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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.
Patrick Adams 0:00
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Lean Solutions Podcast. My name is Patrick Adams, and today I am joined by Beth Carrington. Beth is the president and master coach at Carrington Consulting, where she's led multiple lean transformations across all different industries: pharmaceutical, healthcare, manufacturing, education. She's also a certified improvement kata and coaching kata master coach, and also is an instructor and program developer at the Lean Enterprise Institute. So, lots of important things that Beth is doing and keeping herself really busy, but Beth, I want to ask you a little bit about your past prior to that, so but first I want to welcome to the show, so welcome.
Beth Carrington 0:46
Hey, good afternoon, Patrick. Nice to be here. Thank
Patrick Adams 0:50
you. Yeah,
Patrick Adams 0:50
good to see you again. This is actually your second time on the Lean Solutions podcast, so I'm excited to have you back again, and we're going to dive a little bit deeper into some concepts than we did last time, and maybe talk about some different things, but like I said in the, in the intro here, I really would love for our listeners to hear a little bit more about who Beth was before you founded your consulting agency. What was your experience prior to going into the consulting world.
Beth Carrington 1:23
Oh, excellent. Let's see. Well, now, well, I was born in.. no, okay, we won't go quite back that far, but I come out of the automotive industry, tier one supplier to basically domestic US domestic and international automotive companies started my career in the automotive world as a quality manager. Earlier I was a quality engineer in other organizations, but stepped into automotive as quality manager again, tier one automotive supply company and I went through various roles, I was lucky enough to get some great experience in the quality world, step into operations, and ultimately stepped into leadership role, president of a tier one automotive supply company, and what, and this was back in the 80s, 90s kind of timeframe, definitely aging myself, but
Patrick Adams 2:28
we were very young,
Beth Carrington 2:29
we, yeah, when we manufactured, ultimately it was control modules for electronically controlled automatic transmissions, and so it had embedded hydraulics with electronic controls, and basically these devices would take electrical impulse and translate them into hydraulic signals that then would engage valves in a valve body to engage and disengage clutches, torque converters. They also use this technology and variable power assist steering, and I like brakes, those kinds of applications, and it was interesting because oftentimes what we manufactured in the morning was being put in a transmission that very afternoon, so it was very much just in time manufacturing, so things like delivery and quality were measured in parts per million. We were practicing what today we call lean concepts, before the term lean was coined, you know, we would call them synchronous manufacturing, just in time experimenting with quality circles and pull signals and flow, and then started to, you know, understand the concepts being brought forth of lean and applied those, those techniques in our, in our processes, and I was lucky enough to be engaged. This was in Muskegon County, so you're next. I was, yeah, I was lucky enough to be co-founder of Muskegon County Chamber of Commerce Lean Manufacturing Consortium, and so we would go around and visit various sites in, in Kent County, or excuse me, Muskegon County, and so we would go around and visit various sites, and I was lucky enough to meet a gentleman by the name of Bill Costantino, and Bill was like the first group leader hired at Georgetown, Kentucky, and at Toyota, and he became lucky enough, my sensei over the years, and we started. I finally left the corporate world, did a divestiture of my business with a strategic partner, and left the corporate world and started. At a lean transformation organization with Bill, and worked many years with he and a couple other partners, did some great transformational work around not just automotive, but like equipment like that would build like two a year, and we were able to get them to maybe, you know, 10 a year, and it was huge, and learn continue to learn a lot and so that's kind of my world and then it kind of got altered in a wee bit in about 2008 and Bill was friends and with a guy by the name of Mike Rother and Mike had published well, it hadn't been published yet. He had written a book, and he sent Bill Costantino the transcript, and said, "Hey, read this, give me your feedback, Bill, coming out of, you know, Toyota, and it was called Toyota Cotta, and Bill read that, did some editing on it, and then I was lucky enough to get my hands on the transcript, and I was like halfway through the, and Bill told me, he said, "Read this, it's going to alter the way you think about what we've been doing, and I, before I even finished the book, I called him back, and I said, "Holy cow, Bill, this is a game changer, this is going to change what we've been doing in lean transformation. We had been very much tool-based transformation, you know, the checklist of here's a 5s and here's Kanban, and you know, just basically the tools like everybody else in the world at that time, and Mike introduced us to this element we hadn't been incorporating that was leaders as coaches teaching scientific thinking to their subordinates to their team members, and all of a sudden managers' roles changed from teaching a lean tool to teaching scientific thinking, so that their people could develop their own quote unquote tools of lean, right. And if we look at this, it's kind of like Mike Rather said, what we call lean tools today were just solutions to problems at Toyota. That's right, everybody. We went in and glommed on to their solutions to their problems and tried to apply them to our problems. And Mike was thought maybe there's another way. If we look to develop our people in scientific thinking, they could develop their own tools, right, their own solutions to their unique problems within their culture, within their constraints, and it's.. it changed our, our way of approach to lean thinking and lean practice. And now I've.. I'm full in.. I'm, you know, I was just on a literally hung up from a coaching call, talking about, you know, scientific thinking, and, and what makes it different from the very topics we're going to be talking about today.
