the way that they taught. And what we came to find out was they had a method that was repeatable all day every day. It was very locked down in terms of what they did, and it enabled us to be able to teach what we were learning in a very rapid fashion. So within the span of six months, we certified four instructors like myself to go out and start working in in the the methodology that they taught, which was focused on rapid improvement workshops, sure why they landed on rapid was because it has a very high engagement model. People get into a workshop, they are instructed on what to do from a lean perspective. Active, and then they’re empowered to be able to act on what their vision was for that re engineered process. And so it was fascinating, you know, when you talk about the notion of, oh, will there be resistance? First of all, let’s get that out of the way, there is absolutely going to be resistance, no question about it, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s because of uncertainty that people have that, right? Sure. So I want to give you just a really quick example of of that resistance pocket and why it becomes important. So there was a young engineer that I worked with, and let’s just call him Max, and if he ever sees this, he’s going to know who he is, right? And we did. We were doing the first workshop, and we were doing preparation for it and whatnot. Max came up to me and did this, oh, I said, Max, what does this mean? He said, Pat, don’t bring that stuff around my department. I run a tight ship. I’m going to do what I do, and that’s just good enough. So don’t, don’t come around me. I said, Well, Max, just come to the report outs that we do as part of the workshop and just participate, because you’ve got a lot of great ideas. You’re a hard working guy, all that. Okay, no problem. So he comes to the the workshops as part of the process that we do, because we would report to the masses on Monday, Tuesday and Friday when we did these events. And Max sat through those The workshop was done. It was an unbelievable event. For a first event, we completely transformed an entire department. I mean, construction, rebuild, everything. It was incredible. And Max came up to me as soon as it was done, he said, Pat, let me see if I understand this. You set a goal for that department, and then you got all the resources to do all that work within a one week span, right? I said, Yes, Max, that’s what we did. We listened to what the stakeholder said, and we enabled and empowered them to be able to be successful. Okay, I want the next three workshops to be in my department. Wow, whoa, whoa, Max. Don’t you remember this? And he said, Hold on. He said, Listen, I’m nothing if not a learner, and I know that in three workshops, I can do all of my years worth of metrics to meet all of my goals, and I can do that literally in a couple months, if you are willing to help me do that. But there’s one copy. And I said, Well, what’s that copy on max? He said, I want to teach. He said, I love this stuff. This is great. So Max became the prime student, and lo and behold, he led two of the next not led, but he taught elements within the next. Two out of three. Performance was off the chart, as people were hyper engaged. It was fantastic. So resistance will happen, but it can be overcome.

Catherine McDonald 12:24

Great story. Um, so I suppose it’s not the typical story you hear, is it? Though, no. So we often hear, and we have had guests on the show only. I guess, a couple of months ago, we had Leslie Worthington on the show, and her story was very funny. Well, it was funny, but it wasn’t funny at the time, I guess, for her. So she had these lean experts in and she was saying how difficult it was, how challenging it was, how the use of buzz words, how nobody understood what was going on, how, you know, I guess the Lean people didn’t, didn’t reach the people level. I guess they were focused on what they wanted to do, and people were just expected to go along. And that’s the story actually we hear most of the time. So I mean, what is your secret, Patrick? Because it’s not it’s not easy. So what is it that you think is, is, if there’s people listening in and want to follow you and and are influenced by your story? What is it that you think they need to focus on to have, I suppose the ending that you had?

