บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ Matt Kroll on Structured Problem Solving That Scales

so, you know, after 16, maybe 17 years of really doing process improvement, helping different parts of the organizations that I worked for, find ways to streamline their process, deliver higher quality for their customers, and really organize their their employees, right, and develop their employees to do those things. I just, that was my passion. was like, this is all I'm ever gonna do. I don't really want to take any other path there is in the corporate space. I just wanna keep doing this. And I felt like I could do it with a bit more freedom externally, and also bring it to the bid market in a way that I don't believe anyone. really has and serve the mid-market specifically with those skills. And so I left my company and I founded Chalmers Street Consulting and we've largely been doing that. We have some larger customers and some smaller customers, but our kind of main base is those mid-market companies that are trying to scale up, that are trying to grow. that want to be competitive are hungry and they realize that they have to find a different way to organize their work and develop their employees to be successful. Keith Norris (04:20) Interesting. I love hearing about the journey that people have gone on from this, from the start to, you know, we're working essentially in consulting. ⁓ I'm curious if you remember back to some of like the individual jobs that you had and maybe job titles or. Matt (04:29) Hmm. Keith Norris (04:36) you know, how you progress through there. Because I feel like some of the insights that people who are just getting a taste of this thing that we call continuous improvement, sometimes there's a little bit of this like, where is this gonna take me? Like, what kind of jobs does this touch on? So I'm curious if you might tell us a little bit about maybe some of the jobs you had along the way. Matt (04:53) You know, mean, so a story there, I'm still friends with him today, but our our plant manager kind of early, like my second, I would say my second job inside of of Motorola. He was offering me a little bit of a different path and I was a black belt. I'd earned my black belt and I wanted to keep doing transformative projects. That's what I wanted. And he's like, yeah, they get you a lot of visibility. You know, they're they're engaging and they're different. I understand why you do that. But Matt, if you stay on this path, you may get stuck in that kind of role for the rest of your life. And I thought to myself, huh, well, maybe I will. But that doesn't sound so bad to me. Like, I like this. And and it is, you know, it does. Keith Norris (05:29) you Matt (05:39) You don't quite climb the corporate ladder the same way in this space, right? I don't know how does the say it. kind of top out. You can top out a little bit, although I think that's changed too. But no, from early on, I started as an industrial engineer. stop watching clipboard. and very traditional kind of like time studies and layouts and those sorts of things. And I just, kept coming back to, like this idea of improvement and I like the idea of helping people improve. People that want it, know, people that are like, no, I'm good with having somebody else come in, look over my shoulder a little bit, tell me what we're doing right, tell me what we're doing wrong, give me some data to work off of and then and then use that to drive action, right? And that's the other piece that I found very important early in my career. I saw some folks that, you know, they would do some designs and then get promoted or move off to another role and not actually see that analysis and design come to fruition. I always tried to stay through to the very end because as any kind of change agent or engineer, What you imagine in your mind is going to work, and even when you have the data to back you up, and maybe even have a couple pilots to back you up, it's not gonna quite work the way you thought. And that's extremely valuable learning. I just remember a simple, stupid one. Like, I redesigned a work area, and we're moving everything around, and the maintenance guy goes, Matt, where's the fire extinguisher supposed to go? And I'm like, what do you mean? Keith Norris (07:12) hahaha Matt (07:14) And he's like, that column where you're now bumping a bench up next to has a fire extinguisher on it. And so we've got to move that. Where's that going to go? It's nowhere on the drawing. And I'm like, crap. And we maximized space inside of this facility. And I had left out a component because when I was out there measuring and everything, I was looking at the benches and the carts and all these other things. I forgot about the dang fire those little learnings help you know how important it is to pay attention to detail and also just how to react in the moment because some of this stuff is going to happen and you better be ready to go, okay, right? Like it's not the maintenance person's problem. It's my problem to go figure out because I did the design. Keith Norris (07:53) That's interesting. Yeah. I think there's some good lessons in project management there. One that I always like is you got to leave something for the thing to go wrong, because there's always something to go wrong. Make it part of the plan. And then when it comes up, you're like, OK. I didn't know what it was going to be, but that was it. Matt (08:07) Yeah, like the, have known unknowns and you have unknown unknowns, right? And you can kind of do your risk mitigation and come up with the known unknowns, right? You don't know how they're gonna quite play out, but you know something's gonna happen. It's those straight up, gosh, I didn't know that this was gonna occur. And you better still have a little bit of wiggle room there. to manage through that and just have the integrity frankly to manage through that as well. Keith Norris (08:31) Yeah. So this thing that we call continuous improvement, there's lots of different... ways that this shows up inside companies,

