Ever wondered why your brilliant ideas often fall flat? Transform your approach by understanding the "Humanize, Optimize, Scale" framework, where we emphasize empathy and community-building to tackle real-world problems. By observing and interviewing those directly affected, particularly in the construction industry, we uncover the physical challenges that workers face, leading to more effective and inclusive problem-solving methods. Join us as we explore how seeing issues from multiple perspectives can pave the way for meaningful solutions benefiting everyone involved.
Feel frustrated when your suggestions go unheard? Learn how to switch from imposing solutions to a collaborative, humanizing approach that invites engagement and experimentation. By identifying current conditions and testing improvement ideas, we delve into the benefits of involving everyone in the process. Discover how to achieve better results, enhance team engagement, and scale successful practices using frameworks like Training Within Industry (TWI) and structured job instructions. Humanizing work fosters sustainable and impactful change, ensuring every voice is heard and valued.
Unlock the magic of effective job instruction and training with our detailed discussion on breaking down tasks into essential steps and reinforcing them with key points for safety and quality. We share insights on balancing instruction to avoid confusion or overload, emphasizing the importance of demonstrating, explaining, and continuous feedback. This structured approach ensures proper understanding and execution, minimizing errors and maximizing benefits. Stay tuned for a thought-provoking conversation on the "humanize-optimize scale" and how it can transform your approach to work and life. Be kind to yourself and keep an open mind—peace.
Ever wondered why your brilliant ideas often fall flat? Transform your approach by understanding the "Humanize, Optimize, Scale" framework, where we emphasize empathy and community-building to tackle real-world problems. By observing and interviewing those directly affected, particularly in the construction industry, we uncover the physical challenges that workers face, leading to more effective and inclusive problem-solving methods. Join us as we explore how seeing issues from multiple perspectives can pave the way for meaningful solutions benefiting everyone involved.
Feel frustrated when your suggestions go unheard? Learn how to switch from imposing solutions to a collaborative, humanizing approach that invites engagement and experimentation. By identifying current conditions and testing improvement ideas, we delve into the benefits of involving everyone in the process. Discover how to achieve better results, enhance team engagement, and scale successful practices using frameworks like Training Within Industry (TWI) and structured job instructions. Humanizing work fosters sustainable and impactful change, ensuring every voice is heard and valued.
Unlock the magic of effective job instruction and training with our detailed discussion on breaking down tasks into essential steps and reinforcing them with key points for safety and quality. We share insights on balancing instruction to avoid confusion or overload, emphasizing the importance of demonstrating, explaining, and continuous feedback. This structured approach ensures proper understanding and execution, minimizing errors and maximizing benefits. Stay tuned for a thought-provoking conversation on the "humanize-optimize scale" and how it can transform your approach to work and life. Be kind to yourself and keep an open mind—peace.
What's going on. Y'all, if you're in the continuous improvement space in any industry, I want to turn you on to the most concise framework that describes what I've been doing in such a way that it makes it easy for other people to understand and go run and do awesome things with. The framework is simple it's humanize, optimize and scale. That distillation, say, learning experiences that I help people with. And I went on and on for minutes, which my guess is, when you have to describe what you do as a continuous improvement professional, you kind of ramble on and you can see people that you're losing them or you're stuck using the same old respect for people and continuous improvement, which I don't think are bad, but they just don't help people understand exactly what it is that we do. And, because of our passion for what we do, we get extra wordy. So, anyways, I was doing this extra wordy stuff and Lance said, oh so humanize, optimize, scale. And I'm like, oh my God, well, not really, oh my God, I almost missed it. But Megan Shapiro, another friend on the live stream, went ahead and put it in the comments like humanize, optimize, scale. That's awesome. And I'm like, yeah, that is awesome because it precisely describes my strategy, I guess, or my approach into leading people or supporting people on their continuous improvement path. And so they start with the idea of humanize right Another way to think about it. If you're already in the respect for people realm, this captures that right the humanizing. So what do I mean by that? When I start working with people, individuals or teams, any and all of the above the first thing I want to do is help them understand the problem from other people's perspective, meaning the people that report to them subcontractors, vendors, all of the above, whatever problem we're solving or attempting to solve, for there are other people that are experiencing that pain, and usually what we do as decision makers what we do as decision makers we'll feel the symptoms of a problem and we'll deploy a solution or an idea so that it mitigates the pain that I have been feeling, not necessarily doing anything for the pain that everybody else is experiencing around that problem. And so I want to help people understand, like, yes, this is a problem, but we need to understand it from the perspective of other human beings, and what that requires is some time to sit and connect with those individuals, either through observation or interviews or both, so that we can understand like okay, interviews or both, so that we can understand like, okay, this is what's happening, this is what I'm seeing, how does this affect you? How is this impacting you? Is what I'm seeing accurate? What am I missing Through that interaction is where the humanization starts happening.