Patrick Gaughan 13:27

Yeah. So I think in order to answer that question, I’ve got to step it back a little bit and give you a little bit of insight. So in the course of the next couple of years, doing workshops, we took the cycle time for the process from 15 plus days down to three and a quarter. Now, for those of you that are good at math, that’s about a 5x increase in the capacity of the plant notwithstanding, you run into, you know, the theory of constraints. You have people constraints and other constraints. But from an overall machine standpoint, we completely transformed the business. So once you have a certain measure of success, it enables you to do all sorts of things, right? But I want to draw that back into the method that we use, right? So I talked about how we use rapid improvement workshops, and let me describe to you what that is. The first thing that we do is we have what I call people like myself evangelists. We’re the folks that really believe in these things, and this is what we live and so we are educated, informed on what to do, and then we’ll come into a facility and we’ll study a process in advance, take copious records, right? So process mapping is at a core of my being, and we look at that and evaluate and say, okay, based on Lean principles, we think that we can set a goal that’s about here by just taking all the way stop. Then we go back to management, have them actually put together the team of people that are required to be able to do that, and here’s where people get their feelings hurt. My Sherpa told me, when you run a workshop, don’t ever have a supervisor in a workshop. I said, Wait a minute, nothing happens without supervision in a workshop that doesn’t make sense. He said, No, I promise you the Minute. You started in involving the supervisors in there. People disengaged. They check their brains at the door, because they’ll default to the supervisor actually answering all the questions. It’s like, wow, that’s really kind of bizarre. It’s counterintuitive to do that, but lo and behold, I am nothing if not somebody who pushes envelopes a little bit. I had to do it at least one time, and lo and behold, I had to kick the supervisor out on day two. So it really it’s a real thing, but in terms of methodology, on day one, we spend the first day teaching, so we’re not focused on anything but teaching people about what the Lean concepts are, so that they start to understand things from a mental framework that’s much more in alignment with what Lean really means, instead of the buzzwords like you talked about, Catherine. And then on day two, and we do process mapping on day one, and then on day two, we do a half a day of training, again on lean concepts, but focus on brainstorming. How do we take ideas and start to turn them into something that could become actionable? We report out on day two what the brainstorming efforts were, once we sort out the ideas, and by the afternoon on day two, the team of people that have been put together are actively working on deployment. Now that only works for one very specific reason on day one. Minute one, the plant manager comes into the Meet the group and says, I empower you guys to do whatever you choose to do, as long as you don’t jeopardize safety and quality and check your you know, don’t leave your brains at the door. Don’t just tell me, I need a million dollar solution, and that’s going to save everything you know, be creative and figure out how to do it. And if you do those simple things together, there’s just magic in it. That’s all I can tell you. Yeah, yeah. No,

Catherine McDonald 16:39

that’s great. I think you’ve broken it down really well. Shane, I suppose we’ve, we’ve heard this before from people in terms of the support from senior leadership and the engagement and full involvement of the people doing the work. I mean, this is something we talk about, isn’t it quite a lot?

Shayne Daughenbaugh 16:53

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I was writing those, those three, basically three points, or what I picked out, but that last one you just talked about having that champion to come in and to grant and empower, you know, grant authority, empower the people you know to hate you. You have within, you know, within the scope of what you’re trying to do, you have carte blanche to make this better. And I think, you know, what’s crazy about it is people are afraid of that much authority to be given that, you know, if I am like you mentioned, you know, what happens when the supervisor comes in? I just kind of check out. I just go off of what you’re saying. But now suddenly you’ve removed that resistance, or, you know, that, that, that guidance or whatever. And now, oh, man, I can look around and go, there’s so much. But what I have to remind people, when we do something similar to that and say, Hey, you have the authority is, hey, we’re not burning the building down. We’re right. Now, this is all theoretical. Then after we take a look at it, then we’re going to just practice it in small steps, you know. Then we’re going to have, like, a pilot or whatever. But, yeah, the three points that I really loved having that champion involving people like you said, you know, first we train, then we walk them through, then we train, they walk them through, then they’re implementing, you know, so they’re totally involved. And then that first one, which we’ve, we’ve, I mentioned twice now the training part, like, I Yes, like, I don’t, I don’t know why you wouldn’t spend the time. We’re so in a rush to fix things that we forget that, oh, there’s people involved. And like, Catherine, like you were talking about, rather than just throwing buzzwords at people and just having them, you know, just assuming that they will absorb them. But to say, Hey, this is, you know, here’s the principles of what we’re about to do. And then you, you train a little bit, you do a little bit. You train a little bit. You do a little bit. Because you mentioned Patrick, you know, doing the, you know, the process mapping and putting all that out there. I’m sure you were kind of training the principles to that so that when it came time to do that work, they’re like, Oh, now it makes sense,

