Visual Workplace Radio: Let the Workplace Speak: Recent Episodes
Gwendolyn D. Galsworth, Ph.D.
Visual Workplace Radio: Let the Workplace Speak offers the best in practical tools, methods, and strategies for improvement leaders who want to apply workplace visuality and harness its remarkable cultural and bottom line contribution. Visuality: you can’t get to excellence without it. Each week, award-winning author and foremost visual workplace expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, targets new learning and applications through a range of formats, case studies, interviews with business leaders and topic experts. Whether yours is a factory, hospital, military depot, bank, office or dry cleaners, get informed, get inspired, get visual.
Does it surprise you to learn that operator-led visuality is not a team-based methodology? Not at first. At first, it strengthens the individual—both in skill and identity. Listen as visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how, when visuality liberates information, it also liberates the human will. This is an outcome that is unique to the visual workplace. It is, also, an indispensable requirement for letting the workplace speak—through people. You can never gain and hold on to the 15%-30% increase in productivity that Galsworth promises—and delivers—if you don’t make room for that part of your employees they leave in their cars, with the window slightly cracked, so it will be there when they clock out at the end of their shift: their will. Visuality invites that part to join in: to participate, express, contribute, and invent visual solutions—many never been seen on the planet before. Does this happen overnight? Rarely, but in operator-led visuality, it does happen. Guaranteed.
What if every CEO, manager and supervisor commit to the single cultural outcome of making every employee a hero in their own eyes? What would change as a result? What would have to change? And how would that happen? Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes how visuality is designed to make every employee a hero at wo—and why this s a core outcome to your journey to operational excellence. In each of us is a deep and abiding need to contribute—a longing to create something of value and share it. Not just in our everyday lives but also at work. Especially at work. There is a hero within—the desire to master and excel. Because visuality is, at its core, a language that is meaningful, practical, and I-driven, it ready for this challenge, prepared to assist every boss make the following part and parcel of their job description: to ensure people at work become heroes in their own eyes. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Does it surprise you to learn that operator-led visuality is not a team-based methodology? Not at first. At first, it strengthens the individual—both in skill and identity. Listen as visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how, when visuality liberates information, it also liberates the human will. This is an outcome that is unique to the visual workplace. It is, also, an indispensable requirement for letting the workplace speak—through people. You can never gain and hold on to the 15%-30% increase in productivity that Galsworth promises—and delivers—if you don’t make room for that part of your employees they leave in their cars, with the window slightly cracked, so it will be there when they clock out at the end of their shift: their will. Visuality invites that part to join in: to participate, express, contribute, and invent visual solutions—many never been seen on the planet before. Does this happen overnight? Rarely, but in operator-led visuality, it does happen. Guaranteed.
What if every CEO, manager and supervisor commit to the single cultural outcome of making every employee a hero in their own eyes? What would change as a result? What would have to change? And how would that happen? Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes how visuality is designed to make every employee a hero at wo—and why this s a core outcome to your journey to operational excellence. In each of us is a deep and abiding need to contribute—a longing to create something of value and share it. Not just in our everyday lives but also at work. Especially at work. There is a hero within—the desire to master and excel. Because visuality is, at its core, a language that is meaningful, practical, and I-driven, it ready for this challenge, prepared to assist every boss make the following part and parcel of their job description: to ensure people at work become heroes in their own eyes. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Changing the consciousness of your company (and therefore its operational capability) can never happen through sheer dint of effort—as legions of exhausted and disappointed change-agents can attest. It happens when we tie into the deep force within us that is the source of all positive change. In combination with us, this force works to inspire, transfer, and translate the new thought. The kind of changes that take place as you implement, for example, the principles and practices of workplace visuality change the way that work gets done in your company -- and change you in the process. This is what you want to happen. This is what is meant to happen. Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, completes the discussion she launched last week into chaos theory, morphogenic fields, fractals and leadership. Adding to this powerful mix, she shares the story of the 100th Monkey, tying its relevance to the transformation that every enterprise wants.
Strange how most of us think that change happens—and how companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we are making by identifying exact causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain? What if an all-but-undetectable logic produces tangible, physical outcomes? What if reality ain’t what it’s supposed to be? Yikes! Tune in this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields. Listen as she shares scientific and personal research about the largest gap in human knowledge: “What we don’t know that we don’t know.” The implications are compelling for all of us, leaders included. When leaders decide to deploy a structured process to move their organizations forward, forces are set into motion that will challenge that decision—even as other forces are triggered that invisibly support it. Tune in/learn more.
Question: Which is more important—visual or lean? Answer: Bad question. Visual and lean share a single destination: operational excellence. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, explains why visual and lean represent a single comprehensive improvement strategy but with a telling difference in focus, process, and metric. They are allies, yet importantly and exquisitely different. Visual’s name for the enemy is information deficits; its macro metric is motion/moving without working. Its goal? Build flow. Build adherence. Lean targets the critical path; its macro measure is time and its corollary, speed. Its job is to dis-entangle the path that value follows—and then put pull in place. Which is more important: time or information? Another bad question. Like the wings of a bird, visual and lean are separate yet equal in impact. Ask a bird which of its wings is more important, and it will answer by flying off. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What happens when supervisors use metrics that drive—instead of measures that merely monitor? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (host/visual expert) shares the telling difference as part of her Visual Leadership series. The focus? The role of supervisors and managers as leaders of improvement. Too many managers falsely believe that posting KPIs on a dashboard will trigger improvement. They are wrong. When they deploy visual metrics instead, they illuminate cause, build local ownership of the problem, and use those metrics to drive us down the causal chain—the natural bridge to visual problem solving (VPS). Traditional PS organizes the noise around a problem. VPS doggedly pursues cause in the nested, multi-layered construct where cause resides. There is no silver bullet solution. Listen as Gwendolyn also shares her perspectives on—and experiences with—CEDAC®, ScoreBoarding, Rolls-Royce/Aerospace, Sheldalh, and Sumitomo’s great practitioner, Dr. Ryuji Fukuda. Let the workplace speak.
Question: Don’t computers make visual displays redundant? Answer: No, the reverse is true; displays are often the only means by which we can, in real time, find and share data from multiple sources (including but not limited to from computers) and cultivate operational excellence. As importantly, displays provide supervisors with the margin and means to master daily dilemmas and become leaders of improvement, not merely logistical expediters. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth in this second installment of the indispensable role displays play in not just improving performance but, as importantly, in providing harried supervisors with that modicum of margin that allows them to grow and lead. Listen as Gwendolyn shares her “10 + 5” add-ons for building more powerful displays and a more actionable understanding of what production data really mean. Learn more as she describes the legendary impact Charles Minard’s visual display had in depicting Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812.
Change is never easy, especially when we are the focus. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth in the next show in her visual leadership series as she discusses the power of visual displays to help supervisors/managers learn the behaviors of becoming leaders of improvement. No longer harried expeditors of logistics, these hard-working lieutenants use displays to organize information into a single, centralized format so they can: a) see the dynamic relationship between complex layers of fast-changing data, b) derive meaning, c) make precise, useful decisions, and d) take timely, independent action. Through displays, supervisor gain control over their corner of the world, even when the pressure is on. Listen and learn how displays become the anchor for the supervisors need to know—morphing overtime into vital action centers for change. And, in the process of changing the workplace, these leaders-in-the making gain the internal margin they need to change themselves. Let the workplace speak.
How can structural limits be useful to Executive Leaders? Study the X-Type Matrix and find out. In this episode in her visual leadership series, Gwendolyn Galsworth delves into the importance of the very limits the X-Type incorporates in its layout. More than any other visual leadership tool, the matrix teaches executives their most important function: how to say yes to the few and wait to the many. As the X-Type teaches us discipline and clarity, it also guides us in developing greater skill in deciding and driving on ever finer levels of detail and effectiveness. The X-Type teaches—and it does not waiver. It doesn’t give an inch. You learn ... or the tool stops helping you. Set it aside, blame the tool—but the X-Type merely waits until we learn the lesson it was designed to teach: We will fail as leaders if we do not curb our appetite and cultivate discernment—lean-ness in thinking and action. This is why the X-Type Matrix is the supreme vehicle for attaining our improvement future.
Why do some executives shake their heads in disgust at mention of the X-Type Matrix—while other sing its praises and credit it for not just saving their company but their jobs. The answer to the first: They were taught incorrectly and badly. The answer to the second: They were taught well. The X-Type Matrix is a single-author tool that allows the visual executive (YOU!) to translate, align, and integrate your company’s vision, mission, and strategy into actionable, cross-functional goals, and projects. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert and your host, defines the X-Type Matrix in detail and explains: a) how a leader develops it; and 2) how that same leader deploys it through others. Once in place, the X-Type connects with the projects, targets, outcomes, and resources required to achieve coveted enterprise outcomes. It is your annual plan on a single page—precise, actionable, and exciting. Yes, there are mistakes to avoid and victories to win. Tune in/Learn more.
What does it mean for a leader to name the horizon? And why is that important? When a leader names the horizon, he names where he wants the company to go together. The horizon is the destination (for example, a 40-Day Engine). Join Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, as she continues her description of her Operation System Improvement Template (OSIT). “Deciding,” she tells us, is where visual leadership begins. The nine OSIT elements provide the foundation for this, allowing the leader to name: 1) customer; 2) vision; 3) mission; 4) values & beliefs; 5) strategy; 6) macro metric; 7) strategic principles; 8) tactical systems; and 9) methods. Attempting to run your company without a fleshed-out OSIT, she says, is comparable to the difference between skiing down the powdery slopes of your favorite mountain—or getting caught in a blizzard on that same mountain, without skis, without food, without a compass, and without anybody even knowing you are there. Tune in/learn more.
Have you seen this? Executives in front of dashboards and LCD monitors, eating up KPI and OEE data. Some, real time. Executives love it. We ask why. The answer is simple: Because they get answers to the question: “Should I worry—or can I relax?” This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, explains that such tools provide executives with information but not with meaning, context or direction—without which executives cannot function effectively. As remedy, Galsworth presents the first of her top three visual tools to help leaders decide and drive (their job): Operations System Improvement Template/OSIT. At first glance, OSIT may look like just another version of the Toyota House (temple), capturing key TPS elements and ready for the office wall. But when fully understood and used, OSIT becomes the premier tool for defining the company’s corporate intent and connecting that to the strategy and principles required for stability and then dynamic growth. Tune in/learn more.
What does a leader of improvement do on the supervisory level? Does that new role overlap with such traditional supervisory duties as expedite and firefight? This week, as her series on Visual Leadership continues, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) maps out the seven elements that define improvement leadership for supervisors and managers—and then explains how visuality is the glue that holds them all together. With “improve” as the anchor element, she walks through the other six: stabilize, measure, target, problem-solve, coach, and model. Then she shares a simple way for supervisors to self-diagnose and put those skills into action, without over-reaching or making too sharp a turn away from their current duties. First understanding. Then practice one new behavior at a time with a buddy—then another. Easy does it. It’s best to eat this particular elephant one bite at a time. Change is never easy, especially when you are its focus. But excellence requires it.