particularly in big companies. And I'll be really interested to hear your insights on working with, as you described, the mid-market. But some people are, let's say, like lean purist, or some people are Six Sigma, and you've got visual management, and you've got project management, and PMO, and change management. There's so many different layers and facets of this thing that fit under this. continuous improvement umbrella. I'm curious if you have like a perspective on it or like a way of describing this thing that you do maybe to some of your clients or just somebody that you're telling what you do at an event or party. Matt (09:19) Yeah, well, you know, the simple answer is I work with companies that are trying to grow and scale to streamline so they don't have to just straight up add a whole bunch of labor or disappoint their clients, their customers. But that's kind of broad, right? I think you're looking for something more specific and maybe a little technical. And You know, I look at continuous improvements as a framework for me to look at the business system and understand what's missing, right, from the business system. I do look at it as a problems-focused discipline. I always talk about things in terms of problems or opportunities, right, but I tend to frame everything as a problem because I'm going to look at that company's business system, right? And there's lots of different ways you can organize a business system. But I can look at them all through this framework of how have you established roles and responsibilities? what, you know, is that, is it clear who is supposed to do what? How have you organized teams? I look at organizations as, teams of teams, right? Different levels of teams. Like human beings, we're really good in groups of like 10, but once you start to get to groups of 100, you get a little bit of factions and so on. So how are you managing those teams such that they're governing themselves, they have feedback mechanisms around them, they can self-improve? And then how do you manage your workflow, right? And that's all the more mechanics of things. Like do I have procedures written? Do I have accurate tracking of the material in and out of inventory and WIP and to finish goods? Do I capture data on the quality of my processes? And then if I'm doing that, how do I use it as a feedback mechanism? What do I use to improve, or sorry, understand, identify problems, right, back to problems. Keith Norris (11:18) Yeah. Matt (11:26) such that I can do solving and do process improvement, right? And so I look in those places, roles and responsibilities, governance, flow, review, and then ongoing process improvement. Like I look to see how many process improvement projects do you do in a given month, quarter, year, you know, and how many different people are you engaging in those things? Are you doing it on a continuous basis, right? That's the whole idea. Keith Norris (11:30) Yeah. Matt (11:52) So that's my approach and I can look at any organization that way. I can look at manufacturers, I can look at IT service providers, I can look at financial service providers, call centers, you name it, I can use that same framework and on any size company, large or small. Keith Norris (12:10) Yeah, one of the terms that I'm fond of is this idea of structured problem solving. It sounds to me like you've got a formula that you like to apply for structured problem solving. I know sometimes people will have discussions of like DMAIC versus PDCA versus other methods. Do you have a particular methodology that you're fond of for your structured problem solving? Matt (12:25) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I learned DMAIC and so that's always my go-to. Like I learned that straight out of school, like I learned DMAIC and I'm like, this is perfect. It organizes all of my tools. And so that's my go-to. But I would say, and I would say actually particularly working in the mid-market that I find PDCA very powerful. And here's the why on that. And actually I talked about this in, in one of our CI mastermind sessions just very recently, right? Because they were asking me, what's the difference between these two? And like you're saying, there's more than just those two, but I think those are the workhorses. And I think PDCA is good because of that iterative see, try, reflect, standardized, or, try again, right? And you go back and you do that multiple times until you get to your ultimate improvement. And then we teach to do that inside of an A3, if you're not familiar, you it's like a big sheet of paper and you put that flow of plan, do, check, act, you know, on that sheet of paper so you can kind of see how it all comes together. But there's an iterative nature to it. And typically it's a little more focused on the doing and checking, or at least that's where the most learning comes from. Whereas DMAIC, Define Measure, Analyze and Prove Control, there's a lot of emphasis on the Define and Measure, a ton of it. I look at it as more traditional operations research, right? I'm gonna spend more time establishing Keith Norris (13:45) Mm-hmm. Matt (14:04) measurement system, gauging whether that measurement system is telling me reality, organizing the data in different visual ways to try and understand it. I'm probably going to spend just as much time in the GEMBA as I might do in PDCA, but I'm going spend a lot more time collecting and understanding data so that defined measure analyzer I'm going spend a lot of time in. And then I should be educated enough at that point to go and improve. and be pretty confident on my solutions and then go into control. So to me, it's the front end that's kind of different between those two. And I think of DMAIC as having a heavier emphasis on traditional operations research methods to gain a deep understanding of cause and effect. Keith Norris (14:45) Definitely the X's and the Y's Matt (14:48) Yes, yes, exactly. Yep, yeah, that's exactly right. Keith Norris (14:50) So I'm