Patrick Gaughan 19:05

yeah. And I tell you what to take that a step further. Shane, we worked in a high mix environment, so there were a lot of different product codes. Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, I had 1500 raw materials and I had 1500 finished goods, all with permutations of material additions, it was liquid additions, right? And in that it was highly complicated. So even the methods of, how do you start to process map things like that, right? We had to come up with models that would actually work. And we did it all in Excel, you know. And that’s the way we did it. And I can tell you that we took it so far as to actually turn them into models where we could then sit the team down and say, Okay, guys, play with the model and see what changes, and do we actually hit the goals that we set out for the workshop. And so they could model it out completely, and we would report that in our report out sessions to help convince the the folks that would show up for the report outs that this would really work, because we’d taken that into account and and we always. Hit our marks. I mean, I I don’t remember a time where we didn’t, but I will tell you, there wasn’t one workshop where I didn’t have to remind people exactly what you were talking about that hey, the plan manager came in and said we could do this. So when you say I didn’t think we were allowed to do that, if he didn’t tell me that we couldn’t do it right? All fair game guys. And so with that comes to responsibility, and it’s mind boggling for people, because they’re not used to that, and that’s really a sad reality for manufacturing in America, yeah. And

Catherine McDonald 20:29

as you were speaking there, I was thinking back to what we said at the start, at the sweet spot, right? And this balance that you mentioned, Shane of I guess, structure and flexibility, how, Patrick, in the model that you work to how do you ensure that people continue to have, I guess, a structure on what they do in terms of improvement, because we know improvement needs structure right from start to finish. But yet, I guess, how do you build flexibility into their own I guess, way that they approach it to make sure that you do find that sweet spot. So is there a method of doing that? I assume everything’s not just let go, go and improve. So how does that work?

Patrick Gaughan 21:13

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. Catherine, it’s one I think that really helps us to understand the art of what’s possible. So I am a big believer at my core in the value of standard work. Okay, for every single operation, there is one optimal way under the conditions that we live in to be able to effectuate that process, standard work, one standard, all standard and that’s fine. You also have to have the ability to recognize that I can change the paradigm around that process and I can come up with a new standard. However, while we put creative thought and intentional design into that, we also have to have the ability to say, I’m going to move the standard work to go along with what we re imagined. So now I have a new standard work. The thing is, I am not an advocate of everybody being able to do whatever they want because they think it’s best. Now, that’s a bit subjective, right? But if we tie it to data, then we will know what the best is, and then we just all have to agree that we will move to whatever is best in terms of what the data actually shows us. And that’s oftentimes where the problem is, is, how do I get the data to be able to show what is best? Yeah, yeah. So

Catherine McDonald 22:29

is that kind of pre thought about? Then in terms of, before you go and improve, you have a baseline, you know, measures of what needs to be addressed, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Patrick Gaughan 22:38

100% 100% and Catherine. In the old days, it was all pen, paper, stopwatch and Excel. That’s that’s how we did things. But one of the beautiful things about being around this industry as long as I have been is to have watched the evolution, and so now I am a staunch advocate of taking away all that manual labor and leaning out that process and placing cameras in places to study the operations, let AI actually contextualize that data and report it out, and then give myself the ability to spend more time thinking creatively about what is the art of the possible, as opposed to what’s the drudgery of transcribing a bunch of data. And there’s folks out there. There’s a company, if I can mention them, called Kenda, that does fantastic work in that space that liberates people that do the work that I used to do, to be able to drive change faster and more reliably.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 23:28

That’s awesome. So you mentioned two things there, Patrick and I have a question. You mentioned data. You also mentioned AI, using AI to help. What are some other things for, you know, for the smaller businesses that that may not be able to afford, you know, the fancy camera systems and whatnot, to be able to digitize it and look at it. You know, have aI kind of evaluate and analyze. How can organizations avoid this, you know, this trap, again, we’re talking about the sweet spot, avoid the trap of either being too rigid with their process. Hey, it has to be this way. But also, you, like you mentioned, you don’t want everyone just wandering around doing whatever they want to do. You know, there are standards. Are there other things other than data and AI? Is there anything else that, in your, in your experience, you found, you know, I’m just looking for, for some of some of our audience that’s a little bit, you know, on the smaller side of of a business, you know, what can they do? What else can they do that might help them balance that? Well,