What is visual leadership? Why is it so important? How do leaders become more effective? 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 with the next installment in her visual leadership series. 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 the seven behavioral elements that executives engage in order to become powerful leaders of improvement, visually.
Why do some executives and plant managers struggle to become effective leaders? What does effective leadership mean? How can visuality help leaders be more effective? In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) scans the fourth door in her 10-Doorway Model: the making of an executive leader through metrics, problem-solving and hoshin (policy-goal deployment). To Dr. Galsworth the task of executive leaders is to: decide and drive. She does not embrace the popular but mistaken notion that effective leaders can only be born. Instead, she offers new leaders (and harried managers) a set of highly visual tools that—when learned, applied, and mastered—confers the holy grail of leadership: the ability to say YES to the few and WAIT to the many, with confidence and knowing. Along the way, she anchors your understanding in vivid examples--for instance, Captain Sully’s emergency landing in the Hudson on that cold grey January day in 2009. Let the workplace speak.
Do not confuse managing with leading. Yes, they are linked but they are not the same thing. Each has a central role to play but sequence matters. Join us for the second show in the Visual Leadership series of your host and visual expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth. Over 35 years of hands on experience in the field of visual transformation taught her that managing is a peace time activity; and its behaviors align: We keep things going and stay on an even keel. We monitor, track, and check. And then we check again. Management is about stabilization. Leadership is about growth. Management creates short term safety and a knowable future. Leadership creates short term risk and future expansion. Change is not easy but leaders make it possible. Listen as she shares how the head of one of Indias greatest family conglomerates pivoted his senior team into the first leadership step on a single Saturday morning but only after half the group quit. Tune in or Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Lean is capable of improving the operational profile of so many companies and fast. Yet we ask: When lean turn-arounds are so rapid, can culture be transformed as well? While it is imaginable, for most companies it is unlikely. While many techniques impact the work cultural, none in the view of host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, is more powerful than visuality in transforming a work culture completely and sustainably. This week Gwendolyn launches the first show in her Visual Leadership series and describes how visuality does it. Hear how and why her visual approach engenders fierce commitment and very personal expression. Learn how visuality creates connectivity in an enterprise, even tough ones. Understand the power of margin that slightest bit of internal personal space that can and does liberate 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.
What is the set of practices and mechanisms that must be in place before your company can successfully launch a process that establishes continuous systematic improvement as a way of life in the enterprise? This week’s show on Visual Workplace Radio is the third and final in a series that describes that. In it, your host and visual workplace expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes the last three of the eight requirements she considers indispensable, in this case, for a highly-effective deployment of workplace visuality. They are: the Laminated Map, the Area Hit List, and the Visual Workplace Blitz. Working together, these processes help us find, hold, and drive meaningful improvement outcomes. Join Gwendolyn as she drills deeper into the vital behind-the-scenes preparation that supports the march of improvement through your work areas, across functions, and onto your bottom line. Once again, we understand: a journey's destination is part of its first step. Let the workplace speak.
Success in implementing improvement is not just about what to do--but when to do it and by whom. This week on Visual Workplace Radio, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, presents the second of three shows on an Improvement Infrastructure: the eight behind-the-scenes elements that work synergistically to ensure your deployment outcomes. Continuing, she introduces the purpose and logic of the 3-Legged Stool—those key site leaders that prepare for an effective launch and support long-term outcomes. Then she explains what an official improvement time policy is and why it is indispensable to the on-going success of your improvement journey. She knows what you know: In the battle between production and improvement for time, production always wins. That is as it should be. Your company is in the business of producing products and services. But without a written improvement time policy, there is a real danger that needed improvement will never happen. Tune in/Learn more.
With so many powerful improvement methods available—including visuality, why do so many fail and fail early? Firsat, companies have not put an improvement infrastructure in place prior to launch. There is no framework for success. Second, most companies don’t have a concrete means for tracking early victories and converting them into powerful next steps. This week on Visual Workplace Radio, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares the two sets of start-up requirements that companies need at the start of every improvement process (including visual conversions) in order to ensure intended outcomes happen and are long-term and sustainable. Listen and learn about the first four: 1) the Three Outcomes—the overriding goals of every transformation; 2) the importance of naming/knowing a Vision Place; and 3) importance of tracking bottom-line results; and 4) the meaning of great training materials. This is the first of a two-part series you won’t want to miss.
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.
How can a line impact performance? After all, it is according to John Casey (19th century Irish mathematician) merely: a straight one-dimensional figure, with no thickness, and extending infinitely in both directions, without any ‘wiggles’ along its length.” Why not reject that definition and turn your “lines” into functions, renaming them “borders.” Liberated from their restricted past, your newly-defined borders are now free to trigger a revolution in operational improvement. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) completes the 12 reasons for borders and her march through the 18 border types. Learn about person-width and photocopied borders, range of function, dashed, and slanted borders. Hear about directional and double-function borders, borders as controls, barriers and foam borders, and another visit to time-based borders that allow operators to apply core lean principles while retaining a powerful visual focus. Let the workplace speak.
What happens when your so-called 5S lines find a new life and purpose as borders? What difference does that make—and why is it important? Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth shares how borders produce excellence, ownership, and commitment on your operational floor. That HOW is directly linked to the brain’s relentless effort to find and interpret visual data. This pattern-seeking mechanism of the brain is both built in—and as involuntary and insistent as our heartbeat. Listen as Dr. Galsworth tells the story of her own discovery of this remarkable function of the mind when an operator team implemented a set of borders that transformed the behavior of forklifts drivers—to everyone’s happy surprise. Hear about the unbreakable connection between the pattern seeking capacity of the brain and the built-in capability of the human mind for continuous improvement. Borders have an incredible power to transform even as they create a sense of safety and alignment. Let the workplace speak
Until a company understands the logic and power of borders, they are treated as merely so many lines—useful for neatness and order but not much more. Few people expect “lines” to improve performance; and they don’t. Borders, however, do. And mightily. Borders function. What a surprise to discover that borders (especially when combined with robust addresses) can measurably increase productivity enterprise-wide even as they build a spirited, engaged, and contributing work culture if none yet exists. If such a culture does exist, borders strengthen it, almost immeasurably. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) presents the first of twelve reasons that validate the role of borders on a functional as well as cultural basis. Listen to this first in her new series on operator-led visuality, as Dr. Galsworth describes examples of seven of the 18 types of borders—so you can imagine/re-imagine the role robust borders can play in your company.
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.
What is the indispensable first step on your journey to a visual workplace? The Visual Where—the result on implementing borders, addresses, and (as applies) an ID labels for everything that casts a shadow. Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often feel that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 15%-20% of the final outcome. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, concludes her scan of Doorway-1: operator-led visuality. In it, she introduces the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through the the basics of addresses and those small clusters of the visual where that she calls “visual mini-systems.” Tune in and learn more about the knowledge and know-how you need to inform and inspire value-add associates as they gain control over their corner of the world. Let the workplace speak.
Companies dream about cultural transformation brought on by 5S. But it rarely occurs. In fact, quite the opposite: 5S can turn a growing culture into a dust heap at the very first step—getting rid of junk. Tune in to Visual Workplace Radio this week as Doorway 1 continues. Hear Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and leading visual workplace expert, finish telling the story of Charley and his table—and the mistake made in the name of 5S neat and clean that Charley (and many others) never recovered from. Hear what really makes 5S a success. There’s an awful lot at stake. In the 5S reconfiguration Galsworth has developed over the past 30 years, she puts value-add associates front and center and lets them lead the change—a change in heart and in the physical workplace. She calls it “Work That Makes Sense,” a powerful, proven methodology to convert the HOW, WHAT, and WHO of letting operators get control of their corner of the world, visually. Listen/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
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—just plain mad? Where and why does this well-intentioned company 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—and the territorial imperative kicks in. 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 clear out the clutter, miss golden opportunities to use S1 to re-frame, re-align, and re-invent the work culture. A case in point: Charley’s story and what happened to him and his table in the name of neat and clean. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Have you been wildly successful in rallying hourly employees around the 5S goals of neat, clean, and orderly? Have you tried to motivate their commitment through compliance-based audits? Why not do as the host of Visual Workplace Radio and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, does instead: Focus your 5S on making the workplace visual. When you do, cleanup is about preparing the physical workplace to hold visual location information—the Visual Where. Go further she advises: Incorporate the term “visual” into the name of your process: Visual Factory, Visual Dock, Visual Quality. Or as Lockheed Martin did: 6S/Visual. Make juicy the sometimes-dry steps in 5S. Inspire visionary outcomes instead of only neat and clean. Incite thinking. Tune in this week and learn, for example, Galsworth’s plain but powerful way to join problem-solving with Shine/Scrub. Hear her tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of red-tagging while strengthening its vital center. Listen and learn. Let the workplace speak.
Question: If 5S is so important, why do so many western companies fail at it? Answer: Listen to Visual Workplace Radio this week as host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her robust response as well as a rich cultural and technical explanation of how and why 5S works so well in Japan—but not in the West. Tune in as Dr. Galsworth starts to peel back the layers of concepts, principles, and practices of the first doorway in her 10-Doorway model for creating a workforce of visual thinkers. Doorway 1: owned by value-add associates who deploy the category of visual function she calls Work That Makes Sense (WTMS). Do not mistake this for mere industrial housekeeping or workplace organization. WTMS is more like 5S-on-Steroids! Listen as Gwendolyn starts to share the many innovations she designed to make the process work so well in the West. It will take several shows to tap into the richness of this doorway and what is possible. Hold on to your hats—and let the workplace speak!
Did you know: visual management (VM) is only a subset of the visual workplace? Did you know there are seven other key categories of visual function? Though VM is important (especially to managers and executives), it contributes only about 10% benefit to your bottom line and work culture. Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, defines VM and its over arching goal: to clarify, connect and align operational results with the corporate intent through an array of highly visible (but flat) 2D formats charts, graphs, LCD monitors, KPI dashboards, etc. But VM only shows the results of behavior. It does not create behavior. It does not imbed it. It is limited and over estimated. It cannot replace the other visual functions it is only one of them. Expand your thinking expand your language. Realize the full benefit the visual workplace can contribute to your bottom line and to growing a spirited and engaged work culture. Understand what visual management is not.
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.
Changing the consciousness of your company (and therefore its operational capability) can never happen through sheer dint of effort—as legions of exhausted and disappointed change-agents can attest. It happens when we tie into the deep force within us that is the source of all positive change. In combination with us, this force works to inspire, transfer, and translate the new thought. The kind of changes that take place as you implement, for example, the principles and practices of workplace visuality change the way that work gets done in your company -- and change you in the process. This is what you want to happen. This is what is meant to happen. Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, completes the discussion she launched last week into chaos theory, morphogenic fields, fractals and leadership. Adding to this powerful mix, she shares the story of the 100th Monkey, tying its relevance to the transformation that every enterprise wants.
