Visual Workplace Radio: Let The Workplace Speak

What good is new knowledge if we don’t put it to use? Last week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walked through her seven-element model for shifting supervisors over to a new role: leaders of improvement—and not just expediters of logistics and ace firefighters. This week she shows you how to help supervisors learn that model and put it into action. She shares her Seven-Skill Grid—a tool by which supervisors can self-diagnose their current skill level as visual leaders and then target which skill they first want to strengthen. Knowledge of each of those supervisory leadership skills is essential. Of equal importance is the opportunity to practice that one new behavior with a buddy—build it, achieve it, and then pursue another. Eating the elephant one bite at a time. Production chiefs and managers help through teaching and coaching. Everyone gets a chance to stretch and contribute. Change is never easy, especially when oneself is the focus. Tune in and learn more.

What does a leader of improvement on the supervisory level do? Does that new role overlap with traditional supervisory duties? And how can visuality help? This week, as her series on Visual Leadership continues, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) maps out the seven elements of what a leader of improvement on the supervisory level does—and how visuality is the glue that holds them all together: 1) stabilize the work area; 2) measure performance by focusing on what winning means; 3) target specific improvement outcomes; and 4) deploy the needed activity to meet each target. For Element 5/Coach, Galsworth draws the difference between teaching and coaching. In 6/Model, she describes behaviors that reveal and inspire. In 7/Improve, she demonstrates ways that the new area leader can make improvement contributions of his or her own. Tune in and learn how these elements work together and how your supervisors can gain skills and experience in each.

What do supervisors do? What is their job? Is that job the same in companies pursuing the new excellence? This week, in the fourth show of her new Visual Leadership series, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares her perspective on supervisors and their work. While not yet widely recognized, this perspective tells of a new role for supervisors, one that is pivotal and transformative. Galsworth describes that new role—not as logistical expeditors—but as Leaders of Improvement, a revolutionary principle that can trigger a deep cultural shift. When supervisors learn and adopt this new role (this wider identity), everything changes and for the better, including supervisors themselves. This new job description is a complete replacement for the old way and has a powerful counterpart for executives (which Galsworth covers in future shows). Tune in as she begins to share her leadership model for supervisors.

How does the logic of visual thinking relate to leadership? Do the same core visual principles apply to a leader who wants to make his job more effective, stable, and embedded? Can it really be said that a leader becomes more effective when she uses visual devices to assist her in achieving her required day-to-day outcomes? In this third show of her new series—The Principles & Practices of Visual Leadership—Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, sets out a line of logic that helps us understand the leader as “just another I-driven visual thinker.” But she also identifies the conditions and qualities that make leader-led visuality distinctly different and apart from operator-led visuality. As she explains, while the building blocks of the visual thinking are the same for every employee, the unique pressures of leadership expose a different set of expectations and a unique definition of both work and the leader’s value field.

What is visual leadership? Why is it so important? How do leaders become more effective? And what does “effective leadership” mean anyway? These are just a few of the questions your host and visual expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, tackles this week as she launches her new series on visual leadership. The fact is: Compelling, natural leaders are rare in any field—regardless of industry or venue. Executives, managers, supervisors! To make a compelling leadership contribution to the enterprise, you need to do more than simply chase down information, monitor KPIs, submit reports, and show up for meetings. You need to change your job description, and in the process, change yourselves. Fire the boss that you are—and hire a new one. You need to transform your identity. But identities shift only when we see and understand ourselves differently. Tune in as Gwendolyn maps out a fresh understanding of leaders at work and how visuality can help.

Lean is capable of improving the operational profile of nearly every company—and fast! But we ask: When lean turn arounds are so rapid, can the culture be transformed as well? While it’s possible, for most companies it is unlikely. And while many techniques impact cultural change, none in the view of your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, is more powerful than the visual workplace in transforming a work culture completely and sustainably. This week Gwendolyn describes: how visuality does it. Tune in and hear how and why her visual approach engenders fierce commitment and very personal expression. Learn exactly how visuality can create connectivity in an enterprise, even tough ones. Understand the power of margin—that slightest bit of internal personal space that can and does liberate our human potential and trigger a spirited, engaged and unified workforce. Learn for yourself, why she says: visuality doesn’t just support an aligned work culture. It creates it. Tune In for this great ENCORE!