Patrick Gaughan 24:33

I’m going to give them pause for a little bit of optimism. So part of the the good news story is that, in the old days, to have systems like the one I described would have been very, very expensive. Today, you can set up that exact system of using cameras and AI, using cameras that cost less than $200 each, and you can literally pay for the service implementing the AI, because it’s cloud based on a credit card. It is, it is unbelievably inexpensive. So let me just set that kind of to one side in terms of what’s there. The second part of your, of your to answer your question is, is much more related to the data side. So there is, I guess, maybe a little bit of a misnomer about, well, I need to instrument up all of my operations and be able to do that. And so when I, when I did that for my prior employer, I had to go back with sort of my head in my hand, and said, well, to instrument up this facility, which was 100 year old facility, it was going to cost us $18 million and they weren’t going to get any value from they would just know everything. That’s great, right? But that’s not going to drive the needle, right? So now what we have to do is focus on what are the types of tools that people can use that get high value for very low cost going in, and low thresholds for technical debt as well. Right? We don’t want to put in things that are just so much work and so hard to learn, and I don’t have the people, heaven forbid somebody should leave a job after they were highly skilled in it, right? So those types of things. So we’re big fans of a lot of the emergent technology that’s coming out there. And so it’s not a today type of answer for you, Shane that you might want, but I think AI agents are going to start to take a prominent place in the manufacturing space, because they can upload all of your data and turn it into models and return it back to you in the form and fashion which you want it. So oftentimes we go into a lot of these places, and they have a lot of paper, right stacks and stacks and file cabinets of paper. And right now, it doesn’t serve them, necessarily, but in the future, all of that can be transcribed in a model built and they can describe how do I want that return to me, whether that’s to help with the supply chain, help with distribution, help with even on the design side, we at axiom, we meet with a lot of folks that have cutting edge technologies, and we see where the future is headed. And there’s folks, even in the design space, that are doing magnificent things, and because it’s all web based, it’s very inexpensive. So I would encourage your folks start with just mapping your process on paper. Let’s start there, if you want, and learn a lot about what is actually real as opposed to what you think it may be, and use that as the basis for change is probably the best thing I can do. And virtually everybody has access to excel. And if they want a template for how to record data and look at it, I’d be happy to forward it along, send it to folks and do some cool things with it. So I don’t I think mapping tells you a lot, and I think that’s the place to start personally for where to do that. Okay,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 27:24

so let me just a quick little, you know, sub question to this people, what from what I have some let me just back up a little bit. I’m tripping over my own tongue. In working with lots of different clients, I find that sometimes the data they’re collecting, really is just about data. They just want numbers. So they’re just piling in all of this data, then they don’t know what to do with it, because they don’t have the right data. You know. Can you give, you know, just some one or two tips that would indicate little earmarks to here’s the right data to be collecting?

Patrick Gaughan 27:58

Yeah. And so this is really kind of interesting, and can be a bit of a polarizing topic for people, right? So there’s seemingly a body of work about the fact that you should link financials to the Lean world. The Purists said you should never do that, because now you’re just being run by accountants. I don’t, I don’t espouse to that. I always looked at what was the financial impact of the business I was. Treated the business as if it was my own. Was my own, and in that, it helps you make more informed decisions. Okay, that’s number one. Number two, I think what you need to do in terms of data is you have to have a roadmap for what is truly important in driving the business. Every business is going to be different. So I came from a business where about 80% of the costs were labor, right? Or, I’m sorry, we’re raw materials, but I’ve worked with clients where 80% of the cost is labor, right, so the things that drive the business are very different, right? And, you know, I’ve also worked with other folks that will be quick to point out that we lose one, two, $3 million a year in inventory losses. Their problem is they need data on understanding what’s all the transactional information that’s causing them to bleed out so much money? So it’s not the easiest answer, unfortunately. Shane, I think it’s about understanding your business. What are the drivers for your business? Yeah. And then how do you start to point things at? Where are those places you need to go get data to be able to drive those things down?