Strange how most of us think that change happens—and how companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we are making by identifying exact causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain? What if an all-but-undetectable logic produces tangible, physical outcomes? What if reality ain’t what it’s supposed to be? Yikes! Tune in this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields. Listen as she shares scientific and personal research about the largest gap in human knowledge: “What we don’t know that we don’t know.” The implications are compelling for all of us, leaders included. When leaders decide to deploy a structured process to move their organizations forward, forces are set into motion that will challenge that decision—even as other forces are triggered that invisibly support it. Tune in/learn more.
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.
How can a line impact performance? After all, it is merely—as John Casey, noted 19th century Irish mathematician, stated—a straight one-dimensional figure, with no thickness, and extending infinitely in both directions, without any ‘wiggles’ along its length.” Why not change the paradigm and turn your “lines” into functions, renaming them “borders.” Liberated from their restricted past, your newly-defined borders are now free to trigger a revolution in operational improvement. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) completes the 12 reasons for borders and her march through the 18 border types. Learn about person-width and photocopied borders, range of function, dashed, and slanted borders. Hear about directional and double-function borders, borders as controls, barriers and foam borders, and another visit to time-based borders that allow operators to apply core lean principles while retaining a powerful visual focus. Let the workplace speak.
What happens when your 5S lines find a new life and new purpose as borders? What difference does that make—and why is it important? Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth shares how borders produce excellence, ownership, and commitment on your operational floor. That HOW is directly linked to the brain’s relentless effort to find and interpret visual data. This pattern-seeking mechanism of the brain is both built in—and as involuntary and insistent as our heartbeat. Listen as Dr. Galsworth tells the story of her own discovery of this remarkable function of the mind when an operator team implemented a set of borders that transformed the behavior of forklifts drivers—to everyone’s happy surprise. Hear about the unbreakable connection between the pattern seeking capacity of the brain and the built-in capability of the human mind for continuous improvement. Borders have an incredible power to transform even as they create a sense of safety and alignment. Let the workplace speak
Until a company understands the logic and power of borders, they are treated as merely so many lines—useful for neatness and order but not much more. Few people expect “lines” to improve performance; and they don’t. Borders, however, do. And mightily. Borders function. What a surprise to discover that borders (especially when combined with robust addresses) can measurably increase productivity enterprise-wide even as they build a spirited, engaged, and contributing work culture if none yet exists. If such a culture does exist, borders strengthen it, almost immeasurably. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) presents the first of twelve reasons that validate the role of borders on a functional as well as cultural basis. Listen to this first in her new series on operator-led visuality, as Dr. Galsworth describes examples of seven of the 18 types of borders—so you can imagine/re-imagine the role robust borders can play in your company.
Changing the consciousness of your company (and therefore its operational capability) can never happen through sheer dint of effort—as legions of exhausted and disappointed change-agents can attest. It happens when we tie into the deep force within us that is the source of all positive change. In combination with us, this force works to inspire, transfer, and translate the new thought. The kind of changes that take place as you implement, for example, the principles and practices of workplace visuality change the way that work gets done in your company -- and change you in the process. This is what you want to happen. This is what is meant to happen. Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, completes the discussion she launched last week into chaos theory, morphogenic fields, fractals and leadership. Adding to this powerful mix, she shares the story of the 100th Monkey, tying its relevance to the transformation that every enterprise wants.
Strange how most of us think that change happens—and how companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we are making by identifying exact causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain? What if an all-but-undetectable logic produces tangible, physical outcomes? What if reality ain’t what it’s supposed to be? Yikes! Tune in this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields. Listen as she shares scientific and personal research about the largest gap in human knowledge: “What we don’t know that we don’t know.” The implications are compelling for all of us, leaders included. When leaders decide to deploy a structured process to move their organizations forward, forces are set into motion that will challenge that decision—even as other forces are triggered that invisibly support it. Tune in/learn more.
How do visual principles and practices create heroes at work? What are the mechanics? In this third show in her series, The Hero Within, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the power of the two questions that drive workplace visuality: What do I need to know? and What do I need to share? This is the journey of the I. Building on last week’s discussion, Dr. Galsworth maps out how the first question builds self-sufficiency—and the second builds self-leadership among team members and across departments. Each question is designed to help individuals shift their identity as they build the details of their operations into the living landscape of work through visual devices. This impact is huge. That’s when managers and executives realize they are not just investing in a 15% to 30% increase in productivity when they bring visuality on board, they are also cultivating a spirited and engaged workforce—heroes at work. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Does it surprise you to learn that operator-led visuality is not a team-based methodology? Not at first. At first, it strengthens the individual—both in skill and identity. Listen as visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how, when visuality liberates information, it also liberates the human will. This is an outcome that is unique to the visual workplace. It is, also, an indispensable requirement for letting the workplace speak—through people. You can never gain and hold on to the 15%-30% increase in productivity that Galsworth promises—and delivers—if you don’t make room for that part of your employees they leave in their cars, with the window slightly cracked, so it will be there when they clock out at the end of their shift: their will. Visuality invites that part to join in: to participate, express, contribute, and invent visual solutions—many never been seen on the planet before. Does this happen overnight? Rarely, but in operator-led visuality, it does happen. Guaranteed.
What if every CEO, manager and supervisor commit to the single cultural outcome of making every employee a hero in their own eyes? What would change as a result? What would have to change? And how would that happen? Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes how visuality is designed to make every employee a hero at work—and why this is a core outcome to your journey to operational excellence. In each of us is a deep and abiding need to contribute—a longing to create something of value and share it. Not just in our everyday lives but also at work. Especially at work. There is a hero within—the desire to master and excel. Because visuality is, at its core, a language that is meaningful, practical, and I-driven, it ready for this challenge, prepared to assist every boss make the following part and parcel of their job description: to ensure people at work become heroes in their own eyes. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
How do you create a workforce of visual thinkers? Why is that important? What does a work area function like BEFORE this happens? What is the impact of a pre-visual workplace? Join Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth this week as she introduces her 10-Doorway Model for transforming the negative power of a workplace that does not speak into a self-ordering, self-explaining, self-improving company—a visual enterprise. The result is: every organizational level (from operator to CEO) develops a visual language of performance, adherence, and linkages. As Gwendolyn explains, these 10 Doorways allow the company to target its transformation, cultivating within each organization function a new mindset that enables us to solve problems permanently and sustainably. When we liberate information through visuality, we liberate the human will. Liberated information has the power to shift our identity from simply do-ers to contributors—visual thinkers and self-leaders of improvement. Tune in/learn more.
What happens when supervisors use metrics that drive—instead of measures that merely monitor? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (host/visual expert) shares the telling difference as part of her Visual Leadership series. The focus? The role of supervisors and managers as leaders of improvement. Too many managers falsely believe that posting KPIs on a dashboard or bulletin boards will trigger improvement. They are wrong. When they deploy visual metrics instead, they illuminate cause, build local ownership of the problem, and use those metrics that drive us down the causal chain—and bridge naturally over to visual problem solving (VPS). Traditional PS organizes the noise around a problem. VPS doggedly pursues cause in the nested, multi-layered construct where cause resides. There is no silver bullet solution. Listen as Gwendolyn also shares her perspectives on—and experiences with—CEDAC®, ScoreBoarding, Rolls-Royce/Aerospace, Sheldalh, and Sumitomo’s great practitioner: Dr. Ryuji Fukuda.
Question: Don’t computers make visual displays redundant? Answer: No, the reverse is true; displays are often the only means by which we can, in real time, find and share data from multiple sources (including but not limited to from computers) and cultivate operational excellence. As importantly, displays provide supervisors with the margin and means to master daily dilemmas and become leaders of improvement, not merely logistical expediters. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth in this second installment of the indispensable role displays play in not just improving performance but, as importantly, in providing harried supervisors with that modicum of margin that allows them to grow and lead. Listen as Gwendolyn shares her “10 + 5” add-ons for building more powerful displays and a more actionable understanding of what production data really mean. Learn more as she describes the legendary impact Charles Minard’s visual display had in depicting Napoleon’s disastrous march on Moscow in 1812.
Change is never easy, especially when we are the focus. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth in the next show in her visual leadership series as she discusses the power of visual displays to help supervisors/managers learn the behaviors of becoming leaders of improvement. No longer harried expeditors of logistics, these hard-working lieutenants use displays to organize information into a single, centralized format so they can: a) see the dynamic relationship between complex layers of fast-changing data, b) derive meaning, c) make precise, useful decisions, and d) take timely, independent action. Through displays, supervisor gain control over their corner of the world, even when the pressure is on. Listen and learn how displays become the anchor for the supervisors need to know—morphing overtime into vital action centers for change. And, in the process of changing the workplace, these leaders-in-the making gain the internal margin they need to change themselves. Let the workplace speak.
Change is never easy, especially when we are the focus. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth in the next show in her visual leadership series as she discusses the power of visual displays to help supervisors/managers learn the behaviors of becoming leaders of improvement. No longer harried expeditors of logistics, these hard-working lieutenants use displays to organize information into a single, centralized format so they can: a) see the dynamic relationship between complex layers of fast-changing data, b) derive meaning, c) make precise, useful decisions, and d) take timely, independent action. Through displays, supervisor gain control over their corner of the world, even when the pressure is on. Listen and learn how displays become the anchor for the supervisors need to know—morphing overtime into vital action centers for change. And, in the process of changing the workplace, these leaders-in-the making gain the internal margin they need to change themselves. Let the workplace speak.
How can structural limits be useful to Executive Leaders? Study the X-Type Matrix and find out. In this episode in her visual leadership series, Gwendolyn Galsworth delves into the importance of the very limits the X-Type incorporates in its layout. More than any other visual leadership tool, the matrix teaches executives their most important function: how to say yes to the few and wait to the many. As the X-Type teaches us discipline and clarity, it also guides us in developing greater skill in deciding and driving on ever finer levels of detail and effectiveness. The X-Type teaches—and it does not waiver. It doesn’t give an inch. You learn ... or the tool stops helping you. Set it aside, blame the tool—but the X-Type merely waits until we learn the lesson it was designed to teach: We will fail as leaders if we do not curb our appetite and cultivate discernment—lean-ness in thinking and action. This is why the X-Type Matrix is the supreme vehicle for attaining our improvement future.
Why do some executives shake their heads in disgust at mention of the X-Type Matrix—while other sing its praises and credit it for not just saving their company but their jobs. The answer to the first: They were taught incorrectly and badly. The answer to the second: They were taught well. The X-Type Matrix is a single-author tool that allows the visual executive (YOU!) to translate, align, and integrate your company’s vision, mission, and strategy into actionable, cross-functional goals, and projects. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert and your host, defines the X-Type Matrix in detail and explains: a) how a leader develops it; and 2) how that same leader deploys it through others. Once in place, the X-Type connects with the projects, targets, outcomes, and resources required to achieve coveted enterprise outcomes. It is your annual plan on a single page—precise, actionable, and exciting. Yes, there are mistakes to avoid and victories to win. Tune in/Learn more.
