Visual Workplace Radio: Let The Workplace Speak

Remember the well-worn adage: The only way to achieve employee empowerment is to turn the top/down pyramid on its head—into the bottom/up pyramid? But what do we do with the top/down structure? The wrong step is to reject it and throw it out. The right step is to engage a process that blends the two power structures into a single, coherent framework of governance and participation. In the third and final show of this sub-series, Dr. Galsworth describes the 3-step process for liberating the hidden power of the empowerment paradigm through the re-distribution of power. Doing this launches executive and value-associate alike on a curve of learning and change that re-defines the roles of each and the outcomes for which each is responsible. Executives identify and drive the company’s vision, mission, values, strategy, systems (WHAT, WHO, WHY). And value-add associates learn to hold a steady focus on HOW. An effective work culture is balanced blending of the two. Let the workplace speak.

The world of work can sometimes resemble politics in a hotly-contested election—with further polarization the method of choice for handling differences: Go to your corner and come out fighting. Though showy, playing our differences against each other is not a long -term win. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, recounts the true story of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice groups doing the hard work of seeking and finding common ground. In so doing, they demonstrate the importance of our learning a new way and breaking the myth of either/or choices. No less so in the workplace where the process begins with an executive decision to invert the power pyramid and develop a new power proposition. Executives then learn a new way as do value-add associates. The result? Alignment and the simultaneous definition of areas of commonality and areas of enduring differences. In short: unity. And throughout, managers and supervisors are caught in the middle. Tune in/learn more.

What does it mean for supervisors to keep a low profile during a visual conversion—and why is that important? After an overview of the factors in determining a company’s true level of organizational readiness for change, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual conversion expert, digs into the critical contribution your supervisors (and managers) make in cultivating—rather than pushing—the transition from a traditional top-down work culture to one that is empowered. This does not mean supervisors/their bosses surrender their decision-making role or abdicate their own leadership power. Not at all. It means they identify their power contribution and clearly distinguish that from the power contributions that value-add associates can and must make for the enterprise to grow and transform. Hidden within this process are what Gwendolyn’s calls the two pyramids of power—the top/down and the bottom up. Listen as she describes the telling differences between them and how each functions.

How do supervisors contribute to a successful visual workplace conversion? After a review of the principles to date (plus a newly-added discussion of discovery teaching/discovery learning), your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, details the remaining principles for an effective Work That Makes Sense Training. The focus? The crucial role supervisors play—which may not be what you or they expect. Yes, everyone knows it is vital for supervisors/managers to get on board. But in the WTMS process, their job is to strengthen i-driven visuality in associates by: a) keeping a low profile; b) not pushing/supervising in training sessions; and c) not “making” the change happen. Instead, a supervisor seeks to build the confidence, skill and spirited contribution of area employees as they visually convert the work areas. The focus is on ownership, self-leadership, and self-accountability. That’s how your supervisors contribute to your WTMS success and long life. Let the workplace speak.

How important is the physical training environment for effective learning and application? In today’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert and your host, makes it crystal clear: physical factors are mission critical to your success. She then shares her list of eight indispensable physical elements, in telling detail and with lots of helpful hints. The training room must: 1) be large enough; 2) be clutter-free; 3) have the right equipment; 4) be quiet (noise and sound are not the same thing); 5) have good air; 6) be dark enough (to see visual solutions sharply); 7) have a workable layout (line of sight; good circulation; crescent shape); and 8) have water and refreshments on the inside (NO CHOCOLATE). Then Gwendolyn presents the first five of other nine effectiveness principles. “Inspire First/Then Inform.” “Start Small.” “Everyone Gets Trained.” “Make the Training Room Psychologically safe.” “Get and Keep Your Supervisors Onboard ....” Don’t miss this show. More next week!

Are there natural-born visual workplace trainers? Is training visuality so different from training other topics—like lean? How much is a trainer responsible for the participant learning—and for implementation results? What are some common training mistakes? What are the tricks—and the golden secrets? In today’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert and your host, continues to un-nest her ”Work That Makes Sense/WTMS” methodology—this time with a focus on the training function as an indispensable success factor in your WTMS conversion. This is the first in a set of shows that shares powerful, proven training process she has developed for transforming value-add associates into visual thinkers and passionate contributors of visual solutions. Yes, the success of WTMS derives from its dynamic logic, rich training materials—AND from the skill, knowledge and know-how of the WTMS Trainer in charge of instruction. Tune in as Galsworth shares training tips, concepts, tools, and guidelines.

If the destination of a journey is its first step, then what is the first step for a successful visual conversion? Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, continues to define the elements of your improvement infrastructure and the indispensable contribution it makes to every visual conversion. Just as a new city’s future depends on the design of a quality water system, electrical grid, and roads long before that city can prosper, so must the enterprise prepare for improvement success well before the first training class. After Gwendolyn revisits the Laminated Map and several new applications, she details the importance and process of establishing an official improvement time for your company. Learn the considerations in drafting this policy and how to operationalize it. If you are the ranking site executive this task will fall to you, along with decisions about the pace of change and the consumption of resources. Tune in. Learn more.