Why do many business owners, CEOs, and plant managers struggle with their role as leaders? What does effectiveness mean for leaders? How can visuality help leaders be more effective? In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) continues her walk through the fourth doorway into the visual workplace: Visual Leadership. At this point in Doorway 4, visual metrics are in place; visual problem solving is propelling the workforce down the causal chain; standards are improving and visual solutions are stabilizing those improvements. Leaders are now able to see their organizations behave and it is their turn to step up to their role as visual leaders—owners of the organizational horizon as well as the pacing and will needed to drive the enterprise towards it with focus, confidence, and certainty. Tune in and learn why good leaders always crave excellence and how visuality can help them both sharpen and satisfy that hunger.

What is the big deal in S1 anyway? What is hard about getting rid of junk? Why do so many companies fail at S1? Why are so many value-add associates disappointed? Where and why does this well-intentioned corporate initiative go off the rails? Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and leading visual workplace expert, answers these questions and more. Learn the three premises for S1 success. Hear about the real meaning of S1 and why so much is at stake when so-called junk is removed in the name of 5S. Understand why S1 is the stepping stone to an empowered work culture and to a new kind of improvement leadership. Hear how most companies, in their rush to just do it, miss golden opportunities to use S1 to re-frame and re-invent the work culture. Even if you have been engaged in 5S for years, tune in and learn how to re-invigorate your current approach and go even further. Learn to use 5S to build operator-led visuality. Call in and share your experiences, your stories, your questions.

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

In this, the third show on the Visual Workplace Blitz, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, walks you through the seven elements that can make every blitz a big step forward on an area’s improvement journey. Listen as she describes: ways to keep your blitz focused and well supported; how to inspire people’s improvement vision before, during, and after a blitz; what it means to follow the process as the blitz unfolds—and how photos can be the emotional glue that keep the engagement spirited and connected. But don’t run off just because the hands-on part of your rapid visual improvement event is concluded. Conduct a careful de-brief and follow up and you’ll reap even more remarkable rewards. Done effectively, the visual blitz process can be a powerful training ground for building the habit of visual thinking amongst your value-add associates—and cultivating the improvement leadership of your supervisors and managers. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.

How would you reply if asked whether you held visual workplace blitzes? Would you say: “Sure—someone is always thinking up a new visual device or two when we do our monthly kaizen blitz, sometimes more.”? But this Q&A is at cross purposes. In a visual workplace blitz (“visual blitz” for short), the result is lots of visual devices as well as visual mini-systems. Tune into Visual Workplace Radio this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, defines a visual blitz and maps out its steps, guiding principles, and delights. She will also compare and contrast it with its well-known cousin, the kaizen blitz. How are they the same? What are the telling differences? Join us and learn about the three different blitz levels, how to set them up, how to make sure they are successful, and how to use visual blitz events as a training ground for supervisors as they take on a greater role in the improvement progress of the enterprise. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak!

Where did the Kaizen Blitz originate? If you say Mother Toyota, you are only partly right. Tune in to Visual Workplace Radio this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, travels into history and tells you the real story behind when and how the so-called “blitz” (not its real name) arrived on our shores and what happened when it did. Do you know that the first kaizen blitz (not its name at the time) was held in 1986 at Jakes Brakes in Windsor Locks, Connecticut—and it almost closed that site down? Dazzling in reducing flow distance and flow time, that first event surfaced everything that was right with the blitz format—and everything that was wrong, very wrong, with it. And both that right and that wrong were perfect duplications of how Toyota conducted its own blitzes in Japan, with this one difference: never at Mother Toyota, the OEM. The blitz format was use for the supply chain only. Tune in. Learn the history that insiders know but don’t talk about.

What is the challenge in transforming operations in a low-volume/high-complexity work environment? Why is progress so hard to come by? Where does lean fit in? And what is visuality’s role? This week on Visual Workplace Radio, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, extends last week’s discussion on implementing improvement in slo-mo settings. This week she describes how to do it—her HOW. With military depots as a focal point, Dr. Galsworth describes how she calibrates the bottom-line potential of change—by first comparing visual’s likely impact with lean’s. Then, she shares how she determines what to do first and what comes next, usually in close parallel. To help her, she has designed a so-called “3-Column Assessment Protocol,” specifically developed for the low-volume/high-mix setting. The effectiveness of this protocol in accurately assessing change potential is tied precisely to the fact that it deals with visual, lean, and culture separately. Tune in/learn more.