What does it mean for a leader to name the horizon? And why is that important? When a leader names the horizon, he names where he wants the company to go together. The horizon is the destination (for example, a 40-Day Engine). Join Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, as she continues her description of her Operation System Improvement Template (OSIT). “Deciding,” she tells us, is where visual leadership begins. The nine OSIT elements provide the foundation for this, allowing the leader to name: 1) customer; 2) vision; 3) mission; 4) values & beliefs; 5) strategy; 6) macro metric; 7) strategic principles; 8) tactical systems; and 9) methods. Attempting to run your company without a fleshed-out OSIT, she says, is comparable to the difference between skiing down the powdery slopes of your favorite mountain—or getting caught in a blizzard on that same mountain, without skis, without food, without a compass, and without anybody even knowing you are there. Tune in/learn more.
Have you seen this? Executives in front of dashboards and LCD monitors, eating up KPI and OEE data. Some, real time. Executives love it. We ask why. The answer is simple: Because they get answers to the question: “Should I worry—or can I relax?” This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, explains that such tools provide executives with information but not with meaning, context or direction—without which executives cannot function effectively. As remedy, Galsworth presents the first of her top three visual tools to help leaders decide and drive (their job): Operations System Improvement Template/OSIT. At first glance, OSIT may look like just another version of the Toyota House (temple), capturing key TPS elements and ready for the office wall. But when fully understood and used, OSIT becomes the premier tool for defining the company’s corporate intent and connecting that to the strategy and principles required for stability and then dynamic growth. Tune in/learn more.
What does a leader of improvement on the supervisory level do? Does that new role overlap with such traditional supervisory duties as expedite and firefight? This week, as her series on Visual Leadership continues, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) maps out the seven elements that define improvement leadership for supervisors and managers—and then explains how visuality is the glue that holds them all together. With “improve” as the anchor element, she walks through the other six: stabilize, measure, target, problem-solve, coach, and model. Then she shares a simple way for supervisors to self-diagnose and put those skills into action, without over-reaching or making too sharp a turn away from their current duties. The key is understanding; then practice one new behavior at a time with a buddy—then another. Easy does it. It’s best to eat this particular elephant one bite at a time. Change is never easy, especially when you are its focus. But excellence requires it.
What is visual leadership? Why is it so important? How do leaders become more effective? 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 with the next installment in her visual leadership series. 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 the seven behavioral elements that executives engage in order to become powerful leaders of improvement, visually.
Do not confuse managing with leading. Yes, they need each other but they are not the same thing. Each has a central role to play but sequence matters. Join us for the second show in the Visual Leadership series of your host and visual expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth. Over 35 years of hands on experience in the field of visual transformation taught her that managing is a peace time activity; and its behaviors align: We keep things going and stay on an even keel. We monitor, track, and check. And then we check again. Management is about stabilization. Leadership is about growth. Management creates short term safety and a knowable future. Leadership creates short term risk and future expansion. Change is not easy but leaders make it possible. Listen as she shares how the head of one of Indias greatest family conglomerates pivoted his senior team into the first leadership step on a single Saturday morning but only after half the group quit. Tune in or Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Lean is capable of improving the operational profile of so many companies and fast. Yet we ask: When lean turn arounds are so rapid, can culture be transformed as well? While it is imaginable, for most companies it is unlikely. And while many techniques impact the work cultural, none in the view of host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, is more powerful than visuality in transforming a work culture completely and sustainably. This week Gwendolyn launches the first show in her Visual Leadership series and describes how visuality does it. Hear how and why her visual approach engenders fierce commitment and very personal expression. Learn how visuality creates connectivity in an enterprise, even tough ones. Understand the power of margin that slightest bit of internal personal space that can and does liberate 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.
Did you know: visual management (VM) is only a subset of the visual workplace? Did you know there are seven other key categories of visual function? Though VM is important (especially to managers and executives), it contributes only about 10% benefit to your bottom line and work culture. Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, defines VM and its over arching goal: to clarify, connect and align operational results with the corporate intent through an array of highly visible (but flat) 2D formats charts, graphs, LCD monitors, KPI dashboards, etc. But VM only shows the results of behavior. It does not create behavior. It does not imbed it. It is limited and over estimated. It cannot replace the other visual functions it is only one of them. Expand your thinking expand your language. Realize the full benefit the visual workplace can contribute to your bottom line and to growing a spirited and engaged work culture. Understand what visual management is not.
Have you noticed? There are two leans in the world today. One lean is defined as a known and knowable destination, achieved by applying a closely defined, formulaic engineering protocol that uses time as the lever. The other lean is seen the same as continuous improvement a never ending process without a hard edge, co terminous with the pursuit of perfection. Join us on Visual Workplace Radio as your host and leading expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, presents the dilemma of two of lean two options or two rivals. First, she un nests each approach. Next she considers a third option, keenly captured in the saga of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot. Then, linking Alex and his solution to our day, she shares her experience with Delphi Automotive when the company set aside its own widely accepted definitions, rules, and practices to achieve a 30% increase in productivity on the shoulders of an already perfected lean production system. In a stroke Delphi defined what growth meant to it.
What is Visual Thinking? The ability of a person to recognize motion and the information deficits that cause it—and then to eliminate both through solutions that are visual. The result is a new companywide competency: people who know how to think visually—a workforce of visual thinkers. These thinkers see workplace problems in a new way and solve them using a set of principles called the Eight Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Listen as host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and award-winning author, introduces the first of these building blocks: i-driven. Listen as she explains how answering two i-Driven questions build visuality into the workplace. Join us and learn what those two questions are and how they engage all employees in creating visual devices. From operator to CEO, manager to planner, supervisor to engineer, this is the dynamic that makes visuality rich, relevant, robust, and sustainable—the key to an aligned and empowered work force. Let the workplace speak.
Question: Which is more important—visual or lean? Answer: Bad question. Visual and lean share a single destination: operational excellence. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, explains why visual and lean represent a single comprehensive improvement strategy but with a telling difference in focus, process, and metric. They are allies, yet importantly and exquisitely different. Visual’s name for the enemy is information deficits; its macro metric is motion/moving without working. Its goal? Build flow. Build adherence. Lean targets the critical path; its macro measure is time and its corollary, speed. Its job is to dis-entangle the path that value follows—and then put pull in place. Which is more important: time or information? Another bad question. Like the wings of a bird, visual and lean are separate yet equal in impact. Ask a bird which of its wings is more important, and it will answer by flying off. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Companies dream about cultural transformation brought on by 5S. But it rarely occurs. In fact, quite the opposite: 5S can turn a growing culture into a dust heap at the very first step—getting rid of junk. Tune in to Visual Workplace Radio this week as Doorway 1 continues. Hear Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and leading visual workplace expert, finish telling the story of Charley and his table—and the mistake made in the name of 5S neat and clean that Charley (and many others) never recovered from. Hear what really makes 5S a success. There’s an awful lot at stake. In the 5S reconfiguration Galsworth has developed over the past 30 years, she puts value-add associates front and center and lets them lead the change—a change in heart and in the physical workplace. She calls it “Work That Makes Sense,” a powerful, proven methodology to convert the HOW, WHAT, and WHO of letting operators get control of their corner of the world, visually. Listen/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
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—just plain mad? Where and why does this well-intentioned company 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—and the territorial imperative kicks in. 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 clear out the clutter, miss golden opportunities to use S1 to re-frame, re-align, and re-invent the work culture. A case in point: Charley’s story and what happened to him and his table in the name of neat and clean. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What is a visual workplace? Why is it important? And how does it produce remarkable bottom-line and cultural results on your journey to operational excellence? Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth—visual workplace expert, practitioner, and author of seven books—answers these questions and explains why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together. Learn how visuality strengthens lean yet remains its own distinct strategy. Understand the difference between visual devices that tell and those that embed behavior. Hear how visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberates the human will. Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, military depot or open-pit mine, tune in and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them. Join Gwendolyn on the first show in her new series with Voice America/Business and learn how to let the workplace speak.
Do we really have to like all the people all the time—especially if “some people” are not cooperating with our very important improvement agenda? Can’t we just make them? Or are we forced, in today’s PC-zealous world, to “show respect” for everyone—even when some are clearly indifferent to the corporate intent and others actively push back? Join us this week as your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her take on this tricky scenario. Listen as she shares The Parable of the Rowers. What does she advise? Don’t cave in and sacrifice your improvement vision. And don’t push your agenda strenuously. Instead learn the telling difference between inertia and resistance—and how to handle both. Keep your eye on the main event: getting visual improvement going and growing in the company. To do so, you may have to learn a new and very different way: allowing, even encouraging, people to be themselves, without fear of penalty—even if they are grumpy. Let the workplace speak!
How do visual principles and practices create heroes at work? What are the mechanics? In this third show in her series, The Hero Within, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the power of the two questions that drive workplace visuality: What do I need to know? and What do I need to share? This is the journey of the I. Building on last week’s discussion, Dr. Galsworth maps out how the first question builds self-sufficiency—and the second builds self-leadership among team members and across departments. Each question is designed to help individuals shift their identity as they build the details of their operations into the living landscape of work through visual devices. This impact is huge. That’s when managers and executives realize they are not just investing in a 15% to 30% increase in productivity when they bring visuality on board, they are also cultivating a spirited and engaged workforce—heroes at work. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Does it surprise you to learn that operator-led visuality is not a team-based methodology? Not at first. At first, it strengthens the individual—both in skill and identity. Listen as visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how, when visuality liberates information, it also liberates the human will. This is an outcome that is unique to the visual workplace. It is, also, an indispensable requirement for letting the workplace speak—through people. You can never gain and hold on to the 15%-30% increase in productivity that Galsworth promises—and delivers—if you don’t make room for that part of your employees they leave in their cars, with the window slightly cracked, so it will be there when they clock out at the end of their shift: their will. Visuality invites that part to join in: to participate, express, contribute, and invent visual solutions—many never been seen on the planet before. Does this happen overnight? Rarely, but in operator-led visuality, it does happen. Guaranteed.
What if every CEO, manager and supervisor commit to the single cultural outcome of making every employee a hero in their own eyes? What would change as a result? What would have to change? And how would that happen? Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes how visuality is designed to make every employee a hero at wo—and why this s a core outcome to your journey to operational excellence. In each of us is a deep and abiding need to contribute—a longing to create something of value and share it. Not just in our everyday lives but also at work. Especially at work. There is a hero within—the desire to master and excel. Because visuality is, at its core, a language that is meaningful, practical, and I-driven, it ready for this challenge, prepared to assist every boss make the following part and parcel of their job description: to ensure people at work become heroes in their own eyes. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Why is getting improvement going and growing so tricky? Why do companies so often bail in the early stages—long before they even have had time to fail.? Why is it that the start stops us? If you already learned the answers, another improvement initiative will only strengthen you. But newcomers may take a nosedive. In fact, understanding WHAT to do is only half the battle. The other half is HOW—how to do that what. And then doing it. Knowledge + Know-how. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares the lessons she has taught—and learned—about that HOW. She maps out five factors that can doom your best intentions and your highest hopes—and waste a lot of money. And they may not be the factors you think: 1) the mistaken pursuit of perfection; 2) casual selection of the improvement method—and/or its lacks of a separate and robust deployment protocol; 3) demanding results too quickly; 4) training for the wrong reasons; and 5) ….well, tune in and find out.