curious, you use the word GEMBA, which I'm a big fan of. And one thing that I think is interesting about this discipline. continuous improvement lean is a lot of times lean and Toyota production system people think of this as a manufacturing system, but it's relevant to so many other industries. I know you've had some exposure to other industries. Maybe there's some examples of time, you know, like the Gemba. What does the Gemba look like if you're not in a factory with an assembly line? What are some of these other industries where going to the Gemba might mean something a little different than than, you know, just standing in a factory floor? Matt (15:25) No, it's tough, it's tough. So I spent six years, this is while I still in the corporate world, working for a company at the time, it was called Navtech, and they made digital maps, and they still make digital maps today. And the Gemba was three places. It was in the software development, the software engineers coding, was a Gemba. It was what we called our production centers where we took video data from the field and we input it into a huge geographic database, really cool stuff. And then it was in the field, it was in a 130 countries, maybe 140 countries where we had geographers driving, collecting video data, gathering local maps, annotating them, and so on. So those were our three gembas. I guess maybe the easiest one to describe, the production center, that's a matter of doing some screen reportings and observing how people are using the tool and interacting with different tools that they need, interacting with the data, interacting with the file structure to see where some of the challenges in coding that data, where those challenges existed. The field was a bit harder, mostly because it was just expensive, right? Like I had a small team and we could get on planes and go out and work with folks in the field offices. But you couldn't do it every week, right? You couldn't do it as much as you wanted. So guess what? You're gonna use more interviewing techniques and you're not gonna get into the Gemba quite as much. And so that Gemba time is super valuable. But same thing, we'd get in the car, do ride-alongs. We would look at some of the output too that they would have. So they would capture notes and things like that in the field until we'd look at those things too to understand their processes and how they interacted with the production centers. And then on the software side, you know, we were, or they are an agile company. I assume you're familiar with like agile methodology that's used in software development. And so we didn't spend as much time there, but we did participate like in their release train. Some of the structures that agile has, they would invite us to, because we typically brought a lot of tools that were useful in the agile space. And so that was kind of our closest to getting to the Gemba. And so there's, it, you know, if you're in a call center, is getting into the, the

call center, sitting next to an agent, listening, like we've done a lot of that, like where you listen, you get an earpiece and you listen into the calls. We did financial services and again, sitting next to somebody and watching them do their work. having them send you video and screenshots of what they're doing. There's always ways to do it. You have to think a little bit about it. You have to be creative to find those ways, but there's always ways to do it. Keith Norris (18:16) Yeah, that's interesting. like the screen capture in the video. think a lot of work nowadays is done on screens and computers. so, yeah. Matt (18:24) Well, and we've even found to, we'll set up cameras. We've used security footage. So I do like, know, I've been doing this long enough that I can admit that I would go out and stand behind somebody with a stopwatch. And we do still, we still do that today for sure. But there are other ways to collect that data. And what's nice is I always remember, you know, trying to quickly write down. you know, what's going on? Like, what am I seeing? And you look down to right and you've already missed something when you look up again, you know, and you're like, dang it. And you're like, is this supposed to be like this or do I, am I just not sure what I'm It's sort of the reality of doing observation is that when you look down to right, you're going to miss something. And so I enjoy being able to actually record and then go back and look at it again and then go back and look at it again. And, and you know, and so we do, Keith Norris (18:55) Hahaha. ⁓ yeah Matt (19:16) quite a bit of that because it's so valuable today. And I've even seen now, you know, where you can start to get, you know, a wrist device that will record what's going on. You know, there's so much great technology now for doing observation. And we're trying to explore and research that so we're better at it. Because it is so crucial, right? That's where the work is happening. That's where the value added is occurring. Got to get to that level to do your solving. Keith Norris (19:43) So on this topic of identifying problems, starting with good problem identification, are there some examples of maybe a client that you worked with where there was a particular problem? I'm kind of curious, how did they identify that problem? Matt (19:57) Yeah, so there's probably a few different ways to answer it. And let me kind of organize. The first one is, you know, I'm a consultant. I have a consulting company. People usually bring us symptoms. Sometimes they know that it's a symptom. Sometimes they don't. People bring us symptoms of what they're experiencing. you know, a problem, a deep problem is painful. We're missing our on time delivery and people are