Visual Workplace Radio: Let The Workplace Speak

Workplace information can change quickly and often—products, schedules, specifications, tooling, parts, methods, and the thousands of other details on which the daily life of the enterprise depends. How can busy (often harried) supervisors and managers stay on top of this ever-shifting detail and still make sound, timely decisions? The answer is: visual displays/production control boards, the category of visual function that is Doorway 3 in the Ten Doorways framework. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your show host and visual workplace expert) defines visual displays: physical presentations of multi-layered information in single, interactive formats. Their purpose? To enable us to see and understand complex information at-a-glance, understand a situation's status, and take correct, timely, and independent action. Tune in and learn how displays get developed (I-driven) and help us gain control over our corner of the world, even when the pressure is on.

Standards are the bedrock of all work, paving the way to repeatable, precise, and predictable outcomes. What manager/supervisor does not pursue standards, standard work, and standardization as the starting point of control and the end of human error? But where do Visual Standards fit in? And can they ensure exact, stable performance? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, maps out the conceptual and application profile of visual standards: what they are, how they work, and what they can and cannot contribute to operational excellence. Here is the stuff and substance of Doorway 2, the category of visual function owned and led by managers, supervisors, and engineers—but also often mis-understood by them. While she is at it, Galsworth describes the trap we can fall in if we try to build adherence by standardizing visual devices instead of cultivating visual inventiveness. Tune in. You won’t want to miss this important discussion.

What is the set of mechanisms and conditions that must be in place before a company can successfully launch a process that establishes continuous systematic improvement as a way of life in the enterprise? That discussion started last week as your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, described what an improvement framework or infrastructure is, its three main outcomes, and the first three of its eight requirements. This week she continues, defining the accountability structure (3-Legged Stool); the crucial role of an Improvement Time Policy; and how to find, hold, and drive your improvement focus through The Laminated Map, an Area Hit List, and the Visual Workplace Blitz. Listen as we drill deeper into this vital behind-the-scenes preparation that supports the march of improvement through work areas, across functions, and onto your bottom line. Once again we understand that the destination of a journey is its first step. Your comments/questions are welcomed.

There are many useful improvement methodologies in the world. But far too many fail early on for one or both of two reasons. First, companies do not put a success framework in place prior to launch. Second, they have no plan that will help them track early victories and harvest them into powerful next steps. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to share the set of specific elements or requisites she helps companies structure in at the start of every visual conversion, insurance for long-term sustainable success. Tune in and learn about: the Three Outcomes that serve as an enduring focus for every transformation; the importance of naming a Vision Place; the tracking of bottom-line results; the role of the so-called Three-Legged Stool for input and accountability; and the crucial role of an Official Improvement Time Policy. This is the first of a two-part series you won’t want to miss. Call in your comments and questions.

Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often believe that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 25%-35% of the final outcome. Nonetheless, the formula of Border + Address + ID Label for everything that casts a shadow represents the indispensable first step of that journey. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, reminds you of the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through rules, tips, and innovations associated with applying addresses. Learn to drill still deeper by applying that formula to small clusters of linked function that Galsworth calls Visual Mini-Systems. Tune in and hear, as well, training tips to help you create 5S outcomes that ignite and inspire value-add associates while directly impacting the bottom line. Your call-in comments, stories, and questions are welcomed.

How do you become a visual thinker? How do learn to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it; and then learn to eliminate both through solutions that are visual? The answer is the eight building blocks of visual thinking. In a previous show, your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual system expert and award-winning author), introduced you to the first of these: I-driven. Now she presents the other seven: standards, six core questions, information deficits, motion, work, value field, and motion metrics. Listen as Dr. Galsworth walks you through this logic and shows you how to use it in your work and in your company to create a fully-functioning, sustainable visual work environment—and a spirited and engaged workforce. Whether yours is a factory, bank, hospital, dry cleaners, engineering office or military depot, tune in and learn how to think visually and help others do the same! Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed.

Products are getting more complex and supply chains are getting longer—and not just because they are located in other countries. Some companies are doing it right, focusing on an integrated supply base. Others don’t think much about supply chain, content to let the chips fall where they may! In this week’s show, your host and visual system expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, interviews Tricia Moody, supply chain expert and author/co-author of more than a dozen business improvement books, including five on Strategic Sourcing (or as experts in the field call it: The Spend). Listen and hear savvy ways to select your suppliers and help them improve their own processes instead blaming them for their failures. Hear what changes supplier behavior as Ms. Moody presents dozens of proven steps you can take to squeeze the cost out of your supply chain. Tune in and learn about companies that are doing it right and doing it better. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed.