Speaker 1:
Right, we start all of a sudden going from being the all-knowing, all-powerful decision maker, from being the all-knowing, all-powerful decision maker, boss, manager, to another human being that's experiencing something that they want to change and we're kind of building community in the process. So that's one vein. The other vein that I'm super, super excited about is specifically in the construction space, and I know this can be true in other industries, but I'm you know, I'm a construction guy and that's where I live. So we often have budget problem, schedule, production, which are all tied together, but what we typically do is say we need to work more overtime, we need to plan better, we need more people on site, we need to work smarter, not harder, and those things. Those are really the only answers that most of us have to go and solve the production issues, the schedule issues, the budget issues. So back to the humanization.
Speaker 1:
So now the question then becomes well, how do we humanize that situation. Well, the way we humanize it is go out to observe the work and study the work, like at the point of installation, where people are doing the job, and specifically look for the things that are hard on the people's body, specifically let those things that are stealing life from the men and women that are doing the work inform or set the stage for our improvement ideas. That's the humanizing part, because when we sit there and we study and really understand or get a better understanding of the pain, irritation, frustration that our people are experiencing, I'm going to tell you it compels you as an individual to do something about it. Now they're not just a worker bot that needs to produce more. Now you see them as a human and understand or build some empathy around. Like, holy moly, this work is difficult and I, as the leader, decision maker, have the authority and influence to do something about it, which humanizes me to the worker, because now I'm not just somebody that's breathing down their neck all the time. Now I am an advocate for them so that we can reach the goal that we're working towards together. But for some reason, we like to. So that's the humanizing part.
Speaker 1:
Right, like, yes, we're going to do some problem solving. Yes, we're going to do time motion studies. Yes, we're going to dive deep into some data, but we do that. But first, contact is the humanizing element. Let's get connected, let's understand that we're in this situation together and it's going to take all of us to make it better. All right, that's phase one, the humanize. The beautiful thing is when we start with that, when we start with serving others, when we start with we're going to solve some real business problems, but we want to understand that it improves the quality of the experience for everybody involved. The quality, the experience for everybody involved, that humanizing thing, the relationship thing, the community thing that's happening, continues to grow throughout the event or throughout the effort. Then we get into optimize right, and I alluded to it here just a little bit ago. But when we understand the problem from the perspective of multiple people and we're understanding that there's specific things that are causing pain in people's lives physical, mental, all of the above and we let that inform the countermeasures or the solutions, ideas to fix it, that's a whole nother level right In terms of optimization.
Speaker 1:
Because what it does is it overcomes the resistance to change. Resistance to change is natural. We all know this. Change is very, very, very, very few people like change. Most people like change when other people are changing, not when they have to change. Yes, change is the only constant, but still, I don't like it. I want to keep things just the way they are, because it's comfortable.
Speaker 1:
Now, when somebody comes to me and tells me hey, you need to do this this way because you're not meeting your production goals, that's a way, but I'm not very enthused about it. Right? I don't feel appreciated at all, like it's just my job, and for some of us that's okay, that's how we deal with life, no big deal. But for some other people that's very disrespectful and makes them disengage from the work. And then you get the quiet quitting and all these other things, right. But if somebody comes to me and says, hey, I've been watching what you were doing, or that last conversation we had, you pointed out these two things and that sounds like it ain't no fun for you, I was like, oh yeah, it's not, it sucks. Well, I have an idea to make that better, not just for you, but for the business as well. Oh, here's the idea. What do you think about the idea? Oh well, I like it. And what if we tweaked it in this manner and then we can go and deploy that idea.
