Organizational Chaos

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems
Sponsored by

Achieving Organizational Health
Guest was Karen Martin

Related Podcast:

Copyright Business901


Karen Martin provides Lean transformation and
business performance improvement support to
industry, government, and the not-for-profit
sector. Karen’s broad understanding of
operations design and business management
stems from her experience building the
operational infrastructure for several rapid
growth start-up operations that each grew into
multi-billion dollar companies.

Rather than entering into client engagements with a pre-
determined “program” for improvement, Karen and her team of
industry experts tailor transformation approaches that fit their
clients’ unique needs. They generate rapid results, while
simultaneously developing deep problem solving and continuous
improvement capabilities at all levels of the organization. This
enables their clients to become self-sufficient as quickly as
possible. Whether you need assistance in undertaking a full
organization transformation, jump-start a stalled program, or
merely developing a core capability or two, Karen Martin &
Associates can help your company achieve its business
performance goals and profit through simplicity.

The Outstanding Organization website page has a downloadable
chapter, related webinars on the four key behaviors (Clarity,
Focus, Discipline, Engagement).

Karen has been on the Business901 Podcast before discussing
Holding Successful Kaizen Events. She co-authored The Kaizen
Event Planner: Achieving Rapid Improvement in Office, Service,
and Technical Environments and was a developer of a favorite
tool of mine, Metrics-Based Process Mapping: An Excel-Based
Solution.


Transcription of Podcast
Joe Dager: Welcome everyone, this is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business 901 podcast, with me today is Karen Martin. Karen
is a recognized thought leader, and is internationally known for
her lean work, and her widely acclaimed workshops on white
collar kaizen. She is co-author of the Kaizen event planner, and
with her most-recent book, The Outstanding Organization, she
has launched herself to another plateau. I would like to welcome
you Karen and congratulate you, and apologies for the pun, but
for an outstanding book.
Karen Martin: Thank you Joe, thanks so much for having me on
the podcast again, it's great to talk with you.
Joe: When I first started the book, I thought it was going to be
clarity, let's get focused book, but you surprised me.
Karen: How so?

Joe: You had the most practical undertone I had read in a long
time that was about doing, and the first half of the book had so
much meaning after I read the second half, that I had to re-read
the first half. I don't think I got it all the first time.
Karen: Isn't that interesting, because the concepts are so
surprisingly simple, yet there's a lot of depth to the whole topic
around clarity and what clarity really is, and how do we really
achieve it, and all the different elements. It is interesting that it
sounds so seemingly simple, yet there are a lot of layers to
everything. The discipline part was the easiest to write from a
prescriptive perspective because, it was much of a step one, step
two, step three. Clarity was tough to write about, because there
were so many different elements around clarity, and it's tough to
give general solutions to problems that are very specific in
organizations.


My goal in clarity was really to heighten awareness and offer a
few tips on what to do to get rid of ambiguity and gain greater
clarity, but it was really about just start paying attention to how
unclear things are and then take the appropriate action based on
that.
Joe: Usually I ask this at the end, but I'm interested in finding
out your answer to this. What is the single most important
message you would want readers to take from your book?
Karen: You know; I've been asked that actually a fair amount,
and what I quickly said the first time I was asked it in the middle
of an interview was if I had to pick one of my four children, which
is always difficult to do, I would say that it's focus. It's because
year and year out for 20-plus years of doing this work, I find the
thing that trips organizations up the most of all four of them is
they just have this prevailing organizational ADD, attention-deficit
disorder, where they keep jumping from project to project before
it's completed. That jumping around creates such a high degree
of chaos, and it drains the workforce of their psychic energy and
their creative potential to be able to contribute, that to me, if you
did nothing but focus on focus, you would move your organization
way far ahead.
Joe: You bring up my next question and lead into it perfectly.
Planning seems to be so taboo. Even the lean startup version of
PDCA is Build, Measure, and Learn. Planning, it just seems we're
dropping the planning from the cycle. Is there still room for
planning?

