Blueprint for the Future: Rethinking Work Design

Resolving corporate challenges and increasing effectiveness demands a nuanced approach. Professor Don Kieffer makes the case that the answer lies in Dynamic Work Design.

Professor Don Kieffer

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

There are actually two ways to design work in organizations. Dynamic work design is one, but no one knows about it, and it's certainly not well accepted. The other is well known and well accepted, and that's called static design. If I ask someone in a big organization, can you draw me the organizational chart? Everyone can do that, it takes them like three minutes. But if I ask them to describe how the work happens dynamically in the organization, they just look at me like, what do you mean? People already know how to do good work, they just are not looking at it correctly. And a lot of times they're so good at solutions that their mind is full of solutions. They haven't really focused on exactly what the problem is. The problem is when people have dynamic problems, like there's a problem in the work. Because people don't know these dynamic tools or the language, what they do is they substitute static tools. So they do a reorganization and it really doesn't address the problem. So instead of stopping thinking about what is the problem, let's go look at the work dynamically and do something small to experiment, they just do these big corporate problems. So we try to close that disconnect. Go visit the work, see what's wrong, fix it, learn from it, and spread it that way.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Guesting today's episode alongside our executive dean, Jesper Bergman, is no other than Don Kiefer. Kiefer has quite a longstanding career behind him, with approximately 40 years in the culprit industry, going from a factory shop floor at age 17 to vice president of operations at Hardy Davidson. Kiefer is nowadays not only lecturing at MIT and teaching here at AVT, but also consulting globally and being quite a problem solver of workflow problems in diverse industries. The red thread that runs through Kiefer's corporate experience and consulting career is solving complex problems. So, submerged with his presence in the academic field, Kiefer has co-created a method on how to solve corporate problems and getting results rather quickly. It may also be known as the techniques of dynamic work design. Dynamic work design consists of four main principles of managing, designing, fixing, and optimizing workflows. Principles for efficiency, more or less. Those exact principles, among other riveting workflow insights, is what Kiefer let us in on in today's episode. So tag along if you're interested in getting some valuable insights from the brilliant storyteller that Don Kiefer is. So without further ado, let's dive into it.

SPEAKER_04 2:48

So welcome all uh listeners to today's episode. I've had the privilege to have one of our visiting faculty members, that is Don Kiefer. Uh he's situated in Massachusetts, Boston. So a warm welcome to you, Don. Well, hello, Jesper, and very kind of you to have me on. I would like to start with just asking you what's on your mind today?

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Today it's summer in Boston, and I'm a cyclist, and so I'm thinking a lot about ramping up my miles. I'm a long-distance cycler, so think about I had a rough winter, so I'm thinking about training and getting back on the bike, putting miles on. And my grandkids, of course, the family, but mostly I'm focused on those incremental improvements, putting miles on the bike.

SPEAKER_04 3:38

Yeah, yeah. So do you go for a specific range, or uh would you go for you know two hours or one hour? But I have I have done trips.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

I've pedaled across the United States from Los Angeles to Boston, and another long one about half that far. But usually I just like to go out by myself for a couple hours at a time. When I'm in top form, I'll I'll go out three times a week, twice for two or three hours, and then once for seven or eight hours. So 30 or 40 miles, and then I'll probably do 75, 80 and up to 150 when I get 150 miles at a clip when I get going pretty good. So it's kind of like a meditation on while pedaling. Yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_04 4:16

So did you go on your own or in a group?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

I I usually go on my own, but the the trip I took across the country, I went with about 20 people with no sleeping bags, no camping. It was all hotels and martinis. All right. So we had a nice vehicle to carry our bag, and then um, we just got on our road bikes and water bottles and and rode all day. It's 49 days, and when you do that, it's amazing. It takes about, I'd say, five or six days before all the worries about work and family and politics, it just kind of washes away. All right. After five or six days, it's just eating, peddling, sleeping, laughing. And that's all you that's all you think about for the rep for the other 40 days. It's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_04 4:58