Speaker 1:
Now, with buy-in right, everybody wants to get the damn buy-in, but it's rooted in the countermeasure of the solution, coming from the place of making things better for the person, for the people that are associated or around the problem. We're trying to make it better for them. So when we actually go out and deploy it, they're going to be embraced or, at the very least, be aware that this is coming down the line and they know inherently that they played a role in selecting, or they know inherently that they contributed to this idea that's coming out, coming out Like it's partly theirs, which is huge, which now means when they go do the thing, they're not just going to what's the? They're not just going to do the old malicious compliance right. Well, you told me to do it, so I'm going to do it and not apply any heart or brain power to make it better. We're just going to do it. But because I understand it, this thing is being done in service to me and to my team, my team members. I'm going to take it seriously and I can polish it up and make it a really great outcome, and so that's where we get into the optimize, and that's how we optimize, not just optimize the outcome, the end result. This is all a path, right? We're on the early, on the first phase of this path, and so what we're optimizing because we invested in the humanizing what we're optimizing is the experimentation, the test phase, the adoption phase, the socialization phase of making work better. We're optimizing the conditions for people to be open and try new things. We're optimizing the situation for people to engage and share their critical thinking and tap into that innovation that everybody has, that we cannot access when we're dictating and driving changes that only serve me, when we're doing it in service to others, when we've humanized ourselves and invested the time to understand the problem from their perspective, the work that is, improvement or continuous improvement becomes optimized. Now, have we optimized the process yet?
Speaker 1:
No, no, and I bet you've had at least one time, maybe one year, maybe one decade, where you were frustrated beyond belief because people would not take your recommendations, people would not take your suggestions, people would not listen to your ideas and you feel like you're just spinning your damn wheels and like what's the point if nobody wants to do the thing? I've been there too. I had about a decade of that, because all I was doing was running around solutionizing people, blessing them with all my wisdom and knowledge and telling them what they needed to do to get better, which has, like, a hidden message behind it you need to get better. What they're hearing is you suck. That's not inviting language, that doesn't feel good. And so, rather than telling people you need to get better, which is also saying I'm better than you, I now tell people how, like what? How can we make this better for you? How can we make this easier for you? I can see that this is frustrating and irritating and painful. Here's some ideas. I have to minimize that. What do you think about the ideas? It's a whole different game.
Speaker 1:
And so, again, when we're doing that, when we're deploying our knowledge, our experience, all our wisdom in service to others, we are in the humanizing element and we are optimizing the work. That is, continuous improvement, which produces or delivers sustainable change, sustainable outcomes. Right, and so then you run through the whole, you know the whole cycle, identify the current condition, evaluate the problem, identify the gaps in your thinking or, more precisely, you discover how many assumptions you have been making decisions on historically, because most of the time when folks are out there doing problem solving. We all love to pat ourselves on the back for being super duper, amazing problem solvers. Most of the times, the decisions we make are based on assumptions and opinions. They're based on what I feel and what I think, which isn't horrible Like. That's always where it begins.
Speaker 1:
But the work is to find out the facts, what the hell's actually happening at the point of failure or at the area that we want to improve. And guess what? There's always people there, and if we don't go and interact with the people or rather, you don't have to, you know you don't have to, I know you don't have to what I'm suggesting is attempt to humanize, to optimize, to scale. Investing the time to understand the problem for their situation and coming up with improvement ideas or countermeasures to make it better for them is going to make things super awesomer. That's an official term and, more specifically, that is my approach to continuous improvement, to helping people, companies, teams have better outcomes.
Speaker 1:
Then you go through the whole thing. Then you say, okay, let's try it, let's run an experiment. We knew what we performed before we did all of these things. Let's see what these impacts have. Oh, my goodness, this is working, we are reaching the targeted outcome or we, in some cases, we've surpassed the intended outcome, and my observation is we have amazing results because we did the humanizing part. When I skip the humanizing part, the results are not bad, but they're like well, okay, 5% improvement Not bad. That's actually really damn good. But when we understand the thing from everybody's perspective and everybody contributes to the thing, the outcomes are like super, super awesome and peripheral benefit, which is massive.
Speaker 1:
We have now engaged the critical thinking of our team. We have now signaled to them that, hey, this business thing, this endeavor that we're all working towards, this job that we all have, we can all contribute to making it way better. And I am here as your advocate to make that happen, whereas historically, I'm just here to make sure you're pressing the buttons and checking the boxes. That's okay, that's well. Hell, there's a whole lot of people that live life that way, but it doesn't have to be that way. So now we've done the humanized, then we did the optimized and now we're talking about the scale.