With so many powerful improvement methods available, why do so many fail—and fail early? One main reason is: Companies have not put an improvement infrastructure in place prior to launch. There is no framework for success. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares six behind-the-scenes elements that ensure the success of your WTMS (Work That Makes Sense) deployment. These need to be in place on the macro-level before the launch: 1) vision place (to keep the initiative on course); 2) systematic methodology/WTMS; 3) excellent training materials; 4) onsite leadership (“3-Legged Stool”); 5) laminated map; and 6) official improvement time policy. Today’s show details the first four, with special emphasis on the 3-Legged Stool, comprised of the Management Champion (who resources/protects WTMS), WTMS Coordinator (in charge of scheduling, logistics, and deployment) and the Steering Team (a group of volunteer value-add associates). Tune in/learn more.

What does improvement success mean? What goals are universally relevant, making your improvement efforts worth the investment? Today, Gwendolyn Galsworth resumes her march through her prize-winning book, “Work That Makes Sense (WTMS).” Now on Chapter 3, she defines the three outcomes that all visual transformation targets. Outcome 1: Achieve a Visual Showcase, a work area that demonstrate high-performance visual performance. Outcome 2: Achieve trackable, bottom line results. Visuality does not attack KPIs directly. Instead, it focuses on transforming the physical environment so that struggle evaporates, and flow not only accelerates but is visually controllable. As a result, KPIs that need to increase, do so—and those that need to decrease, do that. Outcome 3 is to adopt an attitude of learning. As people implement WTMS, they change the process and change themselves in the process—including their thinking and sometimes even their attitudes. That’s what success means in WTMS.

Do you pursue standards, standard work, and standardization as the bedrock to repeatable, precise, and predictable outcomes? Yes, all three words contain “standard” in them; but it is a mistake to use them interchangeably. They are not the same. To think so is to radically limit the contribution each can make to operational excellence. Add to that a parallel misunderstanding about “visual standards” and you have a cognitive and deployment trap of the first order. The trap is the mistaken notion that if we make everything the same, we will a) ensure that the right thing will be done again and again; and b) attain the triple win of repeatability, repeatability, and sustainability. This is not true. Listen as Gwendolyn cautions you to resist this form of Borg thinking. Be careful not to swallow the marketing when you bite into your love of “standards.” Get your terms right and definitions clear. Resistance is not only not futile, it is mission critical. Beware of Borg!

Is operator-led visuality about thinking or doing? Answer: It is a system of thinking first, then a system of doing. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth completes her discussion of the eight building blocks of visual thinking with the final two elements: value field and motion metrics. When your associates can define their value field, they begin to understand the balance point between moving and work—and moving and struggle. Dr. Galsworth illustrates through a mini case study of 17 grandmothers who began their visual conversion in a semi-conductor bonding cell in just that way. Couple that with motion metrics and your company has a powerful way for operators to define and measure their struggle, identify with their area KPIs, and own their behavior. Associates realize that, in a non-visual workplace, their hands, feet, and mouths constantly seek the vital information they need but can never find. Learn how the building blocks cultivate new habits of mind and let the workplace speak.

When the outcome is excellence, what’s not to love? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth continues her walk through her Shingo award-winning book, Work That Makes Sense—specifically Chapter 2: Eight Building Block of Visual Thinking. After she re-caps visual standards (Building Block 2), she presents the six core questions (Building Block 3): Where? What? When? Who? How Many? and How? When the answers to any, many or all of these six questions are incomplete, inaccurate, hard to find, or simply not there, the result is the negative performance environment called “the pre-visual workplace.” This is a workplace flooded with information deficits—and, therefore, flooded with mistakes, mis-steps, and danger. Info deficits (Building Block 4) are invisible by definition—findable only by their footprint: motion/moving with working (Building Block 5). Motion is the struggle that leads to bad performance, danger, a de-moralized workforce, and managers/supervisors whose only weapon is firefighting.

What the difference between operator-led visuality—Work That Makes Sense— and 5S? Is it such a big deal anyway? This week Gwendolyn Galsworth, author of the Work That Makes Sense book and her Online Training System of the same name, gives the low-down on why she wrote the book. Making sharp contrast between WTMS and traditional 5S, she notes: “5S is about compliance and the proper relationship between work and dirt.” White-glove cleanliness and order anchored in lines and labels mean employees do better work because they feel safe. WTMS achieves that—plus a stable, spirited, contributing, and engaged workforce. Listen as Gwendolyn delves deeper into i-Driven visuality in the second driving question: “What Do I Need to Share.” Hear how it generates concentric circles of connectivity—and builds servant-leadership amongst hourly employees. Learn her “First-Question-Is-Free Rule;” apply it in the morning. This show also introduces Standards, the second Building Block of Visual Thinking.