Oh, brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 4:59

So any trips this year? No, I'm pretty busy this year and writing and teaching a little bit and uh got my grandkids, so can't get away for a trip this year. So when is your new book coming out? Oh, it's gonna be a while. We've just we've just gotten a big contract, nice contract for it. So it'll probably be a year in the writing and editing and then you know six or eight months to put it together. So I think really early 2025, but we're pretty excited about it. We've been talking about it. My partner and I have been talking about it for at least 10 years. Oh wow, and working on it for five. And we've had a lot of rejections because the funny thing is, yes, but we know how to do this, and we've had tons of experience in industry and with executive education students doing projects and producing results, but teaching it and doing it is a lot different than trying to put it in a book. Sure. So it's been a big since I'm not really an academic, I'm a practitioner, industry guy. This is a it's a big deal for me. I know a lot of people write a lot of books, but for me, this is like the biggest, one of the biggest deals of my life. So we're pretty excited about it. We're actively working on it. I'll be in another year or so. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 6:05

But getting closer to tick that box. Um if it's 10 years down the line, you must have thought about it quite a lot, you know. And you know, every time I teach the students, I ask, well, where can we read more about this?

SPEAKER_01 6:18

It's pretty cool. And well, it if you want to get the latest, you have to talk to me. But there's a few articles and things like that because you know, because as you know, it's a kind of a new insight into the design of how we work.

SPEAKER_04 6:31

Yeah, so before we get into that, would you just um give us a sense of your background um before you know you you went into teaching, uh, etc., and and helping firms in your consultant role as well?

SPEAKER_01 6:44

Yeah, sure. I had a long career before I started teaching and started as actually a frontline worker in a machine shop running a metal lathe, doing what they call peacework, which you get paid by how fast you work. So I I did that till my mid-20s. As I like to say, I was too smart to go to college when I was 18. So I had to wait until I was married, had a kid, was at a mortgage and a full-time job. And then I decided to go to engineering school, you know, on the side. So it took me eight years. But I have a lot of hands-on work experience. And then I got into management, worked my way up through management. And I think the biggest stretch of my career was at Harley Davidson, where I ended up running the engine factory, and I also helped redesign product development and introduced a new engine. So I had a lot of different experience with mechanical manufacturing and also the kind of office and administrative pieces of product development, which product development runs the whole company, involves the whole company. But then then later I went to a smaller family-owned business and got global experience in uh China and Europe and uh Central America and the US with manufacturing and supply chain and all that. So I I had almost a 40-year career in industry, starting from the shop floor up to the sea level before I decided I had enough. So in my mid-50s, I'd I kind of jumped off. I was getting tired, and uh I just decided that I was gonna ride my motorcycle and drink beer. Take it easy for a while. And I called a few guys and said, Hey, you know, I'm off the big trade, but I'd like some project work. And some of the people I've worked with immediately pulled me into consulting and asked me to lecture at MIT, which turned into I have a small consulting company, Shift Gear Work Design. And I've been teaching at uh MIT for uh 15 years now. And at a through MIT, I think you found me. And I've been at AVT, I think since uh 2011 or 12.

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Correct, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

So I currently do about 25% uh teaching. Mostly I do work in the field with consulting. I've consulted all over the world. The thread that runs through it is I love to solve complex problems. That's what always got me a new job when I was working, is they they throw me into the worst running place and say, Don, you can fix this, go fix it. And as soon as it was running well, they'd put in someone who liked to run stuff and then they'd throw me into another chaotic place. So my whole career was was made on fixing problems. And when I started teaching, I worked with uh a professor at MIT, Nelson Repenning. I actually hired him at uh Harley Davidson to help us figure out a quality problem. And we hit it off, and we worked together now for over 25 years. Oh wow. He's kind of the robust, scientific, academic, clear thinking, uh, very critical person. And I'm the like junkyard dog fixing stuff. And we developed this partnership world. I would go fix stuff, and he'd say, Okay, Don, well, how did that work? What worked? How'd you do that? And I'd I'd say, like, oh, you're 25 things I did to fix it. And he'd like scratch his head and think about it, come back and the next day say, Ah, Don, I think only three things you did made any difference. The rest of it was just wasted motion. And so I'd go back and try it again, only using the three things. And so back and forth. For me, it's been um, he's added discipline and rigor to my methods. And I think through that partnership, we we developed a very unique method of how to get results really quickly. So I'm about uh again, 25% teaching, which I've been doing for 10 or 10 years or 15 years now, but mostly I'm an industrial guy and a fix it guy, and I spend most of my time when I work, spend most of my time actually in industry doing stuff. Oh, brilliant. That's about as short as I can get it. Yes, but brilliant.

