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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.
Natalie Howden 0:00
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Lean Solutions podcast. My name is Natalie Howden, and I am filling in for Patrick Adams today, who is supporting the Michigan Lean Consortia. And today we are continuing our pre-summit series of the podcast, where we're sitting down with some of our speakers to really see get a preview of what they're going to be sharing with us at the Lean Solutions Global Summit. Once again, that summit is taking place September 15th through 17th in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the beautiful Frederick Meyer Gardens. We're truly blessed to be at such a beautiful venue, and the theme of the year is "Better Together: People Plus Innovation. So I'd like to take a few minutes and introduce our guests, Cindy Darnell and Steve and Jordan from Gentex. Steve and Jordan, can you give the audience a little bit of understanding about you and your background?
Jordan Kimball 0:50
Yeah, so Jordan Kimball, Gentex. I've been with the company for about 16 years now, and I've been on and off in continuous improvement for over 15 years.
Steve Burgett 1:00
And Steve Burgett, been at GenTech since two yeah 2011. Also in continuous improvement background as a group leader before that. Yeah, excited to be here.
Natalie Howden 1:11
Excellent. And Cindy, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Cindy Darnell 1:15
Yeah, sure. So my name is Cindy Darnielle. I'm the director of operational excellence for the Americas region for a company called Element. I've been in operational excellence for about eight years, Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, and also have a side business doing leadership training, coaching, speaking, and DISC certification, which sneak peek into my workshop presentation here.
Natalie Howden 1:44
Yeah, it's a busy woman.
Cindy Darnell 1:46
Yeah, for sure.
Natalie Howden 1:48
Excellent. Well, Steve and Jordan, can you give us a little bit of a preview about your presentation, which is titled "Designing Your Work to See Problems. Can you share with the audience what they can expect to learn and see during your presentation,
Jordan Kimball 2:01
yeah. So our presentation is based off of the work of Stephen Sphere, High Velocity Edge. So it's a workshop we've been using internally at Gentex for the past 20 years, and really we seriously stole that from some of the work with Toyota and our presence in Toyota's Bama organization, and so you may have heard it called either the high velocity edge or even TPS for executives. So we've taken that material over the past 20 years, and we put our own spin on it, really designed it towards improving our processes and designing good systems. So, part of what this does it allows allows you to take any process and look at it and break it down into basic elements, and decide how you want to structure it to remove ambiguity, have proper escalation, and then again prevent our customer from finding issues and problems, and once we do, when you do have problems, the system's set up in such a way that you can respond to it appropriately, and know what's going on and provide great problem solving. And again, this goes beyond just looking at manufacturing processes. You can apply it to any environment. Really, it applies best to support environments outside of operations. If you're supporting, you know, stuff in accounting, etc. it's a really good way to look at all the human work and design work to see problems. So we say our one person will find all of our problems with our customer, and how do we make sure that those don't leak to our customer and that we can resolve those internally?
Natalie Howden 3:41
Awesome. What is I love that you brought up that this applies beyond just manufacturing, so it applies across all processes, which is great because we have such a diverse audience that joins into the podcast and attends the summit. What was the biggest challenge in really getting maybe folks from non-manufacturing processes to embrace this mindset.
Jordan Kimball 4:03
I think the biggest when we start talking with individuals outside of manufacturing, right? When we understand that there's maybe there's a lot of support or resources, automation, those types of things that can be applied. Having a tools that you can use to really analyze people's work and be able to provide clarity. One of the biggest issues we have is we've got a lot of people that are highly skilled and do a really good job at managing the chaos and the noise. And we think that hey, there's such a great job at doing that that you know we're going to continue to support them by giving them more work and noise, and what we want to do is find a way to we want to capture your expertise and your tribal knowledge, and we want to refine it so that way you can work in a system that reduces noise and be a great problem solver and a great innovator. So that's once once they had exposure to that. It really opened up the doors, and a lot of people were excited about it.
Natalie Howden 5:03
Oh, that's great to hear! What is one key learning that maybe folks can take away from listening to the podcast today that you're going to share with our attendees at the summit? What's one learning that you can share today that our our listeners can take take home and apply?
Steve Burgett 5:21
Well, I think the like Jordan said, like taking the ambiguity out of the process like that, and I and maybe to tag on to what Jordan was just saying too, a lot of people think well, it's complex. There's all these variances, but really, when you when you take get down into the details, right, the devil's in the details. You can actually start to parse some of this out and really discover some simple fixes for your process. And a lot of times, it's you know one learning is that sometimes it's just there's just something not defined in the system that if you define it can help the system run, right? And just learning to see what those things are, whether it's who's doing it, what they have to do. Do they know what the outcome's supposed to be, and do they know what the signal is to tell them to start doing that work or to hand the baton off to the next person?