Shayne Daughenbaugh 29:17

Right? Yeah. I that, that sentence right there, I think, is like, oh, yeah, that’s, that’s simple. I mean, much like lean, when you actually understand the principles, like, Oh, that makes so much sense. But just understanding, Hey, what is it that drives the business? That’s where we need to start looking at, that’s where we need to start pulling the data

Patrick Gaughan 29:34

from. So Shane just as an example of that. So we, as a business at axiom, we have a certain road mapping methodology that we use, and so one of the things that we bring to bear is we will audit the organization against 130 different dimensions of analytics, and we just just give it a zero through five rank, ranking zero, I don’t even know what you’re asking me. Five is with one click of a button, I can show you report relative to that. That, and so we will audit an organization against that. Now what we tell people is, don’t spend more than 10 seconds on Can I, can I do I not know what it is, or can I generate a click? It’s either kind of yes or no. And then give yourself a little fuzzy room between, you know, one and four, sure. And we go through that, and then we provide back to them. Well, here’s kind of where you’re at, here’s where your strengths are, here’s where your weaknesses are. And how do you start to focus? So it provides them a little bit of that direction that you were just talking about Shane, so that they really kind of know where to begin the journey. But here’s the problem. Everywhere I look. I don’t care whether it’s a fortune 50 or a fortune 5000 the the focus on analytics isn’t where it needs to be. And I’m talking about it from us, the folks that are practitioners in the space. Everybody talks about, oh, we need to go get data. We need to go out and contextualize data, but they don’t show people. But here’s what it looks like, so that it’s actionable and I can connect a workflow to it to be able to do something with it, to drive the business. And that’s where I think we need to evolve.

Catherine McDonald 30:59

Yeah, we make, we sometimes make it too complicated. I think, yeah, we just, if we could just focus, as you said, on what are the key areas? Who was a chains in one of our episodes, was talking about the airplane and how the pilot has six little measures in front of them, and that basically, they’re the most important measures. I can’t remember somebody, and that really stuck with me. And as in, know your key metrics, your key measures, and focus on them. And you might have others, but know what’s important and focus on those. So, yeah, totally get what you’re saying. Patrick, what about I guess, is there any other Lean tools that you think are important in this whole process of transformation and improvement. You mentioned, obviously process mapping, and you’ve talked about the importance of including people. So are there other Lean tools that can also help us while including people and showing respect for people? What do you think?

Patrick Gaughan 31:53

Yeah, and that’s another great question, Catherine. And so some of that we’ve already started in the dialog already, right? So we talked about, build a roadmap. Help yourself by starting with a good North Star focus. Here’s where we want to be able to get to in the future. The second most important thing is that education piece, right? Let’s go out and educate people on what that means exactly. And everyone has to have a common understanding, because if they don’t, that’s where the differences start to come up. People see things different. They react different. They don’t embrace things that other people are talking about because they don’t understand. So we’ve got to be able to get people to a normalized place of understanding, um, the next most important thing, and you know, whether that we talk about it openly enough in in lean or not, I don’t know, but you’ve got to be gold driven. You have to be able to set goals that are meaningful. And the way I like to describe this is, I want to be able to set goals that don’t say, well, here’s my incremental 5% improvement to be able to get there. I want goals that when your feet hit the ground in the morning, you’re like, Man, I can’t wait to go work on this, because there’s some cool stuff that could be done to be able to move the ball forward. But in order to do that, you have to have created an organization that allows people two things, one, safe space to be able to try things that are going to fail. And I tell people, embrace failure. Failure is a great teacher, right? As long as you’re willing to fail forward, fast, learn from what those things were and say, great job. We failed. Now. What are we going to do and then move on to the next too often you see organizations that are punitive and they’re like, Oh, I can’t believe you tried that. That was so dumb. What led you to believe you could do that? So that’s a killer. At that point, it’s done, it’s over. You may as well just go out and move to the next business. But then you have to be able to have a management team that is willing to be able to clear the roadblocks out for people, right? So think of servant leadership, right, right? And that is very specific to the people that you have in the management layer. And if you haven’t hired for that, that’s what I would recommend to your listeners, look for people that embrace that as a philosophy. There’s a time and a place for autocrats, I guess. You know, probably in times of war, that’s really important. But when it comes to running a business, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t build that camaraderie and that spirit of collaboration that we need to be successful in the Lean space. So I think that becomes very important. And then last to kind of to put a bow around this whole thing. So often, we tend to focus on the existing process today, and that has dramatic limitations on what you can do. I was really fortunate to have listened to a presentation by a gentleman named Ichiro Suzuki, who was the sort of the father of Lexus within Toyota, very highly regarded engineer. And he put on a fantastic presentation. Talked a lot about Japan and its history as a nation before he ever started to talk about Lean. But one of the things he impressed on me was he talked about the value of the yen and what that was doing to the manufacturing base in Japan, and how they didn’t revolution. What they were seeking to do as a nation, they were going to be found to be irrelevant, because they could make products exceptionally well, better than anyone in the world, because of Edward Deming, right? But they if they couldn’t sell it, because the yen, the value of the M was so high, they had no market, and so now they’re in a really bad place, right? So what Suzuki talked about was having the ability to always be driven on data. And that was never more important than in the design phase. Because once you got through the design phase, 80% of the costs are locked up. The best you can do is take out 20% and my personal experience is in 100% alignment with what Suzuki talked about on that day, and I’ve never forgotten his message. So for folks that think that it’s just about looking at that one process, one operation, you’re going to have to do plenty of that, never forget the opportunity to go back in the design phase and say, How can I design out a bunch of waste? Because it’s incredibly valuable.