SPEAKER_04 10:25

But just to get a sense of you know, the your many international jobs, etc. So, how many people were actually involved in your problem solving uh in those operations, whether it's the family-owned or the Howard Davidson um we've we've been all over the map.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

We've had uh one of the biggest banks in in uh Asia and Singapore, and who did a project across their whole organization, all their sites globally. Um, I had BP as a client for many years, and we worked globally, including the entire IT department, took me on and tried to transform IT. So I've worked in a lot of those kind of big financial or industrial organizations, all over from working at the front line with mechanical people doing stuff on oil rigs or or in factories, but mostly in the office area, technical areas, finance, human resources. And lately, and we've also done all the way down to startups with, you know, just a handful of people. So lately I've been involved in the biosciences. Oh wow. The I've been involved for over a decade in the Broad Institute, which was the first one to sequence the human genome. And now they're the they're probably they may not be the biggest, but they're certainly the leader in low-cost, high-quality sequencing. They're a nonprofit, they're connected to Harvard and MIT and the hospitals in the area here. And they've just been a leader in this for a decade. And when I got involved with them, they were ready to they have a science side, which which they have researchers which get grants to do all this research, and then they have the lab side, which actually gets the samples and does the sequencing, gets the data. In 2010 or 11, they were they're about ready to outsource that because they were so far behind, the costs were so high. And the leader uh was one of our EMBA students, and when she was done with the course, she called me and asked me if I would come over and help her. And within three years, they have people from all over the globe coming to visit them to see how they're how they're doing this with such high quality, such low costs, and such good turnarounds. So then they they've continued to be a leader for all these years. So I do that and uh lately it's been a startup with uh in the intersection with AI and drug discovery, people doing research on electronic devices that put electromagnetic waves in your body that shrink cancer cells, so all kinds of stuff. So I've been all over the map, but a lot of biosciences lately and big companies and down to you know half a dozen people in a startup. So it's it's been an amazing trip for me.

SPEAKER_04 12:45

When when people actually call you today, I mean, is it because they've got a big problem they don't know how to solve? Is it because they've heard about you know your your method, we will come to in in a in a minute, or you know, where where does it start?

SPEAKER_01 12:58

It's all started by word of mouth. We have a very small group, like we don't come in with a with a thousand little young MBAs and take over your company. You know, we come in and and talk to you, do a two or three day assessment, and then we help you get started, and then we kind of back away once you get the idea. So we're kind of a light touch, high impact group and small, and all of us in the group are all have all come from industry and doing this. Right. We hate to be salesmen, we hate usually we hate consultants, even though we are ones now, because we don't like to talk people into stuff. We just like to help show them. So we we we're not good at advertising and marketing. So everything we do is by word of mouth. And a lot of our work comes from from people who know us from teaching, and they'll call us and say, Yeah, I have this problem. Can you come help me work on it? Oh, brilliant.

SPEAKER_04 13:44

Do you then coach them on the side? I mean, when so once you introduce the the the principals, etc., do they do the do you support them in the in the process of implementing and following up and so forth?