complaining. We're shipping defects. Those problems, I guess, are easy to identify in a way, because you're at the symptom, the top level symptom level. Yeah, yeah, and so then our job is to dive in and get into cause. the, you know, maybe, I don't wanna say more valuable, but it's certainly equally important. Keith Norris (20:37) symptom. Matt (20:49) to recognize that mature organizations walk past problems every day. They're used to, yeah, yeah, they're used to seeing them. So they become part of the wallpaper, right? They're little piece of paint, the chip that's missing that's just there, and nobody sees it as a problem anymore because it's always been there. Keith Norris (20:56) Ooh, that's interesting. Matt (21:13) Right, like isn't that the classic line? We've always done it that way, right? It's always been there, it's always been like this. And for that, we encourage waste walks. So waste walk is where you've got the eight wastes and you got a sheet of paper with the eight wastes written on it and you specifically look for them, right? It's not like passive, like let me see if I see something. There's defects in your process, I guarantee it, go find it. There's waiting in your process. I guarantee it, go find it, right? So we, the way we're wired on the practitioner side is we always assume something's messed up. Like it's not a matter, like when someone says, yeah, no, it's running great. I'm like, nothing runs great, come on. Be honest. So it is the formal methods. So waste walks is a big one for us that we encourage. Keith Norris (21:46) Hahaha Yeah. So true. Matt (22:01) And I would say leader standard work is another one. If you can get your supervisors to note down what they're seeing during the day and frankly, make sure one of their activities during let's say the week at least is a waist walk, you start to uncover those problems that everyone's walking past. And I think the reason people walk past them, is also just maybe some of those problems aren't the biggest priority right now, you know? But over time, those things build up and they become kind of a debt, an anchor holding you back from excellence and they become a kind of like almost like a validation of mediocrity, right? It's like, well, know, they... Keith Norris (22:44) and Matt (22:46) The second shift always misplaces where the drills go. So why do I care if I put it back in the right spot, right? And it's only a minute or two that I take looking for it every day. So what's the big deal, right? But when you start talking about multiple times a day and multiple days a year, that adds up to a huge cost, an unnecessary cost in serving the client. So you gotta have formal methods that expose and give an opportunity to provide visibility to problems. People actually have to learn how to search for them. Keith Norris (23:20) It sounds like you mentioned things like leader standard work and the waste walks. When you go into a new organization, I would assume that, you know, people come in all different shapes and sizes with different levels of training or, or, you know, pre-information. What are some things that you might ask or questions to like assess someone's maturity? Like, are they doing

this? Are they doing that? What are some of the things that might help you orient to where someone would be in their journey? Matt (23:32) Mm-hmm. I always go back and forth on the value of maturity assessments. So, so we've done them. There's different good ones out there. think American manufacturing, excellent society, something like that. Have a, have a, have a nice maturity model. ASQ of course has maturity models. And so that, that certainly is a formal way of doing that. And we, know, Chalmers street does. operational evaluations. But I always wonder, you know, it's not about the valuation, it's about what you want to do with it, right? So that's kind of a side and maybe that's a little bit off tangent from the answer you're looking for, but I think it's important. So if I'm just trying to size them up, so frankly, so that I can put together what I think they need, right? That's the... value of the evaluation is put together something that they need. I'm walking the floor and looking for the involvement of their supervisors. Are they in their cubes? Are they out working with people? I'm looking at placement of things. Is stuff marked? Are... different working areas clearly defined, our pathways defined, is there garbage on the floor? mean, you'd be surprised. Or maybe you wouldn't, I don't know. And I always look too, do people walk past it or do they pick it up? You know what I mean? And you see both. I've seen great environments where everyone's always making sure they pick up stuff. But I look for those things. And then I look for kind of part of visuals. Is there information on the floor that's useful to the employees? Certainly things like safety information, but also production information. How was our quality yesterday? Did we hit our output numbers? Are we communicating with the floor and treating them like capable problem solving humans, or does it look like they're all kind of widgets in a big machine? Come in, don't ask me a lot of questions, and just go do your job, right? And there's no floor management, right? That would be on the poorer side, let's say, of an evaluation or a first impression on their continuous improvement. Keith Norris (25:42) Yeah. Yeah. I think that is kind of an interesting... know, tension you might say. Sometimes when people see like, we're gonna come in and we're gonna improve processes and we're gonna standardize and we're do these things, I think there's kind of a feeling that people have like, they're gonna start treating us like robots when really I know and you know that like that's completely the opposite of what we're intending. But how have you seen like the way these improvements get presented, you know, sync or float based on how it's presented? Matt (26:18) Yeah. Yeah. That's, know, whether you're doing plan, do, check, act or define, measure, analyze, improve, control, who's your team? Who's working with you to do the improvements? Or is it just the production leader or the plant manager on high coming down and saying thou shalt do this? Right. Like that's a problem when someone in there has all the answers. because maybe they feel like they have to. I don't know why that happens, honestly. It's a little bit of ego. But I love it when the answers come from the organization. And so that's maybe the first part of the answer to your question is you just have to engage people. Like when we go out on the floor, we talk to folks, right? It's not easy. I'm... more introverted than extroverted. And so I don't love just walking up to somebody and talking to them. But if you're going to be in their space, it's only respectful to introduce yourself and say why you're there and then ask what stuff's going well and what's not. Right. So so that they have some some input like, you know, to to to your point, right. Do people feel uneasy? They do. If they feel like change is happening to them, if they are, if I'm out there doing something for them, that changes the dynamic. And not everybody even likes that though. And so that's where you have to reinforce, well, guess what folks, like we're a business, you're part of a team, and we all have to work together in order to serve our customer and all of us to get paychecks and eat. And if we are all working in different ways, if we aren't working in a standard way, we're going to have trouble communicating, we're going to have trouble handing our work off to the next process. It's going to be an uglier day. those standards that we're trying to understand and we're doing through an observation process, right? It's really to help you coordinate your work better so that your day goes better. So we serve the customer better, so the company grows. and your job is more secure over time. But I think it's a real change management component and the culture, the existing culture will affect whether or not you're expressing that, whether they get on board immediately or they're very skeptical of you. Keith Norris (28:38) Makes sense, yeah. I heard you, part of your prior answer was about leadership and how the leaders are acting and treating the organization. I've heard a lot of people express the importance of executive buy-in or leader buy-in for any sort of a change program. What advice or insights or experience might you have about the role that leaders should play versus maybe the role that you sometimes see them play and it can be challenging? Matt (29:02) Yeah, like I said, don't have all the answers, please. they got to that level because they're smart, right? And some of them got to that level because they want to have all the answers. And maybe they actually do, right? Like some leaders, man, I mean, they're so quick and they see things and they do. But I've been in places where we had to unravel. unravel a culture of deferring to leadership because I know, and this is what I'm saying is going on in that kind of leadership environment, I know that whatever I say is gonna get overruled by the boss, so

I'm just not gonna say anything. And you know what? What's even better about that? If I don't make decisions, nobody can come back at me. I was just doing what I was told, right? And that's toxic. And... Yeah, it's out there, it's out there. The leaders that I enjoy and that frankly are the best clients for Chalmers Street are the ones that are pragmatic and also can decide when we've thought enough and it's time to make a decision. That balance pragmatism with, I don't know, speedy decision making. The ones that ask questions first, those are great. The folks that have a desire to delegate down and recognize that delegating down isn't as simple as saying, hey, you're now responsible for making sure parts get to the work cell on time. It's also making sure that that person has the training and the support around them to be successful. And so delegates down, with also while creating the environment around people so they can be successful. you know, people leaders that are pragmatic, I believe do the best with a continuous improvement mindset and approach. And ultimately, I believe are more successful at running larger organizations than the folks that are autocratic and maybe smart as a whip, but. but don't have the self-awareness to realize that they're starving their organization of growth, of their own personal growth. Keith Norris (31:04) Mm-hmm. Yeah, kind of limiting limiting the growth. That's one of the things that I find personally very interesting with this whole topic is a lot of these concepts are like super easy to like, okay Yeah, I get that that makes sense but it's kind of like knowing that the the path to a healthy lifestyle is to eat less and exercise more like we all know that but For some reason it can be hard to follow that advice ourselves, you know, think that some of this leadership advice Matt (31:28) Yep. Keith Norris (31:30) Like how could, let's say there's a leader out there who's like, hmm, I think of myself as a good leader, but man, I might be the person being the answer guy. Like what could I do, or what would you recommend that somebody might do to help shift directions? Matt (31:47) The simple answer is ask your team. You know, for leaders that are super autocratic, they're not gonna get an honest answer. Another way is to just be quiet, not say things and see what happens, right? Does someone step up? Does the meeting come to a conclusion with a decision or is everything getting pushed back on me, right? And is everyone being quiet and waiting for me to speak? those would be evidence that that's going on. And then if you're going to change that, one, there's probably some coaching that's required to do that, right? Because it's sort of