Catherine McDonald 35:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah, good points. It’s kind of like the the whole, the simple cycle of Plan, Do Check Act. We never just make a plan and follow it and think we’re done. We always come back and we check, or we study, whichever term you prefer. Really, really important. Great points. Shane, yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 36:15

so, so I’m curious. We’ve kind of talked about this a little bit, but we might not have used these words, but you know, how can business leaders use let’s talk about feedback loops. You know, because feedback loops are how you send something out and then you’re going to get the information back. So using feedback loops, and you also mentioned this without saying this word, but coaching, you know? So using feedback loops and coaching to reinforce process discipline. You know, how things are. We want them this way, but also employee

Patrick Gaughan 36:49

autonomy. Let’s go with that. Yeah. So this may not surprise you, but I was also, also a youth sports coach, and so I think that’s where some of my personality comes from in the way I deliver content. And so I I coach football, which is a sport that I love. And one of the things that I learned at a very young age in coaching was, especially when working with with young men, was that often times their belief system wasn’t where it needed to be. I’m a lot smaller than the guy across from me. I’m not as strong as the guy across me. I’m slower than the guy across from me, and forgive the male analogy, but that’s just the football world that I came from. And in that, what I learned a really incredible lesson, that was all they ever needed to do to be successful, was for someone to believe in them more than they believed in themselves. Okay, once someone believes in you, you can do the things that you didn’t think you could do, right? And then when they encourage you, when you have some measure of success, they go even further, and suddenly they become the exact thing that me as a coach, is exactly what I believed in from the very start. They didn’t have the belief system, but I had it for them, and that’s what it’s really all about. Even in the business world, people think, Oh, I can’t do this, and I can’t do that. Woe is me. And you know, heaven forbid we find this victim mentality. But let’s empower and enable people to be able to see the art of the possible. Go down that path when a roadblock pops up, let’s work like hell to get it out of there and continue to enable their success. And that type of engagement is the thing that transforms an organization from folks who are kind of also RANS and, you know, okay, living in the middle to hyper performing, because now everybody’s empowered and enabled to be able to achieve now, if you want to take that a step further too, one of my personal beliefs is that you tie that to personal performance, okay? And I’ve got a number of working examples where that’s come into play. And so one of the things that we encourage people to do is, is to adopt a model where you get to pay for performance as you start to produce more, and the company values more, share that with those people. Because I promise you, when you start to do that, the alignment in the process becomes great. Now you don’t have opposing goals. You have aligned goals, as long as the folks who are doing that coaching, the mentoring, the teaching, are willing to take the roadblocks out of the way to be able to get there, right? So those two things go together, but that’s where super powerful organizations come from, is that ability to be able to share in the wealth of their success. And I’ve got a million stories of places where that’s worked, in industries of a variety of different types.