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Yeah, we don't lead with training, we we lead on with solving problems. So the first thing is to this of also the one of the most enlightening things for the managers and leaders we talk to is we get them to clearly define what's the problem they're trying to solve. They have lots of solutions and they want to do, oh, let's train the salespeople and we need to do this. But you ask them, okay, but what's the problem? Can you quantify exactly the problem? Like sales are at 45%, they need to be at 65%. And a lot of times they're so good at solutions that their mind is full of solutions. They haven't really focused on exactly what the problem is. So that's the first thing we do. And then we lead by going and fixing that problem, picking off a small piece, demonstrating how to do it and showing them how to do it. And then once they get the idea, then they begin to take that solution to scale using the same effects. So it's mostly a demonstrating coach type of model. The amount of training we do is maybe the most we'll do one full day on site, more of an orientation, but then we're showing people and showing people um what the principles are and how to see them in their own work. So I remember when I was at Harley, we had a consultant come in and they wanted us to use like this word hydrunk chart. So I'm working in an engine factory, we're making all the parts for the engine and we're assembling them. And he comes in and he wants us to train us on this on this Japanese term high junker chart, which is just means line balance. And line balance is something that came out of this country, out of the early industry, but they turned it into a religion. No, you have to say hijunker chart, and you have to be trained on it for like three, four days. It's like, no, no, we know what a line balance is. You take the busiest station and you lower it down so all the stations are equal. So that really kind of made me angry. And you can imagine in a Harley Davidson factory 20 years ago, Honda was our biggest competitor. To go in on the on an assembly line with working class people with like men and women, black t-shirts and tattoos, all Harley riders, and tried to get them to speak Japanese is like, this is not gonna work. So we had to like translate like what can you see this in front of you? What it is and can you translate? And that's kind of what started me on. Like, people already know how to do good work, they just are not looking at it correctly. So that what led that's really what led to this approach. Very simple, straightforward, really teaching people how to see the work better. They already know how to fix problems, but they if they don't see the work correctly, then they can't see how to fix it. So it's mostly a coaching and and uh uh show model, and then starts off a little bit heavy, and then after maybe two, three months, we're just showing up once a month to see what are you doing? How can we here's what to try next. So then it's a very light touch.

SPEAKER_04 16:31

All right. We we're talking about uh dynamic uh work design. So when you go out and introduce you know uh dynamic work design, so how do you how do you actually describe it without going into uh a two-hour presentation of uh what it is?

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Actually, it took us a long time to figure out that little short elevator speech. I think as close as we can come is that there are actually two ways to design work in organizations. Dynamic work design is one, but no one knows about it, and it's certainly not well accepted. The other is well known and well accepted, and that's called static design. So if I ask someone in a big organization, can you draw me the organizational chart? Like who's your boss, who reports to you? Everyone can do that. It takes them like three minutes. That's a static piece because it goes on the wall, it doesn't really change. But if I ask them to describe how the work happens dynamically in the organization, so we get an idea and it runs all through the organization and becomes a some kind of physical or or digital product. Can you explain how that goes to the organization? Who does what? They just look at me like, what do you mean? No, we can't we can't do that, they're not used to it. So the problem is when people have dynamic problems, like there's a problem in the work, how the work is done, because people don't know these dynamic tools or the language, what they do is they substitute static tools. So they do a reorganization or change suppliers, do new software, and it really doesn't address the problem. So instead of stopping thinking about what is the problem, let's go look at the work dynamically and do something small to experiment and fix it. They they just do these big corporate problems. So we try to close that disconnect by getting people to go visit the work, see what's wrong, fix it, learn from it, and spread it that way. And of course, sometimes you need to change the organization with the the org chart. But when you when you give people these dynamic tools, now it's a better balance between, oh, this needs a structural change or this, there's a problem in the work, we have to go see what it is and fix it and learn from it. And it really starts to balance the organization. So it's bringing to light that whole dynamic when work starts moving, what happens? The org chart doesn't tell you what to do, but dynamic work design does tell you what to do and how to organize the work properly. Okay, as far as I can get it there.

SPEAKER_04 18:52

And is it for any time of uh organizations, if it's software develop development or whatever it might be? So some uh organizations are very product uh oriented, some are very, you know, if they produce a specific uh product, uh not a service, so then they might be totally different. When you talk about dynamic work design, does it does it matter whether it's one or the other uh type of organization or I'll tell you a story.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