Question: Which is more important—visual or lean? Answer: Bad question. Visual and lean share a single destination: operational excellence. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, explains why visual and lean represent a single comprehensive improvement strategy but with a telling difference in focus, process, and metric. They are allies, yet importantly and exquisitely different. Visual’s name for the enemy is information deficits; its macro metric is motion/moving without working. Its goal? Build flow. Build adherence. Lean targets the critical path; its macro measure is time and its corollary, speed. Its job is to dis-entangle the path that value follows—and then put pull in place. Which is more important: time or information? Another bad question. Like the wings of a bird, visual and lean are separate yet equal in impact. Ask a bird which of its wings is more important, and it will answer by flying off. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
This week, your host and visual expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth concludes her walk through her 10-Doorway Model; she discusses the final six doors. First, Doorway 5: use visual controls and visual pull systems to regulate-balance the consumption/replenishment of material. Then move to quality. Doorway 6 targets poka-yoke devices (aka., “visual guarantees”) so you can control the behavior of cause on the attribute level. The result? The end of mistakes and with that, zero defects. Doorway 7 is next: Apply methods from the six previous doorways to a new outcome: the Visual Machine®—let your equipment speak. Similarly, apply those same six methods in Doorway 8 and achieve the Visual-Lean® Office. In Doorway 9, set up a Visual Macro Team for creating visual linkages between departments, enterprise-wide. And in Doorway 10, implement a comprehensive self-audit system, based on a compelling array of visual principles. Align and unite the company visually. Let the workplace speak.
Why do some executives and plant managers struggle to become effective leaders? What does effective leadership mean? How can visuality help leaders be more effective? In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) scans the fourth door in her 10-Doorway Model: the making of an executive leader through metrics, problem-solving and hoshin (policy-goal deployment). To Dr. Galsworth the task of executive leaders is to: decide and drive. She does not embrace the popular but mistaken notion that effective leaders can only be born. Instead, she offers new leaders (and harried managers) a set of highly visual tools that—when learned, applied, and mastered—confers the holy grail of leadership: the ability to say YES to the few and WAIT to the many, with confidence and knowing. Along the way, she shares anecdotes that anchor her meaning—for example: Captain Sully’s emergency landing in the Hudson on that cold grey day in January 2009. Let the workplace speak.
Workplace information can change quickly and often—products, schedules, specifications, tooling, parts, methods, and the thousands of other details on which the daily life of the enterprise depends. How can busy (often harried) supervisors and managers stay on top of this ever-shifting detail and still make sound, timely decisions? The answer is: visual displays/production control boards. This category of visual function is Doorway 3 in the 10 Doorways Model. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your show host and visual workplace expert) defines visual displays: physical presentations of multi-layered information in single, interactive formats. Their purpose? To enable supervisors and managers to see and grasp complex information at-a-glance, understand a situation's status, and take correct, timely, and independent action. Tune in and learn how displays get developed (I-driven) and help you gain control over your corner of the world, even when the pressure is on. Let the workplace speak.
Standards are the bedrock of all work, paving the way to repeatable, precise, and predictable outcomes. What manager/supervisor does not rightly pursue standards as the starting point of all work. But where do Visual Standards fit in? And can they ensure exact, stable performance? This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, maps out the conceptual and practical profile of visual standards: what they are, how they work, and what they can—and cannot—contribute to operational excellence. This is the stuff and substance of Doorway 2, the category of visual function owned and led by managers, supervisors, and engineers—but also often mis-understood by them. Why? Because they look for control where none is possible. As Galsworth explains, visual standards can have only limited impact because they lack POWER. Power to ensure that what is supposed to happen does happen. Yes, in terms of power, visual standards have none. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What is the set of practices and mechanisms that must be in place before your company can successfully launch a process that establishes continuous systematic improvement as a way of life in the enterprise? This week’s show on Visual Workplace Radio is the third and final in a series that describes that. In it, your host and visual workplace expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes the last three of the eight requirements she considers indispensable, in this case, for a highly-effective deployment of workplace visuality. They are: the Laminated Map, the Area Hit List, and the Visual Workplace Blitz. Working together, these processes help us find, hold, and drive meaningful improvement outcomes. Join Gwendolyn as she drills deeper into the vital behind-the-scenes preparation that supports the march of improvement through your work areas, across functions, and onto your bottom line. Once again, we understand: a journey's destination is part of its first step. Let the workplace speak.
Success in implementing improvement is not just about what to do--but when to do it and by whom. This week on Visual Workplace Radio, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, presents the second of three shows on an Improvement Infrastructure: the eight behind-the-scenes elements that work synergistically to ensure your deployment outcomes. Continuing, she introduces the purpose and logic of the 3-Legged Stool—those key site leaders that prepare for an effective launch and support long-term outcomes. Then she explains what an official improvement time policy is and why it is indispensable to the on-going success of your improvement journey. She knows what you know: In the battle between production and improvement for time, production always wins. That is as it should be. Your company is in the business of producing products and services. But without a written improvement time policy, there is a real danger that needed improvement will never happen. Tune in/Learn more.
With so many powerful improvement methods available—including visuality, why do so many fail and fail early? Firsat, companies have not put an improvement infrastructure in place prior to launch. There is no framework for success. Second, most companies don’t have a concrete means for tracking early victories and converting them into powerful next steps. This week on Visual Workplace Radio, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares the two sets of start-up requirements that companies need at the start of every improvement process (including visual conversions) in order to ensure intended outcomes happen and are long-term and sustainable. Listen and learn about the first four: 1) the Three Outcomes—the overriding goals of every transformation; 2) the importance of naming/knowing a Vision Place; and 3) importance of tracking bottom-line results; and 4) the meaning of great training materials. This is the first of a two-part series you won’t want to miss.
What is the indispensable first step on your journey to a visual workplace? The Visual Where—the result on implementing borders, addresses, and (as applies) an ID labels for everything that casts a shadow. Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often feel that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 15%-20% of the final outcome. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, concludes her scan of Doorway-1: operator-led visuality. In it, she introduces the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through the the basics of addresses and those small clusters of the visual where that she calls “visual mini-systems.” Tune in and learn more about the knowledge and know-how you need to inform and inspire value-add associates as they gain control over their corner of the world. Let the workplace speak.
Companies dream about cultural transformation brought on by 5S. But it rarely occurs. In fact, quite the opposite: 5S can turn a growing culture into a dust heap at the very first step—getting rid of junk. Tune in to Visual Workplace Radio this week as Doorway 1 continues. Hear Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and leading visual workplace expert, finish telling the story of Charley and his table—and the mistake made in the name of 5S neat and clean that Charley (and many others) never recovered from. Hear what really makes 5S a success. There’s an awful lot at stake. In the 5S reconfiguration Galsworth has developed over the past 30 years, she puts value-add associates front and center and lets them lead the change—a change in heart and in the physical workplace. She calls it “Work That Makes Sense,” a powerful, proven methodology to convert the HOW, WHAT, and WHO of letting operators get control of their corner of the world, visually. Listen/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
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—just plain mad? Where and why does this well-intentioned company 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—and the territorial imperative kicks in. 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 clear out the clutter, miss golden opportunities to use S1 to re-frame, re-align, and re-invent the work culture. A case in point: Charley’s story and what happened to him and his table in the name of neat and clean. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Have you been wildly successful in rallying hourly employees around the 5S goals of neat, clean, and orderly? Have you tried to motivate their commitment through compliance-based audits? Why not do as the host of Visual Workplace Radio and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, does instead: Focus your 5S on making the workplace visual. When you do, cleanup is about preparing the physical workplace to hold visual location information—the Visual Where. Go further she advises: Incorporate the term “visual” into the name of your process: Visual Factory, Visual Dock, Visual Quality. Or as Lockheed Martin did: 6S/Visual. Make juicy the sometimes-dry steps in 5S. Inspire visionary outcomes instead of only neat and clean. Incite thinking. Tune in this week and learn, for example, Galsworth’s plain but powerful way to join problem-solving with Shine/Scrub. Hear her tips on how to avoid the pitfalls of red-tagging while strengthening its vital center. Listen and learn. Let the workplace speak.
Question: If 5S is so important, why do so many western companies fail at it? Answer: Listen to Visual Workplace Radio this week as host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her robust response as well as a rich cultural and technical explanation of how and why 5S works so well in Japan—but not in the West. Tune in as Dr. Galsworth starts to peel back the layers of concepts, principles, and practices of the first doorway in her 10-Doorway model for creating a workforce of visual thinkers. Doorway 1: owned by value-add associates who deploy the category of visual function she calls Work That Makes Sense (WTMS). Do not mistake this for mere industrial housekeeping or workplace organization. WTMS is more like 5S-on-Steroids! Listen as Gwendolyn starts to share the many innovations she designed to make the process work so well in the West. It will take several shows to tap into the richness of this doorway and what is possible. Hold on to your hats—and let the workplace speak!
How do you create a workforce of visual thinkers? Why is that important? What does a work area function like BEFORE this happens? What is the impact of a pre-visual workplace? Join Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth this week as she introduces her 10-Doorway Model for transforming the negative power of a workplace that does not speak into a self-ordering, self-explaining, self-improving company—a visual enterprise. The result is: every organizational level (from operator to CEO) develops a visual language of performance, adherence, and linkages. As Gwendolyn explains, these 10 Doorways allow the company to target its transformation, cultivating within each organization function a new mindset that enables us to solve problems permanently and sustainably. When we liberate information through visuality, we liberate the human will. Liberated information has the power to shift our identity from simply do-ers to contributors—visual thinkers and self-leaders of improvement. Tune in/learn more.
Why do we say that visuality is a new system of thinking? What’s new about it? The answer is found in the eight elements that Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, calls the “Building Blocks of Visual Thinking.” In the last two episodes of Visual Workplace Radio, you learned about the first five of those: I-driven, Standards, Six Core Questions, Information Deficits, and Motion. This week Dr. Galsworth shares the final three: the definition of Work, the Value Field, and Motion Metrics. Listen as she explains the telling difference between primary and secondary value fields and why you can be sure you are in motion whenever you are not in your primary one. Learn how and why your understanding of your true value field evolves overtime as you begin to better recognize the true nature of work. Hear how 17 colleagues in a semi-conductor company outside Boston simultaneously experienced this as they watched Paulette Benedictus do her work. Tune in/learn more.
How do you create a workforce of visual thinkers? What is the invisible enemy that visual thinking targets for destruction? How do you uncover the visible footprint this enemy leaves in its wake—the only means at your disposal for tracking down this profit-eating foe? Listen as your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her overview of the eight building blocks of visual thinking. In her last episode, she presented the first building block: i-Driven. In this show she describes the next four: standards, six core questions, information deficits, and motion. As she does, Dr. Galsworth walks you through the logic of this new paradigm of thinking that forms the foundation of a fully-functioning, sustainable performance environment—and a spirited and engaged workforce. Whether yours is a factory, bank, hospital, office, military depot or open-pit mine, tune in and learn how to think visually and help others do the same! Let the workplace speak!