Patrick Adams 8:09
Love it, love it. Well, that's a really great introduction to your background, and obviously, like, I'm sure you have stories from all the different industries, all the different places around the world that you've had the opportunity to go into, and maybe we'll, maybe we'll touch on a few of those, or hear some of those as we talk today, or maybe at the summit coming up in September about that a little bit more too, but one question that I do have is just briefly on this topic before we move into what we're going to talk about today, so with AI, so much is changing so quickly in the world, and it's a topic of every conversation, and I just want to ask you, is improvement kata or coaching kata, is that still relevant as we move into the next phase of, of, you know, how businesses will be ran with, you know, AI having such a huge part in what we do? What are your thoughts on that?
Beth Carrington 9:14
Oh, absolutely, Patrick, and I can see just over the course of, let's say, the last two years, this idea of AI coming into processes, whether that's finance, engineering, even manufacturing, in terms of helping people problem solve troubleshooting equipment, it's so prevalent, and it makes the improvement kata coaching data so much more relevant, not less, because no one knows exactly how to apply this new tool, this new approach, this new system, and so it, it, it definitely. In terms of having an experimental mindset versus an implementation mindset, AI forces us to go down the path of experimentation, which means we better get pretty good at understanding how to affirm, how to shape an experiment, and then affirm or refute our hypotheses, as opposed to just taking action, right, it's just exploded in terms of the improvement kata coaching kata, because people don't have an implementation path forward, they have to experiment their way forward, so it's it's becoming more relevant, not less.
Patrick Adams 10:40
Love it, love it, love it. That's so good to hear. Obviously, and you know, I would, I would echo the same thing, and that's what I'm seeing, you know, as I'm getting around and learning more and more about AI, and just the, yeah, definitely are going to complement, and definitely there's going to be more need for scientific thinking as we, as we go into the future, and in regards to scientific thinking, you know, a lot of times what we say is just run the experiment, or you know, why don't we, why don't we do an experiment and just see, see what happens, and you know, reflect, and then learn, and then, and then you know, move from there, when it comes to kind of thinking, but a lot of teams pride themselves in having, you know, a solid action plan, and you would challenge this, and you would, you know, you would say there's a difference, and you know, I guess I want to ask you, what is the fundamental difference between executing on action plans and running experiments?
Beth Carrington 11:37
Yeah, so there is a don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place for an action plan, right? If there's, there's always the go and dos of the world, but we tend to over apply action plans, and we don't necessarily step outside of what we already know, or what we think we know, that's a whole nother conversation, but and we tend to rely, we create this action plan. I love this. Is I'm going to paraphrase this, it's not an exact quote, but Mike Rather says it's very interesting, this idea of building an action plan. Let's say we do a value stream map, and we create a desired future state, and then people look at their current state, and they build an action plan, and that action plan is built at the moment of let our least understanding about how the implementation will go, but what I tend to see is people get locked in to that action plan, as if we know already the path we're going to take, and how the implementation will go, and what I tend to see is people's focus shifts from what I'm striving to achieve to the task in front of me, and the goal becomes get a smiley face on the action plan, you know, get that task done, and that's that becomes the goal, and people actually measure how many of our action plans are complete, and that 100% becomes their goal when in fact they forget about the future state they're trying to create, and so it's often like they don't lift their head up to see the objective, they're just very task-oriented, and, and you know, we get so far down the action plan, a couple of things happen, one is a concept called sunk cost, you know. We, we've put so much into going down this path, we, we, we believe we can't afford to abandon it. It's like, you know, the classic is reading a book, you know, it's a tome, and you're a quarter of the way through it, halfway through it, and you're going, this is a terrible book, if it's fictional, you know, I'm not enjoying it. If it's nonfiction, I'm not getting value out of it. But I've read half of it already, I better finish it, you know. That's what we call sunk cost, and, and so they tend to get that's one thing, you know, they get so enamored of their own plan that whether it's delivering results or not, they