Speaker 1:
And so what are we talking about in terms of scaling? Is that structure, that framework, that new standard that we've produced as a result of the improvement work. So super simple framework. You've probably heard of TWI training within industry. It's job instruction. Very, very simple to capture all the work that we've done Because, as you've gone through doing all this humanizing and optimizing and studying and understanding the problem, getting the facts and getting the data, you have the basis of instruction. Yeah, some people call them SOPs, which is fine, the nuance or, I think, the important elements of job instruction that enable scaling of the new.
Speaker 1:
Best way is the framework. Right, it's one first one important. What's the important step? And there's a bunch of steps. What are the important steps? High level, the big thing that we need to know about. Maybe I like to think about it as what is the anchoring thought or anchoring term for the step. Then we reinforce that one step with the key points, meaning what are the things that ensure safety, that ensure quality, that make or break the step? I'm not going to get too deep into examples because I get excited and we'll be here for another hour, but important step, the important step is reinforced with the key points what's going to ensure safety, what's going to ensure quality and what's going to make or break that step, like the important information that you need so that you do it right. And then the key points are reinforced by explaining why those key points are there. And so you may be thinking like man, that's a lot of extra information. Sure it is, but the magic is in the delivery.
Speaker 1:
I'm sure you've been in a situation where you're giving somebody instruction and you've flooded them with all kinds of information and saying don't forget this and make sure you do that, and then do this, and then you got to go over here. Oh, and then when you do this, this, there's this. We flood them with so much detail that none of it sticks right. We do this all the time. Or we say, hey, go, go, disassemble the palette. And then we show up and say what the hell are y'all doing? That's not what I wanted you to do. I need need you to do it this way. So we kind of teeter between nowhere near enough instruction to overwhelmingly verbose instruction, and in both cases it does not equip the person to execute the task.
Speaker 1:
And so job instruction helps us break that down, and the delivery of it is the magic, because we will deliver first, only the first, the important steps. It's important step number one, important step number two, important step number three, and so on. And as we're delivering, articulating the important steps, we will demonstrate the step. That's pretty fancy, right, so that the learner gets to say, oh, that's how we do it. Then, once we go through that, any questions? No, okay, well, let me show you again. This time we're going to do all the steps, but we're going to talk about the key points as we do the steps. So now they get another repetition of seeing oh, that's how you do the thing. Oh, okay, now, okay, that's why you put your hand there, that's why you grabbed that tool or whatever. And then one more time we're going to do it again so you can see and I'm going to go through the reasons why the key points are important.
Speaker 1:
So it's another demonstration, so that they see the task and we're reinforcing the information that they need to be thinking about when they're performing the task. Does that sound like a lot? It is a lot, but what it does is it helps people learn and understand what the hell it is we're asking for, right, so that the scaling of this new way is achieved. And then we get to watch them do it, which gives us the opportunity to coach them before we just throw them into the deep end and then come back a day later and find all kinds of disruption and problems that are going to steal production and add frustration to the people's life. So that's the scale part, because once you put in all the work to study and understand a problem and put the effort and expend the social capital in deploying the change, if you don't have a mechanism for training and auditing the new way, it's going to evaporate, it's going to dissolve, it's going to fall apart.
Speaker 1:
People are going to go back to what they've always done, because that's natural, that's what we do, and so this is a reinforcing element that helps us train and audit the new best way, and it's the basis for improvement, because now we have a very defined, very understood way of doing things. We also understand the time in which each step can or should be executed. We understand the degree of quality and safety that's built into this method. So when people want to deviate because it's better right, like air quotes better we say how much better and in which way. Most of the time, when people are, when I'm deviating and doing things in the Jesse fashion because they're because it's better, what I'm really doing is what's most convenient for me. And so, now that we've done all this work, we can say, hey, okay, if it's better, prove it to me. Like you got free reign to do it differently, but show me how it's better in terms of production, in terms of quality and in terms of safety. If it's better in any or all of those realms, then we need to change the standard and teach everybody how to do it, the new, best way.
Speaker 1:
Now, that part of the scale, part of this whole way of thinking, sounds way overbearing, and I know it feels overbearing, right, like man that talk about micromanagement. What about freedom of thought? Yes, if all you do is try to do that style of standardization, you're going to lose everybody. You're going to turn their brains off because now you're dictating. Right, I've tried it. I've tried to create job instruction from my desk without ever having gone out to the field to understand what's actually happening.