Karen: Oh, yes. I'm so glad you asked that question because a
lot of my content got on the cutting-room floor because I had far
more words than what my contract was for. One of the things I
went into in detail, that got cut, was my...I don't know...I'm
frustrated with what's going on out there around planning and
there are a lot of people that are playing into it. So I touch on


Gladwell's comments about planning, and I touch on other people
and their anti-planning, guys who are out there, and I think it's
just wrong, just wrong because I think what happens, and I
mentioned this very quickly in the book, is that people have
gotten the plan confused with the process of planning.
The criticisms I keep hearing about planning is that, "Well, the
world is so fluid, and you have to be flexible and agile." Of
course, you do but who said that once you get a plan in place,
you may not ever, under any circumstances, deviate from it. No
one said that and yet that's how organizations have behaved. So
once again, we throw the baby out with the bathwater on an
extremely robust and necessary part of performing well and
people say, "Ah, forget the plans. We can't plan," and that's just
wrong.
Joe: A well-thought-out plan is going to include the ability to
adapt.
Karen: Well right. That's what PDSA is or PDCA. That is about
adapting based upon current conditions. There's a lot going on
even in the Lean community that's smelling as though people
were saying, "Well, stop with your plans, stop with your to-do
list, and stop with this..." I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no. Don't stop
with it but use PDCA/PDSA as it was intended," which is being
very present with what your experiment's results are showing,
alter your hypothesis, go back experiment again, and keep on
adapting based on your new information.
Joe: Well, you brought up a good subject in the book, and it's
about discipline. Could you explain what you mean by discipline
as it relates to an organization?
Karen: Yes, thank you for asking that. So in a nutshell, it would
be standard work. So your standard work around decision
making, standard work around problem solving, standard work
around actual process improvement, and standard work in how

work gets done. So it's really getting far more consistent so you
can become more predictable and reduce the variation that we
ourselves create so we have the bandwidth to deal with the
variation. That's just the nature of the beast and part of being a
business. It's a methodical approach to how you schedule
meetings and how you put a team together. It's just being much
more thoughtful and methodical about how decisions are made,
and work is done.

Joe: Standard work always gets a bad rap, but to me, I think
that is the majority of everyone's days, including leaders.
Organizational health is about standard work that's really what
puts groceries on the table, and what you need to concentrate on
to insure what you do well and do what you are talking about, the
focus and the chaos and then...
Karen: Lack of standard work is what causes chaos, and it will
never not cause chaos if you don't have some degree of
standardization. Back to your point about standard work getting
a bad rap, I very much agree with you, and it's been getting an
increasingly high number of hits from people that do, again, not
understand what standard work is. I wish if people didn't
understand what it was they wouldn't talk about it because they
are confusing the people that are just learning about standard
work and creating some negativity around it. That's just not
really very helpful. So here's my take on it. Standard work; over
standardization is as dangerous as under standardization. And
what a lot of newbies to lean that got trained and got certificates
and everything when out there and thought that standard work
was the be all end all well it's not. So you have to have flexibility
even within standard work to handle different conditions in
different scenarios, but you can still standardize those different
scenarios. We could talk about standard work for the whole
podcast.


Joe: You talk about discipline, but you talk about in a frame of
organizational versus people because discipline is not about
people it is about the organization. It is the discipline in the
organization, and that is what drives the chaos out of it.
Karen: Right, actually all four of the conditions I talk about are
dealt with at an organizational level understanding that the
organization is a group of people. So it does start at an individual
level, but it's more setting the system in place and the
organizational psyche in place to enable individuals to behave the
way they need to in order to get the organization to behave as it
needs to as a whole. So it's definitely a holistic thing that I'm
working for.
Joe: Could you name the four and briefly describe them?
Karen: Sure, the first one is clarity, and I coach that is the
toughest to get and it's clarity in thought word and deed. It's
clarity around what an organization's mission is, it's clarity
around what the priorities are for the year, what the goals are for
the year, making sure everyone understands them clearly, what
they are, clarity in language so that when you have people sitting
in a room together they are actually speaking the same language,
and you don't have; it's like having someone who speaks French
only, sitting there with someone who speaks Spanish only, and
no wonder we don't communicate well. It's clarity in roles and
responsibilities, who does what. Who exactly do you go to if you
need to get input on blah, blah, blah in those kinds of things?
So focus. Focus is sticking to a plan of action until there are very
compelling reasons not to. So it's everything from prioritizing
projects and improvement priorities so that in getting consensus
around us. So it's not about prioritizing in one person's head. It's
organization-wide consensus so that it's not as tempting to be
distracted when new things come along, and you get people


moving together to completion and getting things done well
before they move on. So that's focus.