continue down that path, and there we're not likely to change it if all we're focused on are the tasks and not the objective, and so Kata helps us in this approach, the scientific thinking helps us keep our eyes up on the horizon and then always be touch, touching where we're going next, you know, where we're going long term, and then building out where we're going next, and then you run up to that in kind of terms, we call it target condition, and then you know, once you get to that target condition, you set the next one. And the closer in you make the target condition, the more you can see the real things, not everything I can do to improve, but the things I need to improve, and so it keeps people focused on the right things, right, and I think there's, there's a, there's a term called the power of and, and it isn't Patrick, one or the other, there's a time and a place for an action plan, and sometimes you just need to sit down and build out a plan in your head, and then I often take those and kind of morph them into objective planning, like I know to achieve this bigger goal, here are the main key stepping stones, things I need to learn how to do. Those become my interim objectives, and maybe I could build a focus or a target condition around those objectives. Get there, and then I can do the next objective. So I'm often finding myself doing, in my terms, what I call objective planning, maybe not action planning, and then I use Kata to execute against that, and I'm always willing to change those plans as I learn more,
Patrick Adams 16:12
right? Right, yeah, because as you go, you're going to learn things along the way that may end up having you head down a different path, or than you originally expected, as long as you're still in alignment with that challenge, or that long-term goal that you have. It seems so simple, like when you, when you explain it that way, and it seems so, you know, that that that would be the way that we should do things, but most leaders don't, and they tend to default to the action plans, and they, they're always creating the action plans, and they're laying out each step of the way, and you know, due dates and owners, and why do you think, why is that, why do they default to that versus allowing, you know, themselves to learn along the way, and you know, stay on path, but you know, reflect and adjust as they go. Is it a, is it a culture thing? Is it a, is a fear of failure thing? Is it a leadership thing? I mean, why, why do they default to that?
Beth Carrington 17:11
Yes, to all of those. You know, there's, there can always be multiple root causes for different situations, but one, I think it's, it's cultural, it's how Western I'll speak to the country and the continents I'm in, right, it's a Western culture, very much part of, you know, the leadership training that's that's been given to leaders for ever, so it's part of just that, that cultural building of, and the education system itself, right? That, that brought us
Patrick Adams 17:55
to, I
Beth Carrington 17:56
would say, overvaluing action plans. Another thing I see happening is people equate action with speed, and, and so the sooner I can take action, and the more people I can get taking action, the faster I'm going to get there, and that's not how it's the case, particularly if we're being constrained by our assumptions, we're being constrained by cognitive biases, like confirmation bias. Those things are very powerful. I was been coaching a team where I see in some leadership maybe a little fear of failure, where learner has might not feel psychologically safe to say to their coach, I am who is their manager, by the way, I don't know, those are hard words for people to say out loud in front of their peers, in front of their manager, and imagine a manager saying that in front of a subordinate, right. It's there's a bit of fear in there. So we've, we've oftentimes have to talk about psychological safety, but those are, in kind of terms, those are just obstacles that we have to come over or overcome to get us thinking in a more scientific, experimental, and it's actually fun, you know. Hey, it's all right if I don't know, but I have some experiments. I have an obstacle I want to tackle. I have a couple of experiments I want to run. It's much more relaxing and and, and, yeah, safe, just to say I don't know, but I have an experiment or two I want to run, and so we oftentimes have to, to teach learners and their coaches more so than learners, their coaches. Is how to do that, so a lot of my work isn't necessarily teaching people how to think more scientifically, it's teaching people how to coach someone to think more scientifically, which means they've got to be in that space themselves, so they can coach others.
Patrick Adams 20:17
Sure, sure. So, what is what would that look like if we were to practice that, like if someone's listening in and they're kind of curious about what does it actually look like? What does it sound like for that to happen? I mean, is there an example you could run me through, or, you know, I don't know, just a kind of an explanation of what it looks like if we put that into practice.
