Visual Workplace Radio: Let The Workplace Speak

If you don’t diagnose your site correctly, how can you expect to improve it? Last week your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, mapped out how to learn to see differently—both what is there and what is not. This week, Gwendolyn will use her Ten-Doorway Model to help you pinpoint specific opportunities for increased visuality by assessing the need for what she calls “categories of visual function.” Which are present in your workplace? Which are weak? Which are non-existent? Even when you get that, the rush is not to simply fill in the gaps. They may not all be relevant to your purposes. The rush is to determine which visual functions are most critical for your company’s next steps. Hope is ever in abundance, but most other resources are limited. You have to choose your next visual improvement steps for what they will contribute to your bottom line. In short, they must support your business improvement model. Most companies do not have one. And yet they hope to improve.

Do your performance measures monitor? Or do they drive? If you are in hot pursuit of operational excellence, your answer tells us lots about your success. In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) opens and defines the fourth doorway in her 10-Doorway Visual Workplace model: “Visual Leadership,” with visual metrics as its first crucial step. Visual Metrics are a category of measurement function that speaks in the voice of the user, names performance in concrete, local terms, illuminates cause, and then drives us down the causal chain. Drives us where? To highly-improved, sustainable performance. Yes, we also need metrics that monitor (KPIs), usually because our boss requires them. Too often, however, we make the mistake of thinking that making measures visible (tacking them on bulletin boards) has the power to create improvement. It does not. Tune in and learn what visual metrics are, how they get developed (I-driven), and how to use them to drive excellence.

How do you assess a workplace for visuality? How do you determine the current level of a site’s visual competency? What are the considerations? What do you look for—and how do you know decide what it means? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, returns to her favorite topic—The Visual Workplace—and shares her secrets and insights about conducting a visual site assessment (the first of two to three shows on this subject). Hear how she sets up her walk about and how she looks for and assesses what is there. Learn what she means when she states that her job is to tell merely by looking—and then to tell the difference merely by looking. Things get even more interesting when she reveals her other big job: to see what is not there. And what happens when she suddenly discovers that 10-15 other people want to join her as she tours. Listen as she seeks evidence of a system—first of a production system; second of an improvement system; and third of a system of visuality.

How do you dis-mantle complexity and keep customer choice strong? Answer: systematically. In this week’s show, the final in the Smart Simple Design series, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and author of the book of the same name) outlines the Variety Effectiveness Process (VEP). Hear how to prepare for the process, what teams to organize, how to assess and validate reduction opportunities, and the importance of early victories to keep skeptics at bay while the harder work of in-depth analysis gets underway. Learn how to organize a special team to analysis company products from a marketing perspective and propose reductions that eliminate unneeded variety but do not endanger the company's market position. Or a team that surveys all the part types in the company's parts universe and often eliminates enough near or actual redundancies to reduce parts inventories by 40%-60%. Learn how to apply the concept of “shared versus unique” to dismantle or even prevent complexity. Tune in. Learn more.

Unrestrained variety is not a requirement for increasing market share. When a choice is pointless (offering 87 types of steering wheels), it is negative. Negative variety adds cost, not value. It burdens the corporation with complexity and expense. Ultimately, the customer pays. Positive variety, by contrast, adds value, increases sales, and can even cut costs. Understanding negative variety and rooting out its causes is the topic of this week’s show. In it, your host and author of Smart Simple Design, Gwendolyn Galsworth shows us how the actions of virtually every part of the enterprise can either help or hinder these efforts. Whether formal or informal, such actions (which Galsworth calls “policy triggers”) reflect what is expected and, to a large extent, what is done. Where are the policy roots of negative variety? Look in these five company functions: 1) Accounting; 2) Marketing & Sales; 3) Product Development; 4) Data Systems; and 5) Operations. Tune in and hear more.

What causes complexity? What are its triggers? Two of them are out-of-date accounting systems and a big, bad bungling parts classification system. Today, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and author of Smart Simple Design, continues to peel back the onion on negative variety—complexity you can’t sell but have to manage nonetheless. Start with the realization that traditional accounting triggers variety proliferation. Why? Because GAAP is not designed to identify, track or quantify complexity or illuminate its causes. Instead, it can and often does trigger parts congestion. In contrast stands True Cost (Variety Costs + Function Costs + Control Costs)—the accurate means for determining the actual cost of putting function and difference in place and tracking them. The second negative trigger she discusses is a parts classification system, flooded with inaccuracies, redundancies and conflicting, useless, obsolete, incomplete data. Tune in and hear her eight guidelines for cleaning that up.

Simplification is a mindset and a process. We need executives who see past “tools” and understand the impact of decisions made at the top on the whole organization. This week your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth, interviews Eric Lail, Vice President/Performance Solutions at Total Insight, a North Carolina firm, offering services in extended lean across the full supply chain. In this third show of the Smart Simple Design series, Eric’s long years as a furniture maker pay off in stories gruesome, glorious and otherwise that show us mistakes on the shop-floor or front office only affect a small percentage of the enterprise. Mistakes at the top, by contrast, impacts 90%-100% of the company—and those are almost always mistakes of complexity. Whether you’re in marketing, manufacturing, service or distribution, it’s time to recognize that the number of parts/options in the system can have negative impact on your service, inventories, overhead (space, buildings, rent, dies, etc.). Tune in.