Discipline we talked about a little bit already so I would just add
that disciplined problem solving is probably the ripest area I see.
From most organizations, they need to have methodology that
everyone in the organization uses so that you get consistent
critical thinking around, and you eliminate or at least reduce the
possibility of Band-Aids and the core solutions not really being the
solutions because the problem was incurred to begin with and
there was no methodology for achieving that.
And the last is the one that doesn't belong with the others, but
it's a result of the others, and that's engagement. So this deep
implies engagement where they are actively involved in all the
decisions that are being made not strategic decisions but daily
decisions. They are using their creative potential much of the
time versus the opposite that usually happens. And they are the
ones that are solving problems at a tactical level versus; those
quote solutions being dictated to the front lines, from managers
who really don't do the work.
The other thing about engagement that's critical is to get people
looking at the whole organization holistically, allows all the
inter-departmental tension that exists to melt away. I see it over
and over and over, and it's a beautiful thing when it happens.
Joe: Well, just to mention the part on engagement, when I
looked at the book, I couldn't wait to get to that section because
I thought, here's where Karen and I are going to really butt
heads.

We're going to have some different opinions here, and I am not
sure that I've read a better forty pages on engagement.


Karen: Thank you Joe.
Joe: I know you spoke at the human-resource conference in
Atlanta. Have you received feedback, from human-resource
people on that chapter yet?
Karen: I have, not from that chapter in the book. But I did from
my talk, which was based on the book. The HR folks that were in
the audience loved what I had to say, very much believe I was
spot on, but they don't feel they have the ability to affect change
within their organizations. So I may be developing a new mission.
My new mission may be to get HR departments positioned within
organizations in a more effective way than they currently are. So
that they can regain some of the leverage, that they used to have
decades ago and to play that significant role in an operational
performance improvement and business performance
improvement overall.
Somehow they've gotten relegated to being order takers and
transaction based people about benefit plans, and performance
reviews, and hiring and firing. Somehow they've been left out of
the improvement loop in a not so helpful way.
Joe: One of the things that really caught my eye is because I
use Zappos and Zingerman as a couple of companies, when I talk
about building culture and people. They go through great strides
on who they hire.

That's root cause just about, isn't it?
Karen: Yeah, I think it's really tempting, and I've been in the
hiring mode a lot. It's common to refer to people in a
disrespectful way as a quote warm body. But what I mean by that
is it's very tempting to get a warm body in the door, because
you've got a need that you need to fill, and not take your time to


make sure it's a good match. And that person comes into the
organization, as full complement, of the thought process that's in
place that you need for the organization. It's tempting to try to,
get the numbers filled.
Joe: When you talk about the engagement, you bring pair
programming into it. Briefly describe pair programming. But then,
can that practice be done outside of software?
Karen: In fact, the reason why I put it in the book was that I've
been applying it in almost every industry there is, and it's so
successful. So pair programming, for the listeners that may not
know about it, it started in software development. It's taking two
developers sitting side by side with one keyboard and one
monitor. One person's designated as the driver, the other
person's designated as the observer or the navigator. The driver
is actually coding while the other person is watching it, looking
ahead, looking for problems, and they are together actively
problem solving real time. It's the two minds are better than one
philosophy.

The problem most organizations have with it is at first glance it
feels like your doubling your labor expense. But you're not, not
even close. You're actually reducing expenses, because when you
count the number of labor that goes into rework and delays and
delivering and all the different things that happen when you got
one-person writing code, it's a significant benefit to pair
programmers together.
Joe: Does that help, bring more people together?

Because once you have two, isn't it easier to engage four?
Karen: Well, it's interesting. I never tried it with three or four
people together, because I do think; you get too many cooks in


the kitchen. What's being done sometime, when I suggest
pairing, isn't really what's meant by pairing. It's not taking
someone with a very well developed skill set, pairing them with
someone with a very undeveloped skill set. That's not the primary
use of pairing. Although you can use it that way to build skill sets,
and you do develop skill sets when you pair any two people
together. But that's not its primary purpose; its purpose is to
problem solve real time, catch errors as they're occurring and get
a more robust product out as a result.
So the people that are working together get this greater sense of
confidence in their own ability, cause their producing better work
and their learning as they go and their learning problem-solving
skills. You're getting a significant long-term benefit in developing
the work force that way. Their fully engaged, they can't be
disengaged when they're in a pair.