Beth Carrington 20:42
Yeah, so there's a simple kind of formula that a leader can use with their people. It's called a coaching cycle, and Mike rather has made it, you know, abundantly available on the internet, you can go to his website or his sub stack, you know, and and learn what those coaching questions are. But in simple terms, a leader asking their people, you know, where do we want to be? What are we striving to achieve, and long term, like a year from now, six months from now, two years from now, you can get it from your annual plan, your strategic plan, a problem that you're trying to solve for a customer or internal problem, you know, you can pretty easily find help a leader identify what we're striving to achieve, and then they can ask, great, that's where I want to go. Where am I now? And so you can do a quick assessment against that challenge. Where are you now? And, and how are we? What are we doing? What, how is our process running that delivers us the results we're getting today, so a little bit of investigation of where you are now. Then from that investigation you can set a what's called a target condition, and then list an obstacle, and there's two things I use all of the time: one is an obstacle parking lot, just a piece of paper. Here are the things I think preventing me from getting to where I want to be next. And then there's a what we call a PDCA record, and it just, it's a simple tool. I use it all the time in Kaizen events and value stream mapping events, and any, you know, in any kind of problem I'm trying to solve, goal worth trying, striving to achieve. It's just
Patrick Adams 22:43
it
Beth Carrington 22:43
simply says, what is the step you're going to take to overcome that obstacle? And by taking that step, the next one is what do you expect to happen, and to learn from taking that step, and then do the step, and then it's simply what actually happened, right? facts and data of what actually happened, and then you compare. This is the backbone of scientific thinking. You compare what actually happened with what you expected. Boom, and that's your moment of learning. I either affirmed that experiment or I refuted it, and then you act on what you've learned, right? If I affirmed it, I standardized, stabilize it, make it my new way of doing, and if I refute it, well, that's interesting. I have learned something new, and then I take another next step. So it's simply those that plan, do check, act cycle that plan, do check act cycle, with a coach helping you reflect on that, and that's when we, we asked those questions, those coaching questions, that that's just represents the framework of scientific thinking, and the coaches there, through repetition, asking those same questions over and over again, embedding that thought process into their learner through through real experience, not just in a classroom but in the real world. We call it going out in the wild, right, and applying it in the real world, and it's through that actual practice and application over time that the person running those experiments begins to begins to embed scientific thinking in their as their new default mode, and that's what, and that coach is your guide through that, right? Just there asking questions, we often tell people leaders go be coaches, but we don't give them necessarily be humble, go ask open-ended questions, but there's no pattern to it, there's no rhythm, there's no framework of what you're striving to achieve and. In terms of skill development, and so this model that Mike built is really powerful. It gives leaders a pattern to follow,
Patrick Adams 25:11
right?
Beth Carrington 25:11
Then they themselves start thinking more scientifically, and their people, team members, begin to think more scientifically. So, if I had two pieces of advice I'd say, go get a cheap sheet of paper that you can put obstacles down, and then either make a template that says, what is my next step, what do I expect, what's going to happen, what did I learn, and start writing it out as you go. You can go online and find what we call a PDCA cycle record, and just start using that as the basis of science, building your own scientific thinking.
Patrick Adams 25:48
Love it. And actually, he doesn't. Mike has a website where most of those materials are offered for free.
Beth Carrington 25:53
Absolutely often. Yeah, he, he's a, he shares relentlessly.
Patrick Adams 26:00
Yeah,
Beth Carrington 26:00
and he's got two sites, he's got his own, you know, just Google Mike, rather,
Patrick Adams 26:04
he's got a
Beth Carrington 26:05
funky URL out of the University of Michigan, but just type in his name, you'll find his website, and the other one is called Kata to Grow, and that's that's the avenue of Qatar in the classroom, bringing scientific thinking into the classroom, helping teachers teach students this way of sign that this way, but teach scientific thinking to their students in a classroom environment, and they're both tons of free material.
Patrick Adams 26:34
Yeah. No, that's great. And you said the two things that you said, because this is, I'm sure there are leaders that are listening, who maybe are hearing about this for the first time, or maybe they've heard about, they've never tried it. Now that they're hearing this, they're like, oh, that doesn't sound too bad, but they've always been in this mode of just get stuff done, you know, action lists and due dates. And how do I think you mentioned two things, and maybe those are your two, but what would you say would a leader should do if they want to shift their team from that, you know, get it done mindset to the thinking, learning, iterating, technical, you know, to shift. What would you say, like suggestions? Yeah,
Beth Carrington 27:12
because there's like these two partners, right? The learner, the person improving, some people call them the improver, I call them the learner. They're learning how to think more scientifically and learning how to improve their process. They could use that obstacle parking lot and PDCA cycle record, right? That that simple form, and that's all a learner really needs, you know, just to get started, there's some finesse and some sophistication you can add to it, but that would be from a learner perspective, from a coach perspective. Again, free on Mike's website, there I've got him on my website, Kata Matters. You can download a coaching card, and a coaching card is that frame, it's a series of questions that a coach would ask that learner, and it represents the framework of scientific thinking, and by simply asking that learner those questions, the most powerful part of that being, and you use the term yourself earlier, reflection, just asking that person with that PDCA record. So, what did you plan as your last step? It's on the back of the card, it's called reflection. What did you plan as your last step? Cool. What did you expect to happen, and to learn from taking that step? Good. What actually happened, and again, facts and data, and then what did you learn, and then that leads to a chain of experimentation, typically, and they just continue on. So it's that leader asking those questions, but guiding that learner through scientific thinking, and they do that just by asking a series of questions,
Patrick Adams 29:02
right,
Beth Carrington 29:03
and then they could explore more. There are books to read, you know. A friend of ours, I'm sure you know, Sylvain Land, his little, you know, Shingo Winner book,
Patrick Adams 29:15
yes,
Beth Carrington 29:15
Bringing Scientific.