like, I love the phrase, can't read the label from inside the jar. It's like, we all have blind spots. Like I've got people that coach me. yeah. Keith Norris (32:29) That's a good one. Matt (32:35) you know, tell me what you see. So you probably need a coach and then need to be really deliberate with the organization to let them know that this is something that we want to change. Otherwise, otherwise, you don't know, people just think you're doing something different. It's weird, right? But but I would say first, be quiet, see what happens when you're quiet. And then second, you know, let the organization know that we're going to change things. And here's how it's going to work in the future. Keith Norris (33:00) Yeah, I'm interested to talk about this idea of being a consultant because in the mid-market, if you've got a consultant, it's a different dynamic than if you're working inside of a company. Some of the people that we work at the KPI Fire, they might be in big companies and they'll have these CI departments who almost function like a consultant or they might not be part of, let's say, that facility. Maybe they work at corporate, they come in and there's a different dynamic as a culture and sometimes there's... I guess attention you might say. It seems like you probably have some tips and tricks for how to not freak people out when you're looking over their shoulders. What advice might you have for how to approach that in a way that's not threatening? Matt (33:40) You know, it's kind of similar to what I was saying before, just around how people know that you're there for them, not necessarily looking over their shoulder against them. There's some, so it doesn't necessarily apply exactly to your question, but there is some tension that's good. I mean, sometimes a little bit of tension can be positive. mean, one of the things, kind of back to, when you're saying, do I look for when I walk into a company to kind of gauge where they're at from a continuous improvement perspective, how are they checking work? We're all, we all have a tendency to have our own confirmation bias, right? And believe what we're doing is great and believe we're making all the right decisions. And if you don't have checks in place, you don't ever get that feedback to know. Okay, those checks are attention, right? And there's really, the only way you make those checks less tense is again, you let people know that we're doing this to help the process. It's not about you, right? Removing judgment, removing blame, that's where we can get the most open environment, collaborative environment for driving continuous improvement. And so that's how we can make it kind of a lesser challenge or lesser tension. But my point is that, yeah, but I still want the tension. Like people work a little better under pressure. Like, I wanna be careful. People work better under pressure. But there is a level of pressure where people cut corners and do bad things, right? So I can't say that as a complete state, a, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some caveats to that statement is what I'm trying to say. Keith Norris (35:09) Sweet spot. Sure. Matt (35:17) So some tension is good. Some tension is good. People knowing that we're checking and we're looking, right? That's

good. Knowing that there's a feedback mechanism and if something's not going well, it's gonna pop up on a chart somewhere and someone's gonna ask me about it. That's good. Knowing that we're doing those things, we're creating that tension because we're serving our customers better. We're trying to create a better, safer work environment. We're trying to beat our competition. And we want you to be a part of that. It's not about you. It's about a process That's what you can you can kind of dull the edge of that tension. Does that make sense? Keith Norris (35:52) Yeah, absolutely. you talk about that, the thing that comes to mind for me is the idea of metrics and measuring stuff. And this is a topic that some organizations, know exactly what metrics they need to be measuring and they've been measuring them for years. But more commonly, there's some new problem that's happening which requires, might require the use of some slightly different metric or let's just say there's a lot of data being measured and not all of it is useful. I'm curious if you might have any experiences of maybe certain measures that were in use for a long time and they were just not the right ones or other ones that you found are really great. Matt (36:27) You know, I probably have an example there, but I have to think about it for a while. What I see more often is a fear of establishing the measure because the information may be imperfect. And there's a good book called How to Measure Anything. And I can't remember the author, but it's good book, How to Measure Anything. And what I really liked about it is early in my career, I was that person, like, I'm like, hey, there's no data on this process, right? And we're not gonna collect good data on the process. Okay, well, flying blind isn't a better answer to that. And in that book, he really emphasizes that any data collection is going to be valuable, right? Even if there's some flaws in it, right? You should at least know what those flaws are through your data collection. so you can understand their impact on any decision that you make from them. But data collection, any data collection is valuable. So that's the first thing, is just go collect some data. The second thing, and I often find myself telling this to companies after I've really pushed data driven decision making on them, is that lean and Six Sigma continuous improvement is not a measure everything program. measurement, there's a cost to it, right? There's a measure, there's a cost to taking measurements. So we should think about what's important to measure. And what I usually find is there's a few, there's a small number of