Catherine McDonald 39:25

I agree with all of that. I’m a coach, so as well as you I understand and I believe in the power of believing in people 100% I’ve seen the difference it makes. I believe in, you know, giving people autonomy. I believe in asking and listening instead of, you know, telling most of the time. But I do think, and I do believe in servant leadership, as you call it as well, Patrick, but just maybe I can, maybe it’s a little bit of a challenge. I don’t know, but or how you’ll see this, but I’m starting to see. Little bit more the need for more. I guess we’d call it situational leadership, which isn’t kind of around a long time, but based on understanding what people really need. So there will be some people like you talked about that are maybe open to being coached, open to and and maybe, I guess, very future focused, very grow, have a growth mindset, and then there’ll be other people who are not so motivated, maybe not so skilled, or maybe just in the wrong job where that approach won’t work with them. So I think what we’re talking about, I think, is the first and foremost, you take that approach in terms of believing in people and empowering people, but there is more to it, and it’s more nuanced than that, and we need a really good understanding of people and their their skills and their abilities and their attitude in order to know which approach you take with them. So I think there’s all of that side of it as well that we have to understand and go through if we’re going to come out of it with a really high performing organization. I don’t know, would you agree as well? Patrick, 100%

Patrick Gaughan 41:03

I absolutely agree. And I could think of probably one of my great failures as a manager was where I was of the belief that my entire engineering team would have to have the same skill set. I was a young a young manager at the time, and so I set up a matrix of all the different things that all the engineers needed to be able to learn. And I started to put people through the training, and I watched this one person in my group just completely start to break down and and I just couldn’t understand this was a hyper achiever, a very talented person, exceptionally bright. And just like, hey, what’s going on here? I don’t quite understand, you know, why you’re struggling with this piece of it, and now I feel like disengagement is starting to happen. And what happened was this person said, you know, I’m thinking about quitting the group and taking another job because I am not comfortable in this space. And their analogy was, all the other engineers grew up, and they work with their fathers to work on the house, work on the car, do different things, and so they’re comfortable working with machines and equipment and contractors. And this person said, I have none of that in my background. It’s not familiar space. And so I’ve playing so far in a position that I feel like I’m just going to fail. And I realized what an incredible failure that was on my part not to recognize what you talked about Catherine, which is, let’s slot people to play in a position of excellence for what their natural talents are. Talents are what you’re born with, right? And so it’s God given. And so let’s let’s be smarter as managers and enablers to be able to get people into the right position to be successful with the tools that they have. If we focus on shoring up weaknesses, as I’ve learned in my old age, all I’m going to do is frustrate a hell of a lot of people, and it’s not going to be fun for anybody, right? So I’ve abandoned that as a methodology because of exactly what you’re saying, Catherine, let’s, let’s get people in the right positions, and let’s do we can now, having said that, I have a little bit of a corollary to that. So I’ve also worked with people, I call them anchor draggers, the people that just want to drag things along because they don’t want change, and everything is and everything has to be their way and all that and and they would come into my office and say, Well, I don’t understand why you don’t treat me like so and so. And I learned over time that my very simple answer to that question was, when you do exactly the same types of things in the same way, with the same bigger enthusiasm and willingness to work with people that they do, I will treat you exactly the same way and and you just watch the color drain from their face, because they know they can’t be held to the standard of these high achievers, right? And so they have to recognize that they’ve chosen a path to be at a place that’s lower, and if they want to be able to work on themselves and their abilities and their lessons and and even perception. They need some coaching to be able to do that, and we’ll be happy to get them there. But if they’re not, if they just want to complain, okay, you don’t get treated the same way as these other folks, right? So much easier once I learn that little, simple lesson. I

Catherine McDonald 43:55

love that. That’s great because you’re still positive and optimistic and saying I’m okay with you being you, but if you want me to treat you differently, just do this. Yeah,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 44:04

right, yeah. So let’s, let’s, let’s wrap this up with one more question. So much fun here, I know, but you may have other things to do. Other things today. Our listeners may have other things to do as well. So, but you know, this is kind of a common question that we want to ask those that have been in the industry for a long time. And you mentioned, you know, 1996 like that was when I was married. You know, 28 I don’t know, my wife’s not around. I think it’s 28 years or something somewhere around there. You know, many years later, what are in your experience? What are some of the typical pitfalls that you’ve seen with continuous improvement initiatives over the years, and not just acknowledging those. But yes, let’s bring those up so people can be aware of them. But also, you know, how can they avoid them? What are some of your I don’t want to say the greatest hits so to speak, but you know, up in there,