Patrick Adams 29:16
He just this year was that the Shingo,
Beth Carrington 29:21
yeah, yeah,
Patrick Adams 29:21
yeah. This year, that's great.
Beth Carrington 29:23
So, there, there are books, and there's Mike's books, if they want to learn more. There are 1000s of hours of video on YouTube around scientific thinking, the improvement kata, coaching kata that you can watch. I have a ton of videos I've done. I've got some at Lei, simply walking you through these routines, and then you know, take as sophisticated as you want to be, the dot the i's, cross the t's, the finesse of how do I write a target condition. In that interim, where do I want to be next? There's some, you know, you can be as sophisticated with these tools as you want to be, but I would just start with that experimentation.
Patrick Adams 30:12
Perfect, that's great advice. And as we wrap up, Beth, I wanted to let everybody know, I kind of hinted at it earlier, but you're going to be speaking at this year's Lean Solutions Summit, happening here in Michigan. It's in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at Meyer Frederick Gardens, which is a beautiful venue, by the way. And it's right, it's right on the cusp of the Grand Rapids Art Festival, which is, which happens annually. And so there's going to be a ton of beautiful art at the gardens, and for people that want to stick around, they can go downtown Grand Rapids and see some of the art show, the art prize that happens every year, which is pretty amazing. So we're going to be in, it'll be middle of September, September 15 and 16th, we'll be here in Grand Rapids, and you're going to be speaking on this topic, getting a little bit deeper, not just speaking, but you're going to be leading a workshop, hands-on workshop. Can you just tell our listeners a little bit more about what they can expect when they attend the Lean Solutions Summit this year?
Beth Carrington 31:14
Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because it's more than just speaking, we're going to learn by doing. So, I've got, I'm going to bring a simple little process with me. It's a 35 piece domino process, so we're going to play with some dominoes, and we're, we have a process we're going to lay out. So, and you're going to be, they're going to learn about a challenge, that's the term we call it. What are you striving to achieve? And we're going to have a challenge that we need to achieve using the dominoes, and we'll set up an interim target condition, so they'll learn about that, though, and through doing, they'll learn about obstacles, how to list those, how to choose one, design an experiment, run that experiment, you know, and based on what they learned, run another experiment, all in service to achieving the target condition. So we're going to learn by doing along the way. I also have some stories you talk about, you know, the power of stories, examples, and so I'll share some of those along along the way. So it's going to be interactive learning, along with a little bit of teaching, and then some doing, little bit of teaching, and then some doing, and we'll be able to do a little role play of what it means to be a learner and what it means to be a coach.
Patrick Adams 32:34
Nice. Well, I have personally experienced your workshops, and you do an amazing job facilitating it. Oh,
Beth Carrington 32:41
thank you.
Patrick Adams 32:41
Learning by doing is, is definitely an understatement. I mean, it's there's gonna be a lot of fun activity and discussion, and good learning that happens. So, for those that are listening in, we'll throw a link in the show notes, but you can go to Lean Solutions summit.com to get more information, and when you register, use the code Beth 100 Beth 100 and you'll get an extra special discount on your registration. So, whatever the lowest price is right now, you'll get a discount on top of that when you use the code Beth 100 So, Beth, it's been great to have you on the show, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in September, not too far away, and yeah,
Patrick Adams 33:23
we'll
Patrick Adams 33:24
connect, and, and love. I'm looking forward to hear hearing more on your workshop.
Beth Carrington 33:29
Excellent, excellent. It's always good to see you, Patrick.
Patrick Adams 33:32
It's good to see you too, Beth. Have a good day.
Beth Carrington 33:35
You too. Bye now.