things, know, yield, scrap, throughput, right, that are useful, ongoing, should always measure them, kind of measures. And then there's measures that are useful for a project purpose, but then I'm gonna probably sunset at the end of the project and just use my higher level measures to make sure that whatever change I made is staying in place. know, yeah, maybe don't approach measurement as a silver bullet. That's probably the first thing to say. ⁓ But don't be afraid, right, that... Keith Norris (38:13) Yeah. ⁓ Mm-hmm. Matt (38:28) that just because the measurement isn't perfect that we're doing. we find ourselves setting up simple spreadsheets, putting tablets out on the production floor so that companies can start collecting measures. Well, guess what? When we do that, people forget to put data in. They fat finger it, whatever. ⁓ Those things happen. But I've never had the case where it wasn't useful. We still go, OK, well, this is useful. Keith Norris (38:46) for you. Matt (38:55) And then you start using the data. I mean, this is another point. You start using the data and then it becomes more important to everybody for that data to be good and you start reinforcing it. So it starts to become this virtuous cycle of I get better at measuring, I start using it more, I get better at measuring, I start using it more, I'm solving more problems, and I'm more aware of what's going on. Because again, back to that, I can't read the label. Yeah, I can't read the label from inside the jar. That measurement is external, it's telling me reality. I might hate it, I might love it, I don't know, but it's it's unemotional, it's just right there and I can start my problem solving with clarity when I have it. Keith Norris (39:35) I like that, think we're touching on another topic that I'm pretty fond of, the value in touching the numbers in some way. I'm curious if you find for the people solving the problem, know sometimes you've got numbers that are just up on a digital board, whereas there's some numbers like you said, you you're fat fingering them. I wonder if you have any words of wisdom on the value of touching the data versus just having it reported. you know, up there. ⁓ Matt (40:02) ⁓ man, do we have another hour? ⁓ So one story is I rolled out GEMBA boards. This was long ago, GEMBA boards. And they're all paper. And people would go get their number and they would write the number up and then they would hold their GEMBA meeting. And one of our technologists came through and he's like, what are you doing? This is ridiculous. This could all be digitized. We could put it on a board. like, Keith Norris (40:04) No. Matt (40:26) You could, but you've now separated people from the information. Like you put this degree of like buffer between me and what happened. Like I want people to feel it, like color it in, like show me. So we, and I say all that and I also admit that at times or in, with some of our clients, we do use, you know, generated reports and slap it up on the wall because it just, makes sense. But I do like, I do like, you know, physically, putting a number up there because you really feel it. I don't know. It's like different. Like it's human. We're physical beings, right? So, ⁓ but then, but the other point that I think you're making is we do a lot of data mining from big data

warehouses and stuff like that and Power BI and all those things, great tools, but you don't know a lot about those data points, right? They're collected at a time and place when Keith Norris (40:58) I... Yeah, yeah. Matt (41:19) you know, at least the folks that are doing the analysis weren't around versus when you are physically capturing each one of those numbers yourself, you know exactly what's going on. You know that there was a power outage. I don't know. You know that the machine jammed, know that, you know, all these things, cause you're there seeing it real time and collecting the data and you can make a note about it. And, and I've had debates with clients that, you know, large data sets, large sample sizes, aren't necessarily better than small sample sizes collected by an engineer who's watching the physical process because they have full context of what's going on in the moment and can then take that and turn it into problem solving. Whereas with big data sets, I'm just guessing and I'm looking for groupings, right? It's useful, it's useful, but I'm not convinced that those small data sets aren't possibly more useful. Keith Norris (42:12) Yeah, I think that's interesting. Particularly coming from like the software world, there's like this bias that digital technology can solve everything, but I agree with you. I would describe it as value add work. There's actually some value add in touching the numbers sometimes. Matt (42:20) Yes. Yes. Keith Norris (42:28) where it's like an ownership or it just, know, things click a little bit differently when you're responsible. There's various studies and whatnot on that. So that's, you're right, that probably is a topic that we could go into in a lot deeper ways. Well, let me try to summarize some of these maybe lessons. there some lesson that you feel like you've learned in your, you know, X decades that you could, if you could. Maybe do things differently or learn that sooner that you might like to pass on to the younger version of yourself. Matt (42:57) Yeah, I think there's maybe two. One is that it's not gonna work exactly how you have it in your mind. I'll see if I get this quote right. It's an economic quote. It's the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they dream they can create. was Friedrich Hayek. That exists in engineering and continuous improvement. Keith Norris (43:18) on that. Matt (43:22) We can dream big. You were mentioning kind of like, oh, you you're just going to press the AI button and the Tesla robot is going to come out and okay, that world is coming. But like with most technology advances, it's going to come in