Speaker 1:
It sucked bad. You know, what was really bad is people followed it and it was missing in. For, like it was, it was bad. I created a bad situation.
Speaker 1:
But when we do all the other stuff right, the humanizing part, to go out and interact with the people and understand the conditions that they're working in, or the pressures and stresses that they're dealing with and deploy things to make things better for them, while also deploying things to minimize the waste and optimize the cycle of work. It's a connected thing and people will understand like, ah, okay, we did all of those things and this is the end result and this is how we want to make things better for everybody else. This is how we want to mitigate the pain and frustration and irritation that people have been feeling when we just hired them and put them in the job and said go work. It's tedious, it's not easy, but I promise, like I know it was one of the biggest questions that I've had in my continuous improvement career. It's like, okay, I keep, we keep doing these improvements, but I keep improving the same things. Right, like fixing the same problems, and I really didn't understand why. Right, of course I blamed everybody else and said, well, if they would just listen, if they care, if they tried harder, if we had better people, like it was all them.
Speaker 1:
And then it was like, oh, no, no, no, it's because I didn't have a mechanism to lock in, substantiate, train and spread the new best way. I was just helping people create another, better way in the situation with the team on the project that they were on, and so as soon as that situation evaporated, they went on to the next task, and when that work popped up again, they had to start all over again because I failed to have the thing in place to. We'll call it like the bucket that held the goodness. It disappeared. It evaporated back into space. Sure, they did things better, but there were a lot of things that they forgot or a lot of things that they left out, because you just forget. And so when I got introduced to job instruction, I was like oh, that's the thing. That's how we bake it all in. It takes a lot of effort.
Speaker 1:
Here's another cheat code. Don't tell any of the lean gods out there because they'll be mad at me, even though job instruction is super powerful and super awesome, after you've done your study, right After you've gone and understood the work from the people's perspective and you deployed improvement ideas to make it better for the people that are suffering, you may discover that the frequency of that occurrence is rare or abnormal. You may discover that the value or the change is so small that it doesn't really make sense to go and produce job instruction. I agree with that Some days I feel like everything needs job instruction. Sure, but that is a heavy, heavy, heavy lift. Uh, and so what I'm saying is you get permission and when the lean police come to arrest you, you can tell them.
Speaker 1:
Jesse said you get permission to apply or use job instruction at your discretion, because the truth, once you've produced the job instruction, the real work begins in using that job instruction as a tool. And so there's a whole lot, there's a whole big hairy mess behind that that we're not going to get into, but too many rather. I'll ask you this If you're out there and've ever worked and you got SOPs and you got descriptions, job descriptions and submittals and specs and all kinds of stuff because I know you do and you've never read them yourself that is an indicator that there's some organizational behavior that says, if you were to go and produce this new document, it's also going to be one of those things that nobody else reads or accesses. So I know how powerful it is. I will always, always recommend and teach people how to do that part of it. But I also know, practically, that the likelihood of people using the tool that they designed after doing all of those things is very low. And this is why I believe most improvement efforts, most improvement ideas don't scale Because they don't produce a document, a resource to train and audit the new way A and B. If they did, they don't use it appropriately, meaning they say, hey, go to the G drive and open up the folder and read the thing there's your training, there's your instruction. If that's all you're equipped to do right now, don't even waste your time doing job instruction.
Speaker 1:
Anyways, I know I rambled a whole bunch but, in summary, I think I got so lit up and excited about this because Lance really helped me say all of the things I just said in a super clear and simple way, which is humanize, optimize, scale. My recommendation to you is out there in your continuous improvement efforts to be thinking about first, how do I humanize the situation? How can I go and build empathy for the work and the workers? How can I use this continuous improvement effort as a venue to build relationships and connect with people? That's the humanized part, the optimized part. I bet you're already there, but you probably weren't aware of how humanizing can optimize the work of continuous improvement. And then the scale part. I'm sure you have there's other methodology over there. I use that one because it's super simple and super repeatable.
Speaker 1:
But I'd love to know, like, where are you on this humanize, optimize scale thought? Like, is it a new idea to you or is it just new to me? It's very possible that it's just new to me, and you know if you want to talk about it. Very possible that it's just new to me and, and you know, if you want to talk about it, you want any help or you want to debate? Like, hit me up, I'm. You know, I'm always happy to talk. So be kind to yourself, be cool, and we'll talk at you next time. Peace.