Where is the “we” in visuality’s first driving question “What Do I Need to Know?” Where are the teams? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth discloses the genius of visuality’s second driving question, “What Do I Need to Share,” revealing the power of the Work That Makes Sense methodology to inspire, inform, connect, engage, and align. WTMS is a new way of thinking and performing for operators. Listen as Galsworth shares her “You Go First” protocol that shifts operators into tolerance when patience is too far to reach. Fears about associate-led change can trigger a lot of commotion in executives as they face their company’s true work culture—even as i-driven visuality helps those same associates cultivate courage, curiosity, and discovery. The benefits can be enormous. In one company, 200 i-driven operators freed up a mere five minutes/day by eliminating info deficits through visual thinking. The multiplied impact? The liberation of 31,890 work hours in one year. Let the workplace speak!

What are the benefits of making the workplace speak? What drives visual work inventions that result? In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes the seven benefits of workplace visuality. Benefit 3/the practicality of visual thinking itself. Visuality is not merely about abnormal vs. normal; it’s about increasing flow by minimizing struggle. Benefit 4/the power of making a partner out of the physical work environment. When you give a voice to inanimate objects through visuality, you come to expect more from them—and they deliver more. “Expect more from the floor,” she says, “ than merely holding you up.” Hear how world-famous composer, Philip Glass and Gwen’s brother, Gary, (both NYC plumbers in their youth) got ornery pipes to loosen up—when Glass sang to them. Then Gwendolyn launches the eight Building Blocks of Visual Thinking, starting with the Need-To-Know, the foundation of i-driven visuality and an opportunity to establish tolerance at work.

Is it enough for value-add associates in your company to become visual thinkers? Is that what it takes to let the workplace speak? No matter how many line employees invent and implement splendid visual solutions, they represent only part of who needs to learn how to think visually. True success in visuality means that every organizational level learns to create visual devices. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, adds to her discussion of her Work That Makes Sense book as she scans her 10-Doorway Model so you can understand for yourself how everyone—from buyers to engineers, planners to machinists, supervisors to CEOs—can learn to make the workplace speak. From visual displays to visual standards, visual metrics to visual problem solving, visual pull systems to the visual control of material, and visual quality to poka-yoke systems, imagine what it would mean for your company to become a fully-functioning visual enterprise. Imagine what it would mean for you.

What would it be like if the floors, instead of just holding us up, actually helped us with our work? What if we could learn to make the walls, benches, desks, and tools active partners in our performance? Many people think they know what a visual workplace is. But it is so much more than is commonly understood. For one thing, visuality is a way to ensure that work not only gets done but that the physical work environment becomes an active partner in achieving work outcomes. Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth continues through the pages of her book, Work That Makes Sense. Setting the stage, she describes the role of management. Then she addresses value-add associates directly, recognizing their pre-existing expertise and describes the further contribution they can make by learning how to think visually. After a clear definition of a visual workplace, Galsworth points out that visuality in the community is everywhere—but rarely in the workplace. Rarely does the workplace speak.

What can a company expect from associates in terms of improvement and ownership? According to Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and author of seven books, a great deal more than they ever imagine. Today she begins a new series on her Shingo prize-winning book, Work That Makes Sense. In the words of Brent Allen, VP/Operations at Lifetime Products and its WTMS Champion: “I have been a student of management for 30 years, read countless management books and gone to many seminars. I have never found a better, more powerful system of transformation than Galsworth’s. That comes through on every page of this book. She does that better than anybody.” Listen as she shares why 5S specialists, trainers, and coaches welcomed her WTMS book as an antidote to the array of their own mistakes in trying to implement Japanese-style 5S in the West. As Rhonda Kovera, president of Visual Workplace Inc./Michigan, put it: “...I feel sure that anyone who reads this book will never confuse 5S and visual again.”

Borders are the work horses of operations—yet rarely utilized to their full potential. Over the past four shows, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, mapped out the vital importance of borders—as one of the three elements of the visual where and its most powerful. Then she walked through the logic of borders and why you apply them to everything that casts a shadow—from easy-to-move items like benches and carts to items bolted in place like machines, tall shelves, and sinks. You also learned that, as you get smarter, your borders will get smarter, reflecting not only your operational intelligence but the inexhaustible spirit of continuous improvement. You learned that borders boil down to brain function and the pattern of work. Last week Gwendolyn mapped out the first four of the seven elements that turn borders into a thinking system for operators: impact/results, brain function, and info deficits. This week she concludes with the final three. Let the workplace speak!

Why bother with borders? Because borders create flow—the foundation of operational excellence. Taiichi Ohno (co-architect/Toyota Production System) told us: “Flow where you can. Pull where you must.” Lowly borders are key to that. They are the work horses of your operations. Yet, they are rarely well utilized because they are not well understood. Tune in this week as your host and visual expert Gwendolyn Galsworth walks through the seven core elements in the effective implementation of borders, led by your operators. Learn the dynamic fit between: brain function, i-Driven change, missing answers in the workplace, the smart location of function—and the financial and cultural impact of borders when operators learn to use MOTION as a lever. Across 30+ years of hands-on practice, Galsworth has witnessed the synergy of these six factors produce a seventh: 18 different types of borders, invented and deployed by operators. Wouldn’t you want to bother with that? Let the workplace speak.