Patrick Gaughan 44:59

yeah. So I think the very first place to start with that is, if you’re going to have a transformation, which is what Lean is really intended to do, it should never start in the middle. Lean needs to be generated and ascribed to by the folks at the top of the organization. It’s got to be a leadership challenge where, where people who are willing to put their necks on the line and clear out roadblocks for other people underneath them are front and center of the whole thing, so that as a leadership position, they recognize this is serious. If it happens from the middle, then it’s it’s doomed to die on the vine. Okay, that’s the first thing. So make sure that you’ve got good corporate sponsorship to be able to do that. Once you’ve got that, then the very next thing is go out and find your evangelist. Evangelists, and these should be volunteers, not volunteers. Okay, the difference is that a lot of folks who would subscribe to doing something like this, like I did, and my colleagues, they already have day jobs, and they’re probably working really hard, and that’s what makes it interesting to them, right? So carve out those evangelists that want to do this, that are enthusiastic and energized to be able to do it, empower them to be able to do things, and get them the right training so they can be successful. The The other thing is, you have to accept that you’re willing to be a data driven organization, which means we will lead with value, stream maps and process maps, so that we have an infinite level of detail to be able to understand what is the current state, and then models to be able to understand where do we want to get to in the future, what’s the art of the possible to be able to do that? And then I think you know beyond that. You know, you heard me talk about, don’t put the supervisors in the workshops for really, what, to me, was a comical reason, but made a lot of sense after the fact. And then you have to be able to recognize that you’re willing to invest in people. This isn’t just about the evangelist that you that you turn loose on the organization to do really cool stuff. It’s the teams that they pull together and enable and facilitate and that you’re investing in them, and that they’re important and that it’s worth your time to clear out the roadblocks for them. And I’ll probably close with I think it’s really important to recognize that we have to dispel the fear of failure. Failure on all of my teams, every team I ever manage, they all heard me say, I expect you to fail, because if you don’t fail, you are not pushing the envelope far enough, and you’re limiting yourself and the organization. So let’s get past that. And, you know, the desire to feed ego and and, you know, start to squash the people who could really do some great things if we just empower them and coach them to be able to be successful. Not too much, right?

Catherine McDonald 47:34

Super brilliant. Well done. Well done.

Shayne Daughenbaugh 47:36

Those top five, love it, yeah, love it. Love it.

Catherine McDonald 47:40

Excellent. So, Shane, I think we’re finishing up. I think we probably have to. We’re being probably forced to. And Patrick, where can people find out more about you and your company?

Patrick Gaughan 47:52

Yeah, thank you very much for that. So you’ll see my company up here, although my finger disappears on my backdrop right, axiom, manufacturing systems.io, you’ll notice the IO, as in, like inputs and outputs in the digital world is out there, and so you can you can find us on our website. You can find me on LinkedIn. I am becoming maybe a little bit more active. I’m kind of an old dog in the world. So I’m learning about this new digital space that you guys are moving us into. So I’m trying to find my way to be comfortable in it. So look me up on LinkedIn, or my colleagues. I’ve got some brilliant partners in the business, Ryan Allen, Michael Manzi, Spencer, Tibbets, Dan Meisner, and a whole host of other folks that are just fantastic at their craft. So we’re happy to help reach out to us, and we’ll be there for you. Brilliant, I

Catherine McDonald 48:41

see, yeah, axiom has written there, and just so people know if you’re listening and not watching, Patrick Gone, gone as well, G, A, U, G, H, A, N, because you’ll need that if you’re going to look Patrick up on LinkedIn. Shane, yes, over to you. Shane,

Shayne Daughenbaugh 48:55

hey, it’s been great. Patrick and Catherine, thank you so much for the engaging conversations, the great questions, the stories, again, you mentioned you’re going to be a storyteller. We loved we love the stories. And thank you listening audience or watching audience. We really appreciate you and and hope we continue to add value. Have a great rest of your day.

Patrick Gaughan 49:20

Thank you, everyone.