What is Visual Thinking? The ability of a person to recognize motion and the information deficits that cause it—and then to eliminate both through solutions that are visual. The result is a new companywide competency: people who know how to think visually—a workforce of visual thinkers. These thinkers see workplace problems in a new way and solve them using a set of principles called the Eight Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Listen as host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and award-winning author, introduces the first of these building blocks: i-driven. Listen as she explains how answering two i-Driven questions build visuality into the workplace. Join us and learn what those two questions are and how they engage all employees in creating visual devices. From operator to CEO, manager to planner, supervisor to engineer, this is the dynamic that makes visuality rich, relevant, robust, and sustainable—the key to an aligned and empowered work force. Let the workplace speak.
What is a visual workplace? Why is it important? And how does it produce remarkable bottom-line and cultural results on your journey to operational excellence? Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth—visual workplace expert, practitioner, and author of seven books—answers these questions and explains why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together. Learn how visuality strengthens lean yet remains its own distinct strategy. Understand the difference between visual devices that tell and those that embed behavior. Hear how visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberates the human will. Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, military depot or open-pit mine, tune in and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them. Join Gwendolyn on the first show in her new series with Voice America/Business and learn how to let the workplace speak.
Our exploration—and exultation—of the power of borders continues. Completing the agenda from last week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, provides three stunning examples of the double-border function—highly useful applications you can bring to your own company and your own area. She then moves on to color-coded borders and the secret of their success (as well as the most common mistakes). As time permits, Galsworth will detail two other border-strengthening processes. First, her tips for laying down borders that last a year but can be removed overnight. Then she shares her 11-Step Procedure for developing a color-coded system for borders that, among other things, ties each color to the percentage of floor space that color category actually occupies. This is a call-in show so don’t hesitate to tell us about your own border/color-code challenges. Time is not an issue. Anything we don’t finish this week, we can complete during next week’s show.
The problem with using the term “line” interchangeably with “border” is that a line is a geometric coordinate. It does not have a performance function. But a border not only tangibly contributes to the nature and performance of work, it also functions dynamically as an operational partner in how, when, and where work gets done. The more we understand this, the more we recognize how borders can help us create work that makes sense. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) discusses ways you can add dimensions of meaning to your borders so they can extend, control, and reveal the work itself. When we get very clever with borders, we can even make them imbed time into the process. Yes, borders change our understanding of the flow and changes in work content. As a result, our visual intelligence grows. And as we get smarter, our borders get smarter as well. Tune in and learn more—especially if you want to amp up your current 5S approach.
Until a company understands the logic and power of borders, borders are merely treated as so many lines—useful for neatness and order but not much more. Few people will expect performance to improve because of them, let alone positively impact KPIs. What a surprise to discover that borders (especially when combined with robust addresses) can measurably increase productivity on the departmental level, even while helping build a work culture of continuous improvement if there is none. And if such a culture already exists, borders will strengthen it. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) presents the reasons that justify borders on a functional as well as cultural basis. Tune in and learn how borders help to make the workplace transparent, building accountability and a PDCA loop in the floor and work surfaces. Listen as Galsworth describes dozens of examples and you imagine or re-imagine the role robust borders can play in your company.
Borders are the work horses of operator-led visuality—and rarely utilized to their full potential. Over the past several weeks, your host, author, and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, has walked us through the Smart Placement formula (Function + Location = Flow) so we can position workplace items in locations that connect and align their functions. Now nail that relationship in place through borders, addresses, and (if possible) ID labels—a trio of device categories that imbeds the visual where. We begin with borders, starting with the floor and moving up to walls, benches, shelving, cabinets, and drawers. In the end, borders get installed for everything that casts a shadow—a requirement that applies equally to easy-to-move items as well as to those that never budge (machines and tall shelves). Plus when you learn to apply borders effectively, they can get smarter as you get smarter. Join us this week LIVE! Learn about borders and their powerful visual performance vocabulary.
Visuality based in principles means you can continue to expand workplace transparency far beyond the first cycle. Over the past two months, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, has explained and described a set of 14 Smart Placement Principles and how to imbed them into the living landscape of work. The result? The flow of work content based on the actual function of the things that populate the work environment. In today’s show, this discussion is completed and next steps described. In addition, Galsworth shares key insights from the project she has undertaken in parallel to her show: revitalizing and strengthening her approach to poka-yoke/visual guarantees. In it, the true meaning of 100% Source Inspection becomes clear: the conversation between attributes. And the real use of poka-yoke devices comes to light: imbedding those attributes deeply into the process of work—or better yet into the design of the product so it can only be made right. Tune in for more.
The final three of the fourteen principles of Smart Placement focus on opportunities hidden in thin air. What, for example, is meant by “negative space?” And how do you turn it into a positive factor that helps the enterprise succeed? This is just one of the many imbedded questions this set of principles reveal. In this final Smart Placement show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) discusses this and other important content that can help you utilize Smart Placement, either as an powerful doorway to robust 5S or as a set of stand-alone lessons that can be used by any work area keen on improvement—whether assembly area, hospital floor or engineering office. One thing is sure: The past eight episodes of The Visual Workplace have demonstrated that where the things of work are located is of vital importance and there is more to learn about that than has ever been contemplated. Tune in and find out for yourself. This a LIVE, call-in show. Let us hear from you!
Piles of things is a known trigger for massive motion. As we continue our journey through the fourteen principles of smart placement, we learn not only how to order those piles but how to organize them to support our performance outcomes. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walks you through Principle 9: ways to sort not only components and supplies into a coherent pattern but, if need be, the entire layout of your area. Or in the case of Scania Trucks, the entire production floor; the result: a 30% increase in productivity and cancellation of plans to build a new plant. Then, in Principle 10, you learn how co-locate different workplace items for a specific task. Called “Design-To-Task,” this approach is indispensable to complex machine change over, patient delivery or assembly processes. Then on to “Use the Existing Architecture,” one of the many double-up functions in workplace visuality. Tune in and learn how to utilize these in your company.
Flow is pull’s foundation. Pull is flow under demand, driven by time. This week we focus on Principle 8/Let The Flow Do the Work in our continuing march through the 14 Smart Placement principles. In 8, we look at the macro-layout in a work area and at its overall flow line. How would you describe that flow? Fluid? Stalled? Using the Could-Be/Dream Map to illuminate motion, we contemplate the placement of what’s easy-to-move and what needs approval before it can be re-located. If you are a regular listener, you know you are in the Land of Big Ideas (yellow post-its)—and they have to be considered carefully. Not handling Big Ideas correctly can cause your smart placement efforts to crash and burn. Do not confuse “I-driven” with open-handed permission. If you do, associates may get the mistaken notion that thinking of a BIG improvement idea is the same as doing it. This is not so. Listen and hear how to handle those decisions and keep the spirit of inventiveness and engagement alive.
This week on The Visual Workplace, we continue our march through the fourteen principles of Smart Placement. Last week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) walked us through the first four. Today, we are bound to pick up three or four more—maybe five: Principle 5/Put It On Wheels; Principle 6/Make It Ergonomically Sounds; and Principle 7/Make Function Appear & Disappear At Will. Those three conclude the basic set of easy-to-make changes on a micro-level. Then we move on to thinking that is more abstract and more conceptual, beginning with Principle 8/Let The Flow Do The Work. You will also learn more about how to maximize the use of the Could-Be Map that teams created to help them see, think, and re-envision the layout of function in their work areas. Listen as Gwendolyn tells you how to keep groups engaged and thinking and how to set up a Charge Chart that captures that thinking, without overpromising. Join us for another practical session of how-tos and what-ifs.
How do we get smart about the placement of function at work? If you’ve been listening to The Visual Workplace, you now have a growing understanding of the HOW and the WHY of that. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) continues to share the details of this core methodology—which she developed so operators could deploy higher dimensions of 5S and become more culturally aligned. This is where 5S and visual thinking begin their dance. After a quick review of the learning so far, hear the first four of the 14 Smart Placement Principles, principles that operators apply directly to their Could-Be or Dream Maps. Because these first four principles are simple, they get heads nodding and pave the way, gradually, to more complex considerations as value-add associates re-engineer the layout of function and create an accelerated flow of material, information and themselves into and through their work areas. Join us for an hour of practical, hands-on listening.
If employee ownership is crucial to continuous improvement (and who would deny that?), then what happens when people want to own their improvements too much? What do you do when hourly associates falsely assume their creativity guarantees their ideas will get deployed? How do you handle the outliers—people with innovative but un-popular improvement notions? And what happens when operators cannot agree amongst themselves on what is needed and why? How do you handle that? Do you step in and pull rank? Do you let associates “duke it out?” In this third show in her current Smart Placement series, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) tackles these questions and shares her “Four People Process Tools” for getting people involved and managing the boundaries. In parallel, she completes the details started last week of the Smart Placement Mapping process, a core step in her 5S protocol for making borders meaningful. This is a LIVE show. Call-in comments and questions welcomed!
Question: On your way to the Visual Where, what do you do before laying down floor borders? Answer: You implement Smart Placement. This is a surprise step Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) discovered twenty-two years ago when her then-attempts at traditional 5S failed. Part of that failure, she realized, stemmed from people laying down lines that simply traced where workplace items were—instead of validating the current location of the functions those items represented or improving it. In response, she inserted a step before implementing borders: Smart Placement. This week in the second show in the series, Galsworth walks you, step by step, through Smart Placement mapping. She also emphasizes the need for trainers/coaches to do their own homework in advance while also preparing for messy people issues associated with new layouts. Listen and learn how to amplify and anchor your 5S in visual thinking and operator inventiveness. This is a LIVE show. Call-ins welcome!
Does the location of things at work matter? You bet! Finding that right location can accelerate the flow of work—or slow it to a standstill. This is the logic of Smart Placement and its formula: Function + Location = Flow. Over the next several shows, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares her Smart Placement approach—that indispensable step before laying down borders. Today, she defines the problem of placement that is not smart and shares a mapping tool so you/your teams can discover the level of motion (moving without working) in your area currently triggered by un-smart location—the un-conscious placement of function. Smart Placement doesn’t just show us where things are. It ensure that things are in the right place—not simply a designated location (as in “a place for everything/everything in its place”)—but the smart place for a function (item), its right location in relationship to every other function in the area. Tune in and learn more.
What’s next? The physical training room is in tip-top shape, you as a trainer know whom to train—and how to handle some quirky issues that surface on your way to your training launch. And thanks to last week’s show, you also better understand what supervisors and managers do during training sessions (Gwendolyn will finish up the last three of the nine principles she started last week). What’s next? Now we get down to brass tacks: Just what do trainers teach? What do you talk about? What do you explain? How do you get people to learn about and apply visuality? How do they become visual thinkers? And what does Galsworth mean when she tells us (repeatedly!): Trainers have to do their homework or the learning won’t happen? What is that about? Tune in this week and get the next dose of how to become a brilliant visual workplace trainer, as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, continues her series on just that. This is a LIVE show. Call-ins welcome!