I was called by Johns Hopkins Hospital, very famous hospital system in the US. They had a problem in their outpatient surgery suites. They had eight outpatient rooms, and the utilization of those surgical suites was around 50%. Right. So they asked us to come in and see what was wrong, why they weren't putting them to use more. When I go on site, I have to go see what's happening. And so I said, you know, I'd I'd like to actually go see a surgeon because there's all kinds of stuff that happens before and after, but I'd just like to go see what's happening in the room. So they put a gown, a mask, and gloves on me, and they they walk me into the middle of a surgery. And of course, the doctor who was doing the surgery knew that we were coming because they made a big thing about we need this help. And he stops, he stops working and he looks up at me and says, Oh, are you the guy that's gonna tell me how to do my surgery faster? And I said, No, sir, actually, because I had been watching for a few minutes, I said, No, sir, actually there's nothing wrong with the surgery, and I would never pretend to know to to have to know enough to show you how to use your knife better. And the surgery acts actually looks like a ballet, like everyone's here, everyone knows what to do. There's a language, is a it's just kind of like on TV, is a click, clack, scalpel, blah, blah, blah. It's everything's running smoothly. I said, I I can't fix what you're doing, but I can fix how the patient gets here on time, that the diagnosis is right, the paperwork is done, the right people are in the room, the right kid is in the room, the right drugs are in the room, the room is clean. All those things that happen to get you to this point to do your work around you, all those operational things, there are a ton of problems there that keep you from doing your operations more more operations than you'd like to do. And then he stopped and looked at me, he says, You can come into my surgical suite anytime. So it's it's not about the work people do, it's about how the work flows to them and how they connect with it. It's about the human system and how we wire people together so the work flows, so actually people can do the work they they're trained and want to do. Oh, brilliant.

SPEAKER_04 21:22

And you you've got the principles behind it that you've developed over the years and and you've kind of adapted some of the principles you've you've already were using on the the shop floor, I think you you call it. But but would you take us through the four principles of uh dynamic work design?

SPEAKER_01 21:38

Yeah, sure. They're pretty simple. We didn't just sit around a room and dream this up from a case study we read. This is more from the ground up, like this happened. Where does it fit? What kind of category is this problem? So we just kept trying to understand what we were seeing. And it took it took years and hundreds of examples, but we came up with a framework that captures, I can't think of Issue that it doesn't now capture that I've had over the past you know 10 or 15 years. So there are four one's about how we manage work, one's about how we design work, one's about how we fix work, and one's about how we optimize work. So the management is reconcile activity intent. And what that means is every organization has a target, a mission, a vision, a goal, whatever you want to call it. And they try to be super clear on what they're trying to get people to do. That's the intent. And on the other hand, they have a bunch of people, five, ten, fifty, hundred thousand. And the other thing they're trying to do is organize the activity of those humans in the most elegant manner to close the gap on those goals or meet the vision. So what we do is like, you need to be super clear on the on the goal and super clear on the activity set. And then we're gonna run an experiment, we're gonna actually do the planned activity, and then we're gonna reconcile it, just like when you reconcile your checkbook. We did the activity, did it reach the goal or not? Now, people usually, every manager does this to some degree, but usually they do it informally in their head, or the goals are not as clear as we'd like to be, or that conversation loop never goes to involve the people doing the work in the in the experiment of that planned activity. So then the learning is not there, and the activities are all over the place and usually disconnected. So when we when we go inside, we can really get that very tightly knit, and now there's they're learning and moving faster and seeing better results. So that's the first one about learning. The second one is about how we design work, and there are two elements to this. One is we focus on the human system, not on the department, the software system, the concept. We see work in particular as it moves from one person to another through the system. And those people are all connected by inputs and output. So my output is your input. And if they're not the same, they're not done at the right time, then there's going to be a disruption. So we horizontally along the path of the work, we organize that work, intellectual work really clearly. And it's it's hard of the intellectual work because you can't see it. Physical work, like in assembly lines, much easier. You can actually see the parts moving, but you can't see the parts moving, it's invisible. So we have techniques to make it visible. So that's one way you organize the flow of the work, and two, we organize it vertically, which is if I have a problem, who do I call? When do I call them? And how quickly does that person respond to help me? And then how do we learn from that? So we connect this. Um we call it a trigger. A trigger is like um like a fire alarm. You know what to do, right? If you see smoke or flame, right? You go pull the fire alarm. Everyone knows what to do with a fire alarm, and the fire department comes right away. So that's a trigger. And then the first thing the fire department does is not berate you for, well, Jesper, why did you call us? There's only smoke here, or you didn't. No, the first thing they do is they come to help. Then when the fire is out, then they come back and send the inspector and tell you what, you know, how you can prevent. So that's kind of what a trigger is. I need help. There's a predetermined uh number or trigger for me to call for help. So it's not a decision. I don't, I don't have to decide. If this happens, I call for help, someone shows up to help me. And now the management system is really connected to the work in real time. Toyota got this right with the and-on cord on the assembly line. Line stops, I pull the cord, line stops, someone comes over. But the same concept applies to intellectual work. So horizontally, vertically, we design the work, the work flows, and we're also connected to the system. Third one is um fix. This one's quite clever because we say that um we want to fix problems in a structured way, especially managers, but everyone's really trained to solve problems. We're all problem solvers. And the thing about our brain is when you see a problem, the first thing that happens is a solution comes to mind and you jump to it. But when you work in complex organizations, sometimes the solution that you have that your brain gives you is not based on all the facts, so it's the wrong solution. We structure that problem solving by writing the problem down, going and investigate it, examine it, and that really adds power to it. And the fourth one is regulate the flow of work. So this is how we optimize work. This one's so simple. If you just just think about if there are too many cars on the street in Copenhagen, what happens to the flow of traffic? Yes, but when you're trying to get home on Friday afternoon, too many cars, what happens? Well, you don't get anywhere. You don't get anywhere. So this when we flood the workplace with work and people have too much work to do, the work is not moving. It's moving from pile to pile to pile to pile. Instead of like an assembly line, once it gets in the system, we want it to keep moving. So we regulate the flow of work, not letting too much in, just like we regulate cars on the highways. We want to keep the flow fast and clean, and that keeps the organization really responsive. So, four things manage work, design work, uh, fix work, and optimize work. Those four things. And again, I haven't doing this for now a long time. I can't think of a problem, an operational problem that doesn't fit into one of those four categories.