Why is it so hard to implement change in military depots? And what can visuality teach us about a better way? This week on Visual Workplace Radio, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares her insights and findings related to implementing improvement in overhaul-and-repair. Success in this venue doesn’t just impact the bottom line. It impacts our military mission because depots refurbish and upgrade military equipment that just left the field of war—and must return there, reliably and with speed. Depots are archetypal low-volume/high-complexity work environments, where intricacy floods a vast physical workplace, with far too many details and barely a trace of flow. Years of effort and tons of money have been invested in an attempt to bring lean principles and practices to depots. Few have succeeded. As Dr. Galsworth explains, the fault is not in the operational goal but in the absence of a visual-lean change protocol customized to the depot setting.Tune in/learn more.

Who’d argue with the old saw: “There’s no such thing as a dumb question?” Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host at Visual Workplace Radio—that’s who! Recognizing questions exert a powerful pull for information sharing, this week she points out that runaway questions are a BIG workplace problem. The same questions are asked time and again—and their answers exist only in the minds and mouths of others. As a result, the only way we can find out WHAT and HOW MUCH we are supposed to do, HOW and WHEN we are supposed to do it, WHERE the materials/reports/patients are that are part of this—is to find someone and ask them. Sometimes that person has the answer. Far too often he does not. So you ask another person, who may not know either. The questions chain gets longer, spreading like a contagion through the company. Interruptions become a way of life. Info deficits rule the bottom line, instead of profit. Listen as Dr. Galsworth presents the Six Core Questions and tells you how to use them as a cure

Far too many companies make the mistake of training and implementing the visual workplace the same way they train and implement lean. In fact, the success of a visual workplace depends on a launch protocol that is very different from the one that works for lean. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares the training and implementation secrets she has discovered in nearly thirty years of hands-on visual workplace conversions. Her learning curve was like that of most: some important failures and a ton of impressive successes. Learn why teaching people about visuality through simulations is not often a good choice. Discover the real purpose of the first visual conversion cycle in a company. Hear how Galsworth defines resistance and inertia. And why she says that success in addressing them usually begins with ignoring them. Tune in and hear lessons learned and make them part of your approach. Call in with your own stories and insights!

Question: Which is more important—visual or lean? Answer: Bad question. Visual and lean share a single outcome: operational excellence by identifying and eliminating waste, relentlessly. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares why and how visual and lean represent a single comprehensive improvement strategy, with only a difference in focus and language. Visual’s name for the enemy is motion. It targets how companies share information and then seeks ways to strengthen and build adherence. On the flipside, lean’s enemy is called waste or non-value adding activity. Its job is to dis-entangle the path that value follows on its way to the customer—and then put pull in place. Why make one powerful improvement paradigm more important than the other? Like the wings of a bird, visual and lean are both separate and equal in impact. If you ask a bird which of its wings is more important, it will simply fly off and let that be your answer. Tune in/learn more.

What is the most virulent disease condition that any company can suffer? Is it defects? No! Is it late deliveries? No! Is it runaway costs or unhappy customers or competitive threat? Three times no! The most lethal infection any enterprise can suffer is motion sickness! Listen in as Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert and your host, describes in gruesome terms the disorder that lays waste to countless companies since the industrial revolution. In telling detail, she depicts the nearly invisible assault missing information makes on the workplace and those who work there. Missing answers. The nasty thing about this illness is you rarely see it. Count yourself lucky if you spot its after effect: motion/moving without working. Whether you work in field, a factory, retail outlet—or, most definitely, a hospital, motion can spread its sickness to every department, every desk, every bench, every hallway, every shelf or cabinet. The cure? Workplace visuality—of course. Tune in/learn more.

Is the pre-visual workplace really such a bad place? Just because it’s a bit dingy and doesn’t look like the board room doesn’t mean good work can’t happen there, does it? Or so says the tribe. What happens if we like things just as they are—and don’t necessarily think progress means: visually ordered, smart and, well, transparent? Tune in this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, deals with the elephant in the room—the devil we know, the past. How do we persuade others of things we believe are not only true but essential? How do we crack the code on the tribal think? Gwendolyn shares her experiences about this and the kind of logic she has worked over three decades of practice. How do you make the visual workplace appealing before it is launched—and before the corporate mandate pushes the pushback back. “All that work!” says 30-year veterans of your company, “…and for what?” Listen as she shares what she does— what works and what doesn’t. Tune in/learn more.