How do supervisors contribute to a successful visual workplace conversion? This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her series on “Becoming a Brilliant Visual Workplace Trainer”—this time focusing on the crucial role supervisors play in a visual transformation. But that role is probably not what you or they think. Yes, everyone knows it is vital for supervisors (and managers) to get and stay on board. But what if they spoil the process because they don’t fully understand the nature of the change visuality represents for their direct reports? Even highly successful, natural-born supervisors may need to adjust their approach. What has this got to do with becoming a brilliant trainer? EVERYTHING! Tune in as Gwendolyn discusses the four remaining principles of effective visual workplace training. When she does, the indispensable role of the supervisor may take on new meaning for you and your company. This is a LIVE show. Your call-in is welcomed!
Whether you are new or very experienced as a trainer, there are special things to learn in order to become an exceptional visual workplace trainer. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, award-winning author and visual workplace expert, continues her trainer series and shares the first five of her Nine Principles of Effective Training—principles that build knowledge, understanding, skill, and confidence for trainer and learner alike. Listen as Gwendolyn discusses: 1) Principle One/Inspire First, Then Inform; 2) Principle Two/Start Small (growth is faster/deeper as a result); 3) Principle Three/The First Cycle is for the Trainer; 4) Principle Four/Everyone Gets Trained (representative training is not effective); 5) Principle Five/Make the Training Room Physically & Psychologically Safe for Learning (operationalize “Respect for the Individual”). In support of Principle 5, Galsworth shares two sub-techniques: “Normalize the Room” and “Talk Amongst Themselves.” Tune in for all this and more!
What are the visual tools of the new leadership for supervisors? Last week your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, presented their seven-element new role description. After a short reminder of how supervisors begin to practice these new skills, Galsworth introduces a nested framework of visual functions, designed to equip traditional supervisors and executives to take on their new leadership roles. The first of these visual functions is Visual Displays: multi-layered information delivered in single, interactive format. Displays enable us to see the relationship between complex information at-a-glance, understand status, and take correct, timely, and independent action—based solely on the info in that display. Tune in and learn why effective displays are always I-driven and how they help harried supervisors: a) secure control over their corner of the world, and b) gain the internal margin needed to become effective visual leaders of improvement. Call-in LIVE: 866-472-5790.
Do you mistakenly use the term “visual management” to refer to the full spectrum of visual function in the workplace? If so, you probably also mix up visual scheduling boards with visual displays. The first merely shows the production time table. The second—when properly built—reveals the pain of the supervisor in trying to achieve that time table: the barriers and constraints. The first merely makes the schedule visible. The second shows supervisors how to improve and get control over their corner of the world. The result? Margin—room to change. That is why your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, positions displays as the premier visual tool for supervisors on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. Tune in this week as she walks you through her unique process for creating visual displays—I-driven and capable of addressing production challenges even as work unfolds. Get really good at this and your displays will start talking to each other. Listen
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 LIVE and learn how these elements work together and how your supervisors can gain skills and experience in each. Call-in: 866-472-5790.
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. Invite your staff to listen LIVE. Call in: 866-472-5790.
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 imbedded? 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. Call in questions/comments: 866-472-5790.
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. This is a LIVE show. Call in: 866-472-5790.
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. Listen LIVE!
Is yours one of the many companies that has given up on 5S? You tried it once—in great earnestness: Sort, Set in Order, Simplify, Standardize, Sustain (or some other set of “S” words that were supposed to work). But just as you thought you had it rolling, you got push instead of pull. Struggle instead of success. Join us this week when your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her secrets for a 5S Makeover—a 5S resurrection. Listen as she shares five simple 5S tips that can revive your 5S—and give you the leverage you need to get and sustain the 5S promise: improved performance and improved KPIs and cultural results. Who would argue with what 5S is supposed to accomplish—cleanliness and order? Who would argue with the how—the 5S audit? Gwendolyn—that’s who! She can and does dispute both. If you already put 5S in the trash, discover five simple ways to bring it back to a vibrant, long-lasting, and productive life. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
Have you committed to a new operational vision? If so, a lot is about to change—including the role of your supervisors. There are so many ways your supervisors can contribute. Are you taking full advantage? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, concludes her 3-part series on getting supervisors on board via your 5S/Visual Blitz. Don’t underestimate this opportunity. Following Galsworth’s five step process for on-boarding supervisors, you quickly see that running an operator-driven blitz is more than a task—much more. It’s a first-rate development opportunity that helps your supervisors grow as leaders and monetizes operator participation. Yes, each blitz can contribute to the corporate intent—in the work area and the company—if you follow these five simple steps, carefully executed: 1/Share the Vision; 2/Teach the Blitz; 3/Demonstrate the Blitz; 4/Practice the Blitz; and 5/Launch the Blitz. Sound too simple? Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
Are you taking full advantage of your weekly or monthly blitzes? Are they just about an attack on waste? Or do you position them as genuine growth opportunities? Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, maps out the ways in which she uses the blitz event to provide a crucial improvement window for the keepers of the corporate intent—your supervisors. Rightly framed and prepared for, your blitz (whether visual, kaizen or lean) can become a training ground and a stepping stone for supervisors to go further and grow stronger—on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. But you have to pre-load a defined pathway that gets you there. Powerful outcomes don’t happen by accident. Listen as Gwendolyn defines her formula for this, including sharing the vision, training the Blitz format, practicing the Blitz format, and forging a strong coaching relationship between supervisors and your training function. Listen/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What’s wrong with employee engagement? What’s wrong with getting people involved? Nothing—as long as you make supervisors an active part of that. Don’t be a company that supports operator creativity but forgets that supervisors are contributors too. When empowerment ignites, it’s party time—and supervisors want to be part of it. But what part and how? Listen in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, sets up the logic of supervisor growth—why to get your supervisor involved and how. Walk with her through her five steps for supervisor empowerment and the mission-critical contribution your five-star sergeants can—and want to—make to the corporate good. Yes, you can use the visual blitz format. In fact, you should. As long as you use it, not as an end in itself, but as a training ground and a stepping stone for supervisors to go further and grow stronger—on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Our sustainment series wraps up today—at least for the time being. And what three things do we now know for sure? 1) A company that does not learn how to sustain its improvements will lose them. 2) A company that thinks audits creates sustainment has confused compliance with engagement—and will fail. 3) Sustainment requires a balance between people, imagination, and structure/tools. In today’s Visual Workplace show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the fourth understanding: 4) Sustaining means driving—and to drive you need a destination (a clear focus) and plenty of gas. Join us and hear specific ways to cultivate continuous engagement as part of your sustainment process. Learn how to re-fresh and re-fuel people’s thinking each month so that new ideas and inventions are continually generated and your KPIs improve. Learn more about why we say: Visuality doesn’t just drive work culture—it creates it. This is a LIVE show. Your emails and call-ins are welcome!
Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often believe that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 25%-35% of the final outcome. Nonetheless, the formula of Border + Address + ID Label for everything that casts a shadow represents the indispensable first step of that journey. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, reminds you of the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through rules, tips, and innovations associated with applying addresses. Learn to drill still deeper by applying that formula to small clusters of linked function that Galsworth calls Visual Mini-Systems. Tune in and hear, as well, training tips to help you create 5S outcomes that ignite and inspire value-add associates while directly impacting the bottom line. Your call-in comments, stories, and questions are welcomed.
What are realistic expectations about how people should and do respond to your splendid new improvement initiative? Should you get your hopes up? Should you remain detached and neutral? Or should you gird your loins for battle? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discusses what she has discovered over three decades of implementations: that people will respond to change in one of three ways. They embrace it. They resist it. Or they do not have an opinion about it one way or the other; they are neutral. We call this threesome: The Rowers, Watchers, and Grumblers. And they offer us a perspective on the I of the I-driven approach to workplace visuality. Tune in this week and hear Gwendolyn share the telling difference between inertia and resistance and the most effective way of handling the grouches. Learn what not to do and what happens when individuals are allowed, even encouraged, to be themselves, with no fear of penalty.
Why is getting improvement going so tricky? Why do companies so often bail in the early stages—long before they even have had time to fail? Why is it that the start stops us? Building on last week’s show when we learned the difference between the HOW of deployment and the WHAT, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, maps out five factors that can doom our best efforts to launch successful improvement initiatives. The first factor, discussed last week, is the mistaken pursuit of perfection. Secondly, we are often far too casual about choosing the methodology itself—or it lacks a separate and robust implementation protocol. The third factor that can defeat us is when managers demand results too quickly and, in doing so, rob the organization. Fourth, our trainers begin to train groups for the wrong reasons. Fifth, implementers decide to re-shape the methodology long before they have learned it. It’s the start that stops us. Tune in LIVE and find out why.
It is a well-recognized fact that understanding WHAT to do is only half the battle in operational improvement. The other half is HOW—and then doing it. Knowledge + Know-how. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares the lessons she has taught—and learned—about getting HOW going. If you’ve already cracked this code and learned how to deploy and make it stick, launching another improvement initiative will only strengthen you. But if you are a newcomer (or have a history of “almost-made-its”), the challenge of putting knowledge in place—so it can be and is used—can be a mighty challenge. So much is at stake: 1) promised bottom-line results; 2) cultural growth; 3) hope and confidence; and 4) the reputation of the people who promised success. Your reputation. But few authentic roadmaps exist to help with this subtle, behind-the-scenes process. It’s the start that stops us unless we know that and what to do about it. Tune in LIVE. Call in.
We are in the homestretch. Just 8 of the 25 leadership tasks remain—tasks that help ensure the success of operator-level visuality: Work That Makes Sense (WTMS). Do 25 tasks seem too many? If so, how many is enough? Could we get away with 18 tasks? Or a tidy 10? Your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, says 25 is the right number for her—because she needs a sturdy set of principles, truths, and sub-routines to frame, launch, anchor, support, and maintain WTMS. The purpose of the first seven (parts 1-2) is to orient and focus your launch. The next six (part 3) ensure you hit the ground running. The five tasks in part 4 anchor the methodology. And a final set of eight—last week’s topic and this—keeps your conversion going and growing: 1) Keep hit lists up-to-date; 2) Show up for every blitz; 3) Create memories; 4) Follow up/Follow thru; 5) Track your KPIs; 6) Open a store; 7) Organize walk-abouts; and 8) Build visual best practices. Tune in/Learn More. Let the workplace speak.
Imagine this: a beautifully-baked cake left in the rain—dissolving into nothing. That’s how it can feel when your improvement initiative hits the skids. You launch. You follow the rules. You gain momentum and start getting results. Then—bamm!—you hit a roadblock and things grind to a halt. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her march through the 25 leadership tasks she developed to prepare, launch, anchor, and support a visual conversion. She’s down to the final eight. But where, you ask, did these come from? They came from her lifelong study of implementations, looked at from many angles and in different light. As an improvement practitioner, you can do this too—the way French painter, Claude Monet, did when he visited the Cathedral at Rouen and responded with his 30 studies in light. It was the same structure but he learned to see it differently. Let that be you. As you implement, probe, adapt, and add—some or all of the 25. Tune in/Learn more.