What’s special about scrubbing the workplace? Or about safety for that matter? And what’s the real reason we implement so-called “lines and labels?” (In fact, there are eleven such reasons.) In this third show on 5S, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the engines behind the four remaining Ss (or five, depending how you count). Listen as she tells you why she calls her approach to industrial housekeeping “5S on Steroids.” Tune in and learn about the logic of smart placement, the step Gwendolyn developed to make sure that when you lay down the lines, they contribute to metrics-driven performance and the bottom line. Hear about not less than ten different types of borders, and the powerful role an address plays, even when your borders are color-coded. Speaking of color-coding, do you know how that can go wrong, very wrong? Join us and find out. This is the show when 5S ramps up beyond neat and clean and soars into visuality! Your call-ins are so welcomed.

What is the big deal in S1 anyway? What is 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 leading visual workplace expert, answers these questions and more. Learn the three premises for S1 success. Hear about the real meaning of S1 and why so much is at stake when so-called junk is removed 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 have been engaged in 5S for years, tune in and learn how to re-invigorate your current approach and go even further. Learn to use 5S to build operator-led visuality. Call in and share your experiences, your stories, your questions.

What is a visual workplace? Why is it important? How do you develop workplace visuality in your own work and company wide? These are a few of the questions Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and author of seven visual workplace books, answers on today’s program. Tune in while Dr. Galsworth shows you why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together, how it strengthens lean initiatives yet remains its own distinct strategy, and why visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberating the human will. Join Gwendolyn on her premiere show on Voice America/Business and learn how visuality is used to translate information into exact behavior and make the workplace speak. Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, engineering office, military depot or open-pit mine, listen and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them.

How do you bring visuality to a manufacturing setting that sometimes requires a full year to complete and ship a single product? How do you ignite and maintain interest? And what role does management play in keeping the momentum strong? In this show, host Gwendolyn Galsworth is joined by two master practitioners at Brandt Engineered Products (Canada): Stewart Bellamy, Quality Assurance/Lean Manager, and Barry Freeman, Paint/Assembly Manager. Listen as they share insights, expertise, and stories about deploying workplace visuality on the operator level and describe the challenges and triumphs of deploying visual and lean in a high complexity/low volume setting. Learn as they tell how they are teaching Brandt production teams to populate their work areas with robust, innovative, location-specific visual solutions so work is easier, safer, more accurate, cost effective, spirited, and very satisfying. Tune in and learn what it takes to implement visuality for results that last.

Why do so many 5S efforts get stalled? Why do so few get visual? On this show, your host Gwendolyn Galsworth (leading visual expert/award-winning author) begins a detailed discussion of her Ten Doorway framework—starting (of course) with Doorway 1: Visual Order-Visual Inventiveness. This is not just a re-hashing of traditional 5S, with a neat, clean, orderly work area as the outcome. In Galsworth’s approach that just gets us to the starting line. Her goal, by contrast, is robust, operator-led visuality that, in many companies, triggers a 15%-30% increase in productivity and a spirited, engaged, and aligned workforce on the value-add level. Because this process also liberates supervisors from deadly repetitive support tasks, they can instead become leaders of improvement. It will take Gwendolyn several shows to cover the main principles and practices of Doorway 1—that indispensable first step on your journey to a fully-functioning visual enterprise. Tune in. Get informed! Get inspired!

What is the key to sustainability? This is a question Brent Allen, VP of Strategic Improvement, asked himself repeatedly over his career at Lifetime Products (Utah). Overtime, he realized that many lean tools can trigger good results. But results don’t last if they are not operator-led. In today’s show, Mr. Allen discusses this with host Gwendolyn Galsworth, leading visual workplace expert and award-winning author. He explains why Lifetime chose workplace visuality and how the company uses it to widen leadership ranks to include operators as self-leaders. As a student of world-class manufacturing for nearly thirty years, Brent knew most supervisors would love to get operators to take on more responsibility and make more decisions. The question is how? How do supervisors learn to transfer the doing from themselves to operators? This, Brent shares, requires finding a balance between structure and free will, two elements workplace visuality offers in abundance. Tune in. Call in.