Joe: When we talk about current employees and the current
organization is this one way of creating and introducing
engagement to them?

Karen: By the pairing?
Joe: Yes.
Karen: I'm not sure that I use it as my primary or my first
approach to engagement. Actually kaizen events are usually what
I turn to show how deeply engaged they can get the workforce
and how excited people get, around work and an improvement as
a result of a kaizen event participation. I actually always turn to
pair because of a quality problem, and the engagement part of it
happens to be a side benefit. But it's very tactical to solve a
quality problem. So for example, in a hospital setting I was
working with, these nurses in doing medication reconciliation at
discharge. High stakes, high-risk process, often done poorly, and
people can die as a result of it, so it's a pretty big deal. Nurses
were in my class; they were always doing this alone, and it's a

very complex process to look at all the meds someone came into
the hospital on, all the ones they had while they were in the
hospital and what the physician or physicians are suggesting
they're on, when they leave the hospital. So it's a complex
process. First of all, it's complex so one person has a hard time
seeing everything and getting it done well.
But then there were always these interruptions and by pairing
two people together and putting them in a cone of silence, as I
call it, then they're able to have two eyes on a complex task, and
they are able to do it without interruption. The quality of that task
then goes through the roof. That's just one example. I've used it
in financial services; I've used it in engineering design, for
different pieces of a process, and it's wildly successful.
Joe: Well you have hosted and facilitated as many kaizen events
as anyone, I would imagine, and they seem to have a bad rap at
the moment. Are they needed? Are they a good way to introduce
something?
Karen: Yes. The bad rap, just like the bad rap for planning, I
think a lot people give things a bad rap when they haven't really
experienced, what's good about it. So the bad rap comes first
from people who have never experienced a good kaizen event,
and also from those who have grown up with a very pure view of
Toyota Production Systems. And Toyota does use them, but they
don't use them extensively, because they've got a culture that
can solve problems and get rapid results in another way.
Organizations that aren't Toyota, and didn't grow up with the
Toyota thinking and management style are starting from a deficit
position. And so kaizen events to me are first a way to shape
behavior.

Yes, you get rapid results. I consider the shaping behavior as a
bigger benefit to kaizen events than the rapid results. I just don't


understand the nay saying that goes on around kaizen events
because they are wildly effective.

I guess one thing I will say about the nay saying, one thing that
people are correct about, is if organizations become what I call
addicted to kaizen events, where they only make improvements
during a kaizen event? Well, that's of course just wrong.

You want to build daily improvement into the culture. But that's
not what I use kaizen events for. I use them to build daily skill
sets, so the organizations can perform that way in the years to
come, without having kaizen events. It's to teach those
behaviors.
Joe: So I could use kaizen events to get out of organizational
chaos.

Karen: Absolutely. Actually, every kaizen event I have ever
facilitated helps reduce chaos. It may be a very local level, but it
absolutely reduces chaos.

Joe: You mention a lot of lean terms, Toyota, and PDSA in your
book, but do I need to be a Lean company to benefit from the
book?
K. S.: No, no. In fact, if you're a Six Sigma kind of company,
then you could easily replace PDSA with DMAIC, although there
are certainly some benefits to PDSA and PDCA in that they're
cyclical and DMAIC is linear. But we won't go into that.
Joe: No showing of partiality here.

Karen: No, no, no. There are good reasons for my partiality, but
that's another podcast. But you don't even have to be a Six
Sigma company. You could be a company that doesn't have a
formal methodology that you're using, and you're just using
common sense to make improvements. The challenge is making
improvement on a cracked foundation. Businesses are trying to