little bits at a time. We're going to go, ooh, that actually made things worse. It doesn't. It doesn't. That grand design that you have on paper, the process map and the technology that you just purchased. it's not gonna do exactly what you had in your mind, so be ready to change and react, be adaptable. And then as maybe a little bit of a continuation of that, when I change a process and hand it back to the process owner, I can't assume that that process owner and depending on the degree to which they were involved, they better be involved, but still like the degree to which they were involved in the change, they may not be ready to just jump in and do it. Like, don't underestimate the amount of training. I'll never forget, we moved a distribution center within the same region, right? But it was still a move. So a lot of the same employees and fired things up on go live day and things got stuck, I think in the packaging area. And someone went out there, it wasn't me, but someone went out there and they're like, what's going on? Why is everything getting stuck here? And they're like, I can't find the packing sheets that we use to know what goes where. And they're like, they're in the printer. Keith Norris (45:00) hahaha Matt (45:00) And the person's like, what printer? It's right over there. It's the same printer we had at the other place. Yeah, but at the other place, the printer was over here. It's a small change, but you know, we get, we all get into our routines and we all get in our routine. So don't assume that everyone's going to be able to take on and run that process the way you have in your mind. And that's component of building good supervision, training, practices, habits, discipline. It's absolutely. crucial to whatever the process change is, maybe equal to whatever the process change is, because if it doesn't get adapted, if it doesn't get executed, it wasn't worth the time. Keith Norris (45:38) Yeah, that's an interesting one. This is an off-script question, but is there any games or models or anything that you like to use as part of your training to teach people some of these lessons? Matt (45:48) So all of our training, so we do training that has exercises in it. And exercises are useful so you can check how people are a five Whys All of our training, our CI Mastermind program is real projects live in the GEMBA. We do all that training through real stuff. I also teach for Northern Illinois University's Lean Six Sigma program. And this we didn't invent, we borrowed from some other place, I don't even know where, but there's an airplane building game. You build airplanes and you build a production line and you assemble your airplanes. It's just a really good way for people to see handoffs and decision making and batching and all those kinds of things. But you can invent a lot of them. There's a lot of good... exercises like that that you can go find companies have off the internet. We do paper helicopters too to teach design of experiments. ⁓ That's through NIU as well. So there's quite a few out there. I don't know that I have a passion for anyone. I would say where my passion lies is real, you know, live environment application. That's where I believe the greatest learning occurs. Keith Norris (46:49) Cool. Matt (47:05) And you you stumble a little bit, but those stumbles are important part of the learning journey. Keith Norris (47:10) Well, let me ask you, if folks want to follow up or follow you or get in contact with you, what would be the best way for them to follow up with you? Matt (47:19) So look at me on LinkedIn, Matthew R. Kroll. Look at my website, www.chalmersstreet.com. There's a SST at the end there, so chalmersstreet.com. And you can see some of our offerings and some testimonials of our stuff too. And sign up for our newsletter. And we also run a monthly CI Mastermind Live session where we where we try and create a little bit of a CI mastermind environment, but we do it for free, and we try to solve problems real time in that environment. So frankly, there's lots of ways. There's lots of ways. Any one of those are great ways to get to know us and what we do. Keith Norris (47:56) Yeah, and I, as somebody who sat in on one of those masterminds just this week, I thought it was great, really excellent way to just talk to different practitioners in different areas. I learned some new things. I think probably most people there did. So I think that's a great service that you offer that mastermind and you've got a newsletter that's great. So I would encourage people to follow you on that. yeah, really appreciate you joining us today and sharing some wisdom. I'm sure we could do this again in a few months and probably have a whole bunch of stuff to chat about. This is a great topic. Matt (48:09) Thank you. Keith Norris (48:24) I really enjoy talking to people who are as passionate about this as you are. So thank you so much. Matt (48:29) love doing it and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. Thanks, Keith. Keith Norris (48:32) This episode is brought to you by KPI Fire. KPI Fire is continuous improvement software. KPI Fire helps you align strategy, drive execution, and engage your people. All in one powerful software platform. So whether you're leading a team or transforming an entire organization, KPI Fire is your partner in achieving breakthrough results. Learn more at kpifire.com. For anybody listening if you'd like to suggest a guest ask a question or give us any ideas for future episodes Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn Keith C. Norris Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn and this concludes this episode of KPI fireside a continuous improvement podcast so if you've enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to like and follow us and share us on all the socials and You can find us wherever you get your podcasts until next time keep driving progress and sparking change