How do you achieve a fully-functioning visual enterprise? The roadmap for getting there is “The Ten Doorways”—a central framework that matches up specific company groups (managers, associates, CEOs, engineers, supervisors, etc.) with specific visual methods (or functions). Groups take responsibility for specific methods: visual order, visual standards, visual displays, visual metrics, visual problem-solving, visual leadership, visual controls, visual pull systems, and visual guarantees (poka-yoke). It will require more than several shows to cover all ten doorways. This week, your host Gwendolyn Galsworth, leading authority of workplace visuality and award-winning author, introduces you to the overall logic of her ten-door template. Then she delves into “Doorway One: Visual Order/Visual Inventiveness”—a category of visual function many refer to as “5S.” But hold on to your hats! Dr. Galsworth’s definition of 5S is more like “5S on Steroids.” Your comments and questions are welcomed!

Have you noticed? When you engage in a change process, at least one key moment will occur when the values and principles of that proposed change are tested. This is a “moment of truth” and the outcome of all your hopes and efforts hangs in the balance. In today’s show, host Gwendolyn Galsworth interviews thought leader, Carol Shaw, who for over 30 years has designed change curriculum, introduced subject experts, coached leaders, and taught seminars to thousands of companies as they pass through their own moments of truth on the way to operational excellence. Hear why many miss the learning in those moments and what happens instead. Learn why the entire workforce must understand (in heart as well as mind) why the change is needed and how “we will get there together.” Listen and gasp that there are no moments of truth in Fake Lean or Fake Visual. Recognize that how you respond to your moment of truth determines how long the change lasts after the consultants are gone. Tune in. Call in.

How do you become a visual thinker? How do learn to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it; and then learn to eliminate both through solutions that are visual? The answer is the eight building blocks of visual thinking. In a previous show, your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual system expert and award-winning author), introduced you to the first of these: I-driven. Now she presents the other seven: standards, six core questions, information deficits, motion, work, value field, and motion metrics. Listen as Dr. Galsworth walks you through this logic and shows you how to use it in your work and in your company to create a fully-functioning, sustainable visual work environment—and a spirited and engaged workforce. Whether yours is a factory, bank, hospital, dry cleaners, engineering office or military depot, tune in and learn how to think visually and help others do the same! Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed.

Did you know that an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year in US hospitals due to medical errors? The number of people injured—or requiring prolonged hospital stays—due to errors is ten times that. Other research shows 5%-10% of all pharmacy prescriptions contain errors, 70% are significant, 14% serious, and 16% potentially fatal. In today’s show, host Gwendolyn Galsworth interviews poka-yoke expert, Martin Hinckley, on the sources of error in healthcare and how simple, inexpensive mistake-proof solutions can eliminate them forever. Mistake-proofing (aka, poka-yoke or visual guarantees) is a visual workplace method that targets non-conformance due to variation, errors, and complexity. Highly effective in every workplace, poka-yoke devices excel in life-sensitive medical settings. Yet, they are rarely used. Instead, efforts often reflect little understanding of the attributes of mistakes and basic mistake-proofing principles. Tune in. Call in. Join the discussion.

What is Visual Thinking? The ability of a person to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it—and then to eliminate both through solutions that are visual. A main outcome of a visual conversion is the emergence of a new companywide competency: people who know how to think visually—Visual Thinkers. Such thinkers see workplace problems in a new way and solve them using a set of principles called The Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Listen as host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and award-winning author, introduces the first of these building blocks, sharing the two I-driven questions that power workplace visuality. I-driven is Galsworth’s way to involve all operational levels in creating an enterprise-wide visual language. From operator to CEO, manager to supervisor, engineering office to purchasing and marketing, this is the dynamic that makes visuality rich, robust, relevant, and sustainable—the key to an aligned and empowered work force.

What is a visual workplace? Why is it important? How do you develop workplace visuality in your own work and company wide? These are a few of the questions Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and author of seven visual workplace books, answers on today’s program. Tune in while Dr. Galsworth shows you why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together, how it strengthens lean initiatives yet remains its own distinct strategy, and why visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberating the human will. Join Gwendolyn on her premiere show on Voice America/Business and learn how visuality is used to translate information into exact behavior and make the workplace speak. Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, engineering office, military depot or open-pit mine, listen and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them. Call in with your questions!