do that, and it's why improvement isn't any more successful than
it is. So you have to rebuild that foundation, seal up those cracks
by infusing greater clarity, focus discipline and engagement in the
organization. And then any improvement will be far, far, far more
successful.
Joe: Well, I was quite surprised with your Blue Angel ending; I
was more surprised when I got to the appendix, the reference to
the Socratic questioning and Richard Paul because I spent about
two years of my life in a deep dive studying his work and other
related work about it. I thought it was a very interesting twist to
bring that in at the end. Why did you do it?
Karen: The questions are actually a sidearm of the coaching
piece that I talk about in the engagement section, because
coaching is the ability...and actually during discipline as
well...coaching is the necessary step in order to build the
discipline process for problem solving into an organization. You
can't just learn it by reading a book, people need to be coached
by someone who knows the process; it also is a way to get deep
engagement, by having a coach and teaching people a skill set.
The coaching methodology that I learned had a lot of appreciative
inquiry as part of it, so that you could break a coach's habit, and
I was absolutely one of these people, type A personality; I've got
the answer, when I was an employer in my early career, I
absolutely was guilty of telling my employees what to do.
Fortunately, I had some good mentors who told me, no-no-no,
you need to help develop them, and you don't do that by telling
them what to do. What I found in teaching coaches, for example,
with A3 problem solving, the way to keep someone from telling
people what to do, is to teach them how to ask better questions,
and to use questions as a teaching methodology.
Not questions just for the questions' sake, but questions that help
the person realize that they are maybe on the wrong path, or

they maybe want to look over here. When I got into the
questions, that's how I bumped into Richard Paul, I actually had
never heard of him until I did this book. That's fascinating that
you studied him.
Joe: Karen, why don't you just expand a bit without giving the
ending of the book away, about the Blue Angels?

Karen: I looked for organizations outside of business that I felt
were outstanding, because to be frank, I had a very difficult time
finding a large number of businesses that I considered to be
outstanding based on my definition. I looked to the arts, and
sports, and military, and the Blue Angles just jumped out at me
as being the organization in my world view that is just
consistently outstanding. I found myself a Blue Angel pilot and
started getting a deep dive into their world, and he spent so
much time with me; he was very generous in helping me
understand exactly why they're so outstanding. Sure enough,
they have this impeccable clarity about their show, and what
they're going to be doing every second of that show, and they
have clarity around their mission, and all of that.
They're extremely focused, there is probably no other
organization as focused. I've heard that as a team maintains and
demands the level of focus that they do from their pre-show and
post-show briefings where no one is allowed in and how they go
about this whole routine they've got to stay focused on the show
and then dissecting it afterwards. Then the disciplined approach
they have towards training, there's nothing like it.

They are very, very engaged, of course, is necessary in what they
do. I am bit of a Blue Angel's fan. Not a bit, I'm a huge fan of
what they do.

Joe: Is there something that you would like to add that maybe I
did not ask?


Karen: I think one thing it's important for every listener to
understand is that while we're talking about organizational
performance and organizational clarity, organizational focus all
starts at individual level and to a department level or team group
level actually, department level, and then division level. So it
doesn't have to be the CEO of the organization to clear we're
going to become more outstanding than we are and this is how
we are going to do it. It doesn't have to be a top-down driven
approach.
It could be anybody who has any stake in organization starting at
their local level. Even if it's just an employee who doesn't have an
employee's reporting to them, asking questions to clarify and
drawing people's attention to the fact that having a little bit of
ADD going on that type of thing.
Supervisors are managers, or in an ideal place to start driving
these principles into their departments and their work teams. And
then, of course, further up the organization you go the greater
the gains will be but it all starts one step at a time. Everyone can
play a role in instilling clarity, focus, discipline, and engagement
in their organization.
Joe: What is upcoming on your agenda?
Karen: I have my next book already in mind, and it is an off
shoot of this book. I haven't really started sketching it out in
detail yet, because I am busy promoting this book and frankly,
need to take a bit of a rest. I actually have another book in the
works as well that will be more of a how-to book with Productivity
Press.
Joe: How can someone contact you?

Karen: My web site is KSMartin.com; that's S as is Sue,
KSMartin.com, you can find all the different ways to connect with
me on social media straight from the home page on my website.

Joe: Is there a book website?
Karen: It's actually part of my website, so it's
KSMartin.com/the-outstanding-organization; you can click right
on the home page and get straight to the book page.
Joe: I would like to thank you very much Karen; I think it was
an outstanding broadcast.
Joe: I look forward to hearing more about what you're up to.

Karen: Thanks Joe, it was really nice talking with you again,
thank you very much.



Joseph T. Dager
Business901
Phone: 260-918-0438
Skype: Biz901
Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Website: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in
bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty
years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies
it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
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