SPEAKER_04 27:11

And and first time I heard you talk about dynamic work design and the principles, I was I was really intrigued because I completely understand, you know, you heard about lean six sigma on the you know, in a production line, etc. But but then, you know, I thought, wow, you know, in terms of intellectual work, as you mentioned, I mean, I've I've never heard any great principles, I would say, to to actually manage that. You do a lot about, you know, how does the team operate? Is it functional or dysfunctional, but getting really efficient, more or less. Is is there is there similar help or process or principles out there than then what are you actually proposing?

SPEAKER_01 27:51

Well, um, two things on that. One is you're absolutely right. There are instances of this kind of dynamic work design in the physical work. The most well-known one is a Toyota production system, obviously. They've very they focus on flow. They do all these, uh, they do all the things we're talking about, but in physical work, keep the work moving, don't build up the inventory, and that has transformed manufacturing around the globe. Interestingly enough, the word lean comes from MIT, not from Japan. So some MIT people went over and looked at what Toyota was doing and they called it lean. So they extracted a few elements, made it into rules that you follow and some kind of arc, you know, idealistic principles, and they made rules about it. And a lot of people have done the same thing with Toyota. There's agile, there's all kinds of good methods, but the basic mistake people make with these methods is when they turn them into rules, like agile, you have to have a coach, or you have to wear a hat, or you have to have certain job titles, or stand a certain way, or hold your tongue a certain way, you have to say hi junk a chart, all these kind of rules, but people don't understand why the thinking behind it. And that's what really puzzled me. And actually, this is how I got to this was um I got to a certain point at Harley running the engine factory where I was kind of out of ideas. And um, I ran into a guy, Hajem Oba from Toyota, one of the masters at Toyota, who was working in the US, and he agreed to come help me. And he coached me for about, I don't know, a year or 18 months, he and his people. And all of a sudden the lights went on. Like, he walked through my factory, Esper in 20 minutes and and saw problems that I had never seen. I'd been I'd been working there 10 years and leading the factory for five years. And I like I'm a shop floor guy, I know the shop floor, I know what's going on. Totally changed the way I saw it. So, what I wanted to figure out was how does he think? Where did all these rules come from? That's what I want to know because when you move to the office area, you can't see the work, and it's complex complex and many there. There are these these kind of um systems in physical work. The trick we use in intellectual work is we have to make the work visible. We have to give the invisible work a visible face. So we use post-it notes. We put the post-it notes on the wall, like, okay, yes, we have some goals. Please write them on the wall. I don't need a 50-page PowerPoint about the vision of ABT is like, what are your goals? Like more students, you know, higher quality graduation rates, you know, uh more income, more staff, more. What are they? And then what are you doing? Write it down. People think they know it, but when you've asked them to write it down simply, it almost brings them to tears sometimes. It's harder than you think. So making the work visible, and then when you see it on the wall, you can say, Oh my gosh, we have too much going on, or this doesn't fit here, or why are you doing that? So now all of the normal kind of problem-solving things come to light. And I think what we did was boil down the big reasons in people's thinking about why work is wrong. Like you're managing it wrong, you're designing it wrong, you're fixing it wrong, or you've got too much work in the system, those four basic ideas that can show up in your workplace in a unique way. So I think you can use those four ideas and explain the Toyota production system, or explain agile or lean, or because I think it's a it's a bigger intellectual umbrella, but we got there by doing just as you say, we tried to figure out how does this how do we do this in the office area with engineering and finance and strategy and sales and marketing where you can't see the work. And that was the problem we set out to solve starting in 2001.