What went wrong? To gain market dominance, Company A offers customers endless choice. Gross sales soar but profits do not improve. The company re-groups and develops still more products. The result? Profits not only do not increase, sales on previous products plunge. What went wrong? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host, presents the second in her Smart Simple Design series on negative variety. Learn why Visual and Lean are simply coping mechanisms for the seemingly innocent introduction of “just one new part.” Costing a mere $0.35, it triggers a long causal chain of cost and complication. Why? Because: All costs adhere to the part! To help better grasp this, we walk through The Parts Index—a simple but shrewd yardstick for measuring product complexity and its corresponding organizational impact. Instead of simply counting each part on a bill on material, you multiply it by the number of times each part occurs across all products. The result: YIKES! Tune in and learn more.

Consumer demand for choice drives today’s market. Product and service variation is exploding—and, with it, enterprise complexity and a choking internal congestion. In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins the first of a series of shows, based on her book, “Smart Simple Design.” In it, she describes the triggers of negative variety and ways to minimize them so we can continue to offer our customers choice and still make a healthy profit. Tune in and hear why many thriving companies are heading for a crash because they don’t see the negative consequences of mushrooming product and service variety. Or because they mis-name the problem as “deteriorating profits” or “excess inventory.” As a result, they pursue solutions—such Lean and Visual—that are not designed to address the real problem. The real problem is not the production system. It is not quality, service or delivery. It certainly is not the customer. The real problem is the product itself.

Engineer by training, master lean practitioner, continuous improvement expert, Maria Elena Stopher drives excellence with the heart of a leader…a soulful leader in private practice and in national and international arenas. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host, interviews Ms. Stopher on her 25 years in the trenches of manufacturing and at the board table—driven by a single abiding vision: to change the world. First as head of the MEP Network, Maria Elena developed an excellence curriculum connecting hundreds of field technicians in a national mission to help small manufacturers. Ten years later she launched a private practice (Ultimate Lean) and brought the same lean and visual fire to government agencies. As she continues that work, she also chairs AME (Association of Manufacturing Excellence), an all volunteer not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating networks of leveraged learning across 50 States. Tune in this week for a story and a vision—told from the heart.

Is workplace visuality recognized as a vital part of operational excellence? Does it really make a business difference? If you are challenging for The Shingo Prize it does. Tune this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, asks these questions (and more) of Robert Miller, executive director of The Shingo Prize. Under Bob’s visionary leadership, The Prize has re-defined its assessment criteria and anchored them in a tight framework of principles, systems, and tools (in that order). Hear how visuality aligns those criteria and facilitates their achievement. Having led or assisted at over 100 Shingo site visits, Bob Miller has a unique, first-hand appreciation of the dynamic partnership between visuality and excellence. As we listen, we come to know what they know: “Visuality doesn’t just create a lean enterprise culture—it drives it.” This is a LIVE Show. Call ins welcome. (Visit shingoprize.org for a copy of the new Shingo Model and Application Guidelines.)

What’s the big deal about S1 anyway? What’s hard about getting rid of junk? Why do so many companies fail at S1? Why are so many value-add associates disappointed? Where and why does this well-intentioned corporate initiative go off the rails? Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, answers these questions and more. Learn the three premises for S1 success. Hear about Charley’s Table, the real meaning of S1, and what’s really at stake when people’s so-called “junk” is removed against their wishes—in the name of 5S. Understand why S1 is the stepping stone to an empowered work culture and to a new kind of improvement leadership. Hear how most companies, in their rush to “just do it,” miss golden opportunities to use S1 to re-frame and re-invent the work culture. Even if you’ve been doing 5S for years, tune in and learn how to re-invigorate your current approach and go even further. Learn to use S1/SORT to build operator-led visuality and value-add empowerment.

Why do many business owners, CEOs, and plant managers struggle with their role as leaders? What does effectiveness mean for leaders? How can visuality help leaders be more effective? In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) continues her walk through the fourth doorway into the visual workplace: Visual Leadership. At this point in Doorway 4, visual metrics are in place; visual problem solving is propelling the workforce down the causal chain; standards are improving and visual solutions are stabilizing those improvements. Leaders are now able to see their organizations behave and it is their turn to step up to their role as visual leaders—owners of the organizational horizon as well as the pacing and will needed to drive the enterprise towards it with focus, confidence, and certainty. Tune in and learn why good leaders always crave excellence and how visuality can help them both sharpen and satisfy that hunger.