Did you prepare to get started? Did you get ready for success? Did you launch? Yes! Congratulations! Next question: Can you relax? Next answer: Sorry, no! Yes, you accomplished 12 of the 25 tasks that need to be in place to support improvement success. But more is needed. You have simply graduated to the next level of vigilance. You still have stay on your toes—but in a new way. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, maps out the list-that-needs-doing after your launch. Better said, this is not so much a list as a set of core principles that can really mess things up if you are not aware of them—or not yet experienced enough to understand their importance. Let’s change that. Today Gwendolyn will treat five of thirteen “tasks” that remain: 1) Pay attention to beginnings; 2) Handle big ideas wisely; 3) Balance I-driven with consensus; 4) Promote iterations/cultivate cycles; 5) Don’t standardize too soon. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Strange how most of us believe change happens. Strange how we believe companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we’re making by attending to exact technical causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain and an all-but-undetectable logic produces these tangible, knowable outcomes? Suddenly reality ain’t what it used to be—or is supposed to be. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields, sharing research on how companies evolve and learning happens, based on the largest gap in understanding that exists: “what we don’t know we don’t know.” Tune in and you may be surprised to learn that even monkeys can point the way to what’s really going on when we learn, implement, and improve. This is a live show. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed!
How do you celebrate the completion of the ordinary? Who would want to come to that party? Getting ready for a successful visual conversion begins many weeks before the first training session—and it looks like a long list of mundane, humdrum tasks. There is good reason for that: It is. But if you don’t do them, the likelihood of failure looms large. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, will walk you through the next six tasks on her 25-item list of how to get ready for a splendid visual transformation. This set of six is undertaken by your trainers and supervisors: 1) Define the new role for supervisors; 2) Decide on a border protocol (so they last a year but can be removed overnight); 3) Develop a color code system for borders; 4) Create ways to keep visual workplace supplies handy (and why); 5) Set up a communications center; and 6) Give money away to operators, with few strings attached. All before you launch.
Is it realistic to troubleshoot your next improvement process before it gets started? Can you really plan your failures away—even when lots of people are involved? According to Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, the answer to both questions is a resounding YES. Join us this week as Dr. Galsworth continues her march through the 25 leadership tasks that she considers mission-critical for a highly-effective visual conversion. These tasks or behaviors either prepare us for success—or trigger a set of early victories that allow the company to build momentum, moving from strength to strength. This week she adds four tasks to the set of seven the senior manager or ranking site executive undertakes before the first person gets trained: 4) Target the change through your Laminated Map; 5) Resource success through your Improvement Time Policy; 6) Get your supervisors aligned and on board; and 7) Get Maintenance aligned and on board. All before you launch.
Q: How many ways can your improvement initiative fail? A: Nearly uncountable. Q: How many ways can you succeed? A: Well, that depends on how many of 25 success principles and practices you implement—before and during your roll out. Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins her march through the principles and practices she considers mission-critical for a highly-effective improvement process (a visual conversion)—behaviors that build your site’s improvement infrastructure. Listen as she explains the first three of seven behaviors that you, as the ranking site executive, need to undertake before the first person gets trained: 1) Name in advance the financial, cultural, and visionary outcomes you want; 2) Set up your accountability team prior to launch; and 3) Identify a vision place—an actual physical location that demonstrates that what you want is not just possible but already exists in inspiring fullness. All before you launch. Tune in/Learn more.
Some US politicians have provocative notions about Mexico and its society. They talk about keeping the Mexican people out of the USA—while, in the view of other political leaders, we should be looking for ways to bring more Mexicans in. Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, spent last week in one of Mexico’s main industrial cities—Queretaro. She was there under the auspices of the Opex Academy-Shingo Prize to conduct visual site assessments, meet with business leaders, and spread the word about workplace visuality and its power to inform and transform. And what a trip it was. Although Gwendolyn has worked in Mexico’s maquiladora centers since 1986 -Juarez, Matamoros, Reynosa-, this time she went deeper and further—and encountered that country’s beating heart. Tune in this week as she shares what she discovered: that nation’s rich value system that we in the USA would do well to appreciate and cultivate in our own lives and companies. Tune in-Learn more.
Did you know: 50 percent of our brain function is dedicated to seeing and interpreting visual data? Yes, that’s the way we make sense out of all that we see—and we humans see a great deal. In 1985, the host of this radio show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, had an encounter that revealed this but not in a way she recognized at the time. The players: 1- an operator, 2- an indexed final assembly line at Toyota, 3- an impact wrench, 4- five lug nuts and 5- a bucket of pink powder. The stage was set. Hidden in plain sight, that pink powder was much more than it seemed—and much more powerful than its fluffiness might suggest. As she slowly realized that that powder was in fact a performance partner in Toyota’s production process—plus key to the perfect quality for which the company was then famous. Listen as Gwendolyn supplies the details of this scenario and describes the two prime principles of visuality that she derived from it -with examples. Tune in-Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Is there a part of us so hidden from view that decades can pass without anyone noticing that we possess a rich and creative interior life? And is it possible that even then we ourselves may not take it that seriously—until one day we do? We just do. And that changes our lives, permanently and in ways that are dazzling. Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host, has the rare treat of interviewing a man who started life as an artist, then became a master plumber and very successful businessman for nearly four decades—only to set it all aside in order to become an artist again. That man is Gwendolyn’s brother, Gary Galsworth, known around Hoboken, NJ, as: Gary da Plumber. As they talk, Gary shares his journey from, and then back to, his path with heart. Finding it was not that hard—but following it took guts. But just for the first few steps. Then it became the only way. During the show, Gary reads poems from his two books, Yes Yes and Beyond the Wire—both available on Amazon.
Question: How big are chronic information deficits in the workplace? Answer: HUGE!!! Imagine Godzilla and you are approaching the right size. Find the footprint of this beast and you will have a gauge for the massive volume of motion that missing answers trigger at work—whether you are in a hospital, office, factory or open-pit mine. This week on the Visual Workplace, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, will map out four handy ways you can calculate the size of the beast, even as you plan its extinction. Visuality is a system of thinking first—then a system of doing. Put that thinking into action by: 1- Staying alert-looking-listening: 2- Using a memo pad and pen: 3- Naming the location of your main work: 4- Having a pedometer or stopwatch handy. Gwendolyn explains precisely how to use these simple elements to stalk the enemy, wrestle it to the ground, and cremate its broken body! Hurray. Lean can’t help—nor Six Sigma nor CI. Visuality to the rescue. Tune in-Learn more.
There is an enemy in your company—and it’s 100 percent invisible. You can’t see it because it literally is not there. Yet its impact is massive on every level of the enterprise, from board room to marketing to operations to the field staff. And the only way you have even the smallest chance of destroying it is by focusing on what it causes…its footprint. Can you name that enemy? Can you name its footprint? Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, reveals that enemy and shows you how to find it, stalk it, and destroy it. Hint: It takes 8 to 10 minutes to recover from an interruption, any interruption, no matter how long or short? To recover doesn’t merely mean to get back to the task-at-hand. It means: to get back to the level of focus and attention you had before the interruption. And some of us get interrupted so often that we are convinced interruptions are a part of our job description. In some companies, we are called supervisors. Tune in-Learn more.
George Bernard Shaw, the 19th century Irish playwright, once declared: “The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” An amusing thought perhaps—but, for most companies, the result is not funny. If you make a habit of blaming bad communication for problems and mistakes—including assembling a part the wrong way or administering the wrong med—you miss the real problem. Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, presents a four-part logic that explains why things go wrong at work, and only one part is “bad communication.” That logic is called The Four Workplace Conditions, derived from the work of Dr. Ryuji Fukuda, former head of quality at Sumitomo. Follow the four stages as performance deteriorates from ideal to just plain wrong because people: a- don’t understand, b- they cannot execute, or c- no one has yet identified what’s right. Here is a new way of keeping track of results—and all in support of greater visuality at work.
Strange how most of us believe change happens. Strange how we believe companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we’re making by attending to exact technical causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain and an all-but-undetectable logic produces these tangible, knowable outcomes? Suddenly reality ain’t what it used to be—or is supposed to be. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields, sharing research on how companies evolve and learning happens, based on the largest gap in understanding that exists: “what we don’t know we don’t know.” Tune in and you may be surprised to learn that even monkeys can point the way to what’s really going on when we learn, implement, and improve. This is a live show. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed!
How involved should value-add associates be in making a visual workplace conversion a success? If you ask Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visuality expert: a lot! One of the major mechanisms for doing this is “The Visual Workplace Steering Team”—the topic of today’s show. Call this team what you will, it consists of hourly employees who volunteer to monitor the visual roll out in the enterprise and provide feedback and recommendations to help ensure its success. Its members collaborate with management to make sure the company keeps true to the cultural values and implementation principles it professes to embrace. While this team, by design, has no positional authority, it does have significant responsibility. In short: empowerment on steroids! Tune in for the details on: what this team is, how it functions (autonomously), what it contributes—and how it governs itself and learns to govern itself. Galsworth provides the fine points. This is a LIVE show. Emails and call-ins welcomed!
Our sustainment series wraps up today—at least for the time being. And what three things do we now know for sure? 1) A company that does not learn how to sustain its improvements will lose them. 2) A company that thinks audits creates sustainment has confused compliance with engagement—and will fail. 3) Sustainment requires a balance between people, imagination, and structure/tools. In today’s Visual Workplace show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the fourth understanding: 4) Sustaining means driving—and to drive you need a destination (a clear focus) and plenty of gas. Join us and hear specific ways to cultivate continuous engagement as part of your sustainment process. Learn how to re-fresh and re-fuel people’s thinking each month so that new ideas and inventions are continually generated and your KPIs improve. Learn more about why we say: Visuality doesn’t just drive work culture—it creates it. This is a LIVE show. Your emails and call-ins are welcome!
What happens after the Visual Where (“5S”) is in place? Do visual contributions from value-add associates stop? If no, then how do line employees continue to visually develop a robust operational language for day-to-day work? That’s the topic of this week’s Visual Workplace show. In it, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how operators can extend their visual thinking to new areas of challenge: motion triggered by information needed by internal (and later, external) customers and suppliers. She calls this extended or advanced visual thinking: “Customer-Driven Visuality,” one of the keys to sustainability through visuality. In this fourth show on SUSTAIN, Galsworth answers the double-sided question: 1) How do we use visuality to anchor and sustain improvement? and 2) How do we use visuality to sustain (and extend) visuality? That’s when continuous improvement becomes a way of life in the company. This is a LIVE show. Your call-in questions/comments are welcome!
What company champion (site executive, CEO, plant manager, GM) does not seek ways to sustain and extend hard-won improvement results. But few such executives rightly understand what sustainment means or how to attain and extend it. Instead, they mistakenly insist upon mechanisms that track—or even enforce—compliance: Audits are a case in point. But, says Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert), they would do better to look for specific ways to use their positional power to: 1) cultivate employee engagement; and 2) drive improvement. In this week’s show, Galsworth presents the third segment in her on-going discussion on “tools that sustain.” This time she focuses on the role of the Management Champion (aka, site executive) and two mechanisms that champions can use to help drive the improvement process—without driving over employees in the process: The Management Watch and The Laminated Map. This is