SPEAKER_04 31:35

Excellent. And you've developed this um form where you basically, you know, uh diagnose the the problem and the current design that you've just mentioned, that target design and execution plan. And and I I know you're uh in favor of you know with the with the visual management, you know, but do you use other kind of tools you could say to show the the the problem or the design, etc. uh versus uh you know doing post-it notes or is there another system, you know, electronically or whatever we we? Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Uh no, I've I've stayed away from that because I think most people already have a lot of those. For example, at the Broad Institute doing uh genomic testing and sequencing, they have a system of Jira. They have, I mean, they are just covered in technology. They're they're they're doing working with you know three billion bits of information and something you can't even see. So it's all technology. But the the thing they're missing, and the thing I think a lot of people are missing, is the human conversation about what to look, what's the problem, what's the data we need, and where are we going? And so by putting it on post-it notes, what we're what we're really energizing is the human conversation. When we're standing in front of a board and looking at the same information and saying, geez, what do you think about that? Now that rich conversation can lead to all these other lead us to the right path to the technology. So at the Broad Institute, for example, they run it with post-it notes. But the post-it notes have a little barcode on it, if say if it's a project. So you can go up with your phone, hit the barcode, and look into JIRA and see all the technical details details you want. But the thing is, from a status point of view, are you ahead or behind? What problem do you have? Are you talking to the right people? All those things. That's what we're after. Biggest thing for me, the biggest insight for me that I learned from the Toyota guy was we work in a human system. And we have to connect the human people and let the computer systems help them instead of putting computers in to block people out or replace people. So, what we're trying to do is engage the human system in a structured way, in a structured conversation to first understand what the problem is, what we're trying to do, what's the experiment we're trying to run, what do we learn, then move to action. And of course, we can use all that technology to get there. The second question you didn't ask is you know, a lot of these organizations are spread across the globe, different cities, and they they can't stand around and look at post-it notes together. So at the Broad, for instance, um when COVID hit and they all went off site, they had to go totally on Zoom. They figured out between Zoom and Slack and all these other kinds of materials, they could get close to the conversation they were having together. It wasn't quite as good, but they could get close. Once they went back on site as they did this year, they got rid of all that because they found a mix of the Zoom and the on-site doesn't work. You're either on Zoom or you're in in person. So they went back to the post-it notes because even though they get pretty good at the electronic stuff, it's no substitute for you and I standing in the same room talking together. A human brain can reduce ambiguity in a second. Like if there's a question between you and I, if we talk for a minute or two, we can get clear on it. But try doing that on text or email, it takes 10 times as long. So that's what we're about. Really energize and and focus that human conversation on the right stuff to figure out what are we dealing with and do we all know what to do? Then let's go do it. Then we come back and check, did it work or not, and get that conversation going.

SPEAKER_04 35:17

Oh, brilliant. I can't wait to read the the book, uh, Don, once it uh comes out. And I'll I'll say to the to the listeners, um, we'll publish some uh links to the articles that Don has uh written or been involved in and on our website, and uh some of these uh needs to be purchased um as well. But we'll certainly produce uh some links for you so that you can uh read more about uh the principles and and the way uh Don Keith uh uh addresses uh problem uh solving, etc. So, Don, thank you very much for uh joining us here today, and um we look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen soon. Thank you, and hello to all my AT friends. Take it easy for a while.