Workplace visuality is not rocket science. You see it. You get it. That is one of its powers. Implementing visuality in the enterprise so it has a long and vital life, however, is another matter. Setting up a visual workplace steering can help—a lot! In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host) continues describing this team of associate volunteers who help the company stay the improvement course and meet its impact potential. With 30 years of hands-on experience in implementing visuality, Gwendolyn provides the telling details. This week she adds to your understanding of how this team: 1) gets groomed through a self-process of norm setting to take on a leadership role that has no authority; 2) learns to discern the difference between process and task and deploy that in its interactions; and 3) leads not just by example but also by helping to set standards which the company may not realize it needs. Empowerment on steroids continues! Emails and call-ins welcomed!

How involved should value-add associates be in making a visual workplace conversion a success? If you ask Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visuality expert: a lot! One of the major mechanisms for doing this is “The Visual Workplace Steering Team”—the topic of today’s show. Call this team what you will, it consists of hourly employees who volunteer to monitor the visual roll out in the enterprise and provide feedback and recommendations to help ensure its success. Its members collaborate with management to make sure the company keeps true to the cultural values and implementation principles it professes to embrace. While this team, by design, has no positional authority, it does have significant responsibility. In short: empowerment on steroids! Tune in for the details on: what this team is, how it functions (autonomously), what it contributes—and how it governs itself and learns to govern itself. Galsworth provides the fine points. This is a LIVE show. Emails and call-ins welcomed!

Healthcare organizations are under renewed pressure to improve quality and reduce costs. Kaizen, as a methodology, lets front-line staff engage in a process of everyday improvement that results in safer patient care, better patient care, and a more rewarding care-giving experience. As these improve, costs shrink. This week at The Visual Workplace, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) interviews Mark Graban, lean healthcare expert, speaker, blogger (www.leanblog.org), and author of Lean Hospitals. His brand new book (co-authored with Joe Schwartz) is Healthcare Kaizen: a comprehensive overview of Kaizen thought—loaded with tons of examples, quotes, tools, pictures and stories. Tune in and listen as Gwendolyn and Mark discuss the role of Kaizen in the world of health today and the many powerful steps you can take to apply this powerful tool to your own enterprise. While healthcare is the setting, continuous improvement is the focus. Get your pencils ready.

Our sustainment series wraps up today—at least for the time being. And what three things do we now know for sure? 1) A company that does not learn how to sustain its improvements will lose them. 2) A company that thinks audits creates sustainment has confused compliance with engagement—and will fail. 3) Sustainment requires a balance between people, imagination, and structure/tools. In today’s Visual Workplace show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the fourth understanding: 4) Sustaining means driving—and to drive you need a destination (a clear focus) and plenty of gas. Join us and hear specific ways to cultivate continuous engagement as part of your sustainment process. Learn how to re-fresh and re-fuel people’s thinking each month so that new ideas and inventions are continually generated and your KPIs improve. Learn more about why we say: Visuality doesn’t just drive work culture—it creates it. This is a LIVE show. Your emails and call-ins are welcome!

What happens after the Visual Where (“5S”) is in place? Do visual contributions from value-add associates stop? If no, then how do line employees continue to visually develop a robust operational language for day-to-day work? That’s the topic of this week’s Visual Workplace show. In it, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how operators can extend their visual thinking to new areas of challenge: motion triggered by information needed by internal (and later, external) customers and suppliers. She calls this extended or advanced visual thinking: “Customer-Driven Visuality,” one of the keys to sustainability through visuality. In this fourth show on SUSTAIN, Galsworth answers the double-sided question: 1) How do we use visuality to anchor and sustain improvement? and 2) How do we use visuality to sustain (and extend) visuality? That’s when continuous improvement becomes a way of life in the company. This is a LIVE show. Your call-in questions/comments are welcome!

What are realistic expectations about how people should and do respond to your splendid new improvement initiative? Should you get your hopes up? Should you remain detached and neutral? Or should you gird your loins for battle? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discusses what she has discovered over three decades of implementations: that people will respond to change in one of three ways. They embrace it. They resist it. Or they do not have an opinion about it one way or the other; they are neutral. We call this threesome: The Rowers, Watchers, and Grumblers. And they offer us a perspective on the I of the I-driven approach to workplace visuality. Tune in this week and hear Gwendolyn share the telling difference between inertia and resistance and the most effective way of handling the grouches. Learn what not to do and what happens when individuals are allowed, even encouraged, to be themselves, with no fear of penalty.

Is your visual workplace (or 5S) roll out a little stuck? Is your empowered approach to improvement suddenly at a standstill? Does a slowdown have you baffled—not knowing if it’s you, your breath, or simply a bad implementation plan? Tune in to The Visual Workplace this week and hear your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discuss exactly this situation with Clifton Doll, who is in charge of continuous improvement and operator-led visuality at the Doosan Bobcat in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Listen as Clif describes his goals, process, why he feels stumped by the current level of engagement—and how he hopes to “fix the problem.” Then hear Gwendolyn’s assessment, plus her recommendations on how Clifton can move forward. This is the first show of real-time un-rehearsed visual coaching. If you and other listeners show interest, there’ll be a regular spot to sign up for and get free expert coaching from Gwendolyn, on-air, on your own conversion challenges.