Natalie Howden 6:10
I found a lot. No matter what process it is, like documenting and making the process visual just leads to a lot of light bulbs going off in people's minds.
Steve Burgett 6:20
Yes. Yeah. Well, and like, people get kind of stuck. Like, well, there's not a way to define it. But then, what's beautiful beautiful about this is that when you separate it out into the different elements that you need to define, it makes it a lot easier to really understand what are those simple things. And one of the big things is connections. Right. We're just missing that signal telling us when you know something needs to happen or what that the key piece of information that helps keep the whole system humming.
Natalie Howden 6:49
Excellent, Cindy. So your topic is discover the code to better communication. Can you give our listeners a little bit of a preview of what you're going to be sharing?
Cindy Darnell 7:00
Yeah. So it's based on DISC, and DISC is a personality behavior assessment. And essentially, we're all a blend of four different styles, and how we show up at work every day, you know, is different from person to person. And tagging on to maybe what the Gentex guy said here is how we solve problems. You know how we tackle problem solving and change is different depending on the style that we are. And so yeah, just taking everyone through you know the different disc styles, their strengths, their motivators, how they you know, handle change and react to change, and how we can apply that when we're leading a site or, you know, a department through a change initiative, like you know, bringing lean in, changing our culture maybe to a lean culture, is big, right? And everyone's going to react a little differently, and so learning that can give us maybe a step up in you know changing that change curve, shortening that change curve when we're doing that.
Natalie Howden 8:12
What's one misconception that people might have about DISC and how to apply it to communication styles?
Cindy Darnell 8:20
I think one thing. Well, there's other. I mean, of course, there are several things, but one thing for sure is that maybe some styles are bad, or we don't want those styles on the team, and or we want you know few of those styles, and so it's it's really good to learn that there are definitely strengths that each style brings, and just learning how to approach those styles can make the difference, right? And so, I think that's a big, you know, misconception that people have is that, well, we really want to tailor our team, you know, and and maybe not have the people that are so confrontational, and we need those people, right? We need those decisive, bold folks that will make decisions. And so, yeah, I think that that's one that will be fun to learn about in this session.
Natalie Howden 9:14
Yeah, and it makes me think back to what Steve and Jordan were just talking about, and we also need some people that are really good at getting into the details to help us absolutely,
Cindy Darnell 9:24
absolutely for sure. And you know, I think even just putting those folks that may be a little hesitant about change and learning why they're hesitant about change, and it could be that they want more details, right? It could be that they, we just haven't really satisfied their need to to have information, and you know, providing that extra level of information may make that change acceptance a little smoother. So, yeah, I think that's important. Yeah, it's
Natalie Howden 9:59
going to be such an. Interesting topic. What if you can give all of our listeners today one key learning, one thing that they can take back and apply to their work today without listening to your whole presentation? What would that be?
Cindy Darnell 10:14
I think it would be that we all are can only control ourselves, and we can control our approach, right? So we can't control anyone around us, but if we can learn that there are different styles and we can adapt, I think that's the biggest takeaway for sure. That would have impact.
Natalie Howden 10:31
That's an excellent one. Thank you.
Cindy Darnell 10:34
Yeah.
Natalie Howden 10:34
So back to our our topic or theme for the year of better together, people plus innovation. Steve and Jordan, can you share how really your workshop is hitting on the theme of how people and innovation are better together?
Steve Burgett 10:50
Yeah, well, I think you know as we're reflecting on this and the work we're actively doing here using these tools, right? It's it's easy to turn things into like people problems, right? Or like point the finger at people. Like, why did you miss this? Hey, the customer found this. Why didn't you catch it? And when we start to look at it this way, we can work together and solve process problems together instead of people problems. A lot of our problems are not people problem people problems, they're process problems. So this is a fun tool to get people working together, and it works best when you have people from all layers. You know, we have workshops going on right now where we have everyone from the front line to the support engineers to leadership looking at all the different levels to design a good system that works for everybody. And over the years, as we've done this, we've taken things from a whiteboard that become part of our homegrown software integrated systems that help us be successful today. So, yeah, that's that.
Jordan Kimball 11:54
Yeah, and I think, like I hit on earlier, the big thing is, it's how to, in terms of developing people and developing processes around people. How do you take the noise and chaos that we all deal with and live with, and create some standardization and stability, and then it allows allows our team members who are involved in the process, right? Not to take away their skills, but to allow them to be problem solvers and to be proactive versus always firefighting. So that's one of the big things too. Is you can allow that room for innovation for teams to see other things they didn't see before because they're so busy just in the day-to-day details and fighting fires and chasing after things and trying to chase through the ambiguity. So it allows us to what may feel like you're handcuffing yourself because you're defining the process, following standard work. What really what that allows you to do is again innovate and improve your processes.
Natalie Howden 12:49
Yeah, I don't know how many times I say in different events or when I'm talking to folks, a bad process will beat a good person every single day of the week. I really like Cindy. Your topic is really complementing Steve and Jordan's as well, because having like they talked about like the different layers that are involved, but also the different perspectives that we might offer from a disc standpoint can be really powerful in helping.
Cindy Darnell 13:16
Yeah, absolutely, and it's so important to really understand our teams, and you know, I always say, start with yourself first. Learn about yourself and your own disc style, but then learn about the team around you. And when everybody has that kind of same level of understanding, it can just be really powerful, particularly when it comes to change and innovation. Right? We talk about people and innovation are better together. Well, you know we're we are definitely in in an innovation era, right? And with all the AI and all the things, and we can't forget the people side at the at the heart of it all. There are people making these things work or not work, and yeah, just learning how to communicate more effectively can make all the difference in you know success of a project like that, or implementing something, or of innovating a new idea. So, very important.
Natalie Howden 14:16
Cindy, what are you most excited to share with our conference attendees this year.
Cindy Darnell 14:22
So I think a lot of people maybe have some maybe base level understanding of DISC. You know, it's been around a long time, so I'm really excited to kind of maybe go a little bit deeper. And I'm excited to do a hands-on workshop. You know, it's not fun to just go and listen through slides, and so I'm looking forward to, yeah, getting people engaged and and doing some activity together.
Natalie Howden 14:48
Perfect. Do you have any previews of any activities that you can share with us without giving away too much?
Cindy Darnell 14:54
It will just be some movement in the room. That's I'll just leave it at that.
Natalie Howden 14:58
All right. I like the. Stephen Jordan, what about you? What are you most excited to share with your workshop attendees?
Jordan Kimball 15:06
We're hoping that there'll be some good aha moments, so can't give away too many details about the activity. But we'll be breaking groups apart and running through a couple different activities, and with everyday processes that we all deal with, right? We all deal with the noise and ambiguity, and once you start putting a pen to paper, you realize how ridiculous it is. So we're hoping to have some fun with that, and again, try to make it lively. There's some slides we got to go through, but hopefully, the activity kind of overshadows that. So yeah, the
Steve Burgett 15:39
details can be fun. It can be fun and and and you know empowering to get into the details. Just the you know and hopefully people take it home. But it's hard. I suggest caution when trying to apply it at home. It doesn't go over well when you start talking to your spouse about process improvements and we need better connections at X Y Z. So just you know hopefully people can be excited, but not that excited. Yeah, I think
Natalie Howden 16:02
some of the disc profiles might feed into that as well. My spouse and I are quite, and we love disc here. Yes,
Steve Burgett 16:10
we love disc at Gentex. There's a big disc circle right outside where we are, where one of our one of our departments has everybody, all the managers mapped on it, so people can see, you know, where they land and what their their kind of tendencies for communication are. So we love it.
Natalie Howden 16:27
Perfect. Yeah, I've I've used it in my in my past life, and it's been very eye opening to know I I know what my weaknesses are in terms of my dis profile and making sure I'm tapping into the folks on the team that have can cover my weaknesses and I can help cover theirs has been has been very helpful in my career so far.
Steve Burgett 16:49
I've had some of my biggest like ahas as a leader about like understanding like that you know the way like the way I'm communicating doesn't always work for people and so when I learned how to start tapping into some of those different frequencies? It was like a oh, you know, like I'm trying to talk to people. Like I'm trying to I want to be talked to, but there's somebody different that wants to be talked to or hears something different. So I might be I might think I'm coming off blunt, but they're like thank you music to my ears. You're telling me exactly what you you know you wanna you want me to do or you want me to understand. So it's great stuff.
Cindy Darnell 17:26
Someone someone told me that one time. They they said I'm a D and D's we always have our big girl big boy panties on. Just tell it like it is. We'll be okay. We're not gonna get our feelings hurt. That just sticks with me all the time. It's like because that that is not my style personally, but knowing that and setting that stage is like okay, I I get it now. Yes, exactly. It
Natalie Howden 17:51
can be so helpful to understand your audience and to understand how to play to different audience, especially all of us. We have many years' experience in change and continuous improvement across lots of different industries, et cetera, and I think that that piece of how do you interact better with people is so important and can be so powerful and have a profound impact on how your results play out. So also, Steve and Jordan, you are one of our tour locations. So the the Gentex team has been gracious enough to invite our attendees. So september 15 is our tour and classroom day. And so, with being one of the tour locations, can you share with the the group what what people can expect to see at your location?
Jordan Kimball 18:40
Yeah, we've got it broken into into two parts. The we've kind of general overview and seen some of the the systems and things we're using out in operations. So those that come from manufacturing background, I think will be some things that really resonate. And then the other half of the tour is going to be focused on our kata process, kata growth, and Cada sustainment. I know one of the things that we've always been hungry for is we've gone to different conferences and summits in the past. Is great. We've started Cada. We've got our Kata starter going. We have a couple coaches, a couple learners. How do I grow to all the other plants I have in my organization or all the other buildings, departments? How do I grow that and sustain it? So we've been working at that for the past seven years on really growing that and developing our own program around it. And again, what you'll see is what works for us and may not work for you, but there could be some good takeaways, and we can share some of our learnings, some of our fails with it, and what we're doing to have that as part of our people development process. So it's not just getting katas going and trying to save money. It's around how do we use this process as a pipeline to develop people, give them the skills and tools they need, and then really embed it into our culture. So we've had some learnings, and we're excited to share. That as well in the tour is kind of our we call it our inception kata on how we really grow that that culture of sustainment.
Natalie Howden 20:08
Excellent, that'll be exciting. I I don't know which event I'm going to end up supporting, but I hope I get to come in and see you.
Steve Burgett 20:15
Yeah.
Natalie Howden 20:17
Any other key nuggets that you would like to share, Cindy, with any of our listeners or folks that are interested in attending the summit. Like, why should they come? Besides the beautiful location that we're going to be at this year, why why should they attend the summit this year?
Cindy Darnell 20:32
Yeah, I'm actually excited. I've never been to the Frederick Meyer Garden, so I'm looking forward to that. And I keep hearing about how beautiful it is, but I would say you know come come if you're curious about people right. I I'm I love people. I love all the assessments, whether it's DISC or Myers Briggs. You know I love doing all of those. And so if that is interesting to you, I think it will be something that you take away and learn how does this apply in the lean world? Because I think not everyone sees how a tool like DISC can support a lean initiative or a lean culture change, and that's really what I want people to take away from from my session. Is it is a tool that you can use on your journey with lean and just how that applies. Yeah,
Natalie Howden 21:19
and honestly, so much more than just lean, any so much more can help with no matter what your experiences is from continuous improvement. Just any, it's a great tool to support you on your leadership journey, no matter what your your path
Cindy Darnell 21:34
is. Yeah, yep, for sure.
Natalie Howden 21:36
Stephen Jordan, what about the two of you? What are?
Steve Burgett 21:39
Well, I think it is it is energizing if you're a change agent. Try or trying to be a change agent in your organization to be around other change agents. You know, I think we all can get you know beaten down a little bit by the challenges that we're facing, right? You know, we talk about headwinds in our company, the headwinds we face, and those can be challenging, especially around change and thinking differently. To be around other people is energizing. To go and do that hard work to make change in your organization, and you know, just the learning new tools. You never know where you're going to find that little nugget. Two years ago is when we discovered like Kata Coach's dojo, and that's been a journey that's helped us take the next level and our kata practice will be part of what we share, you know, during the tour to you know find that one thing that's going to connect with you and you'll be able to apply and take you to the next level.
Natalie Howden 22:34
I'm excited. I don't know that I can join both your workshops because I'm running a workshop, but I think maybe at the same time. A
Steve Burgett 22:41
lot going on.
Natalie Howden 22:42
Yes, but for our listening audience, Cindy and Steve and Jordan are just a few of our amazing workshop speakers that we have lined up. We have so many different options for items that you can attend and workshops that you attend, and really with a focus on, we don't want this to be any other conference. There's going to be takeaways that you're going to learn over over the few days at the conference that you can immediately take back and apply to your work, which is exciting. It's great to hear Steve and Jordan. I think I know the workshop that you're talking about from a couple of years ago, and Cindy, I know you've done a lot of awesome workshops for us in the past. So I'm excited to see both of you, your groups at the summit this year. So thank you to Steve and Jordan, you as well, Cindy. So as a reminder to our listeners, our Global Lean Solutions Summit is taking place September 15, 16th, and 17th in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Frederick Meyer Gardens. september 15 is our tour and classroom day, and then we'll have the two days on site at the summit. The 16th and 17th, we do have a special code for all of our listeners. If you use code VIP, you will get a special discounted price. So please join us. We're excited. the The lineup's amazing. The venue's going to be amazing, and we hope to see all of you there, thank you.
Cindy Darnell 24:03
Thank you.
Steve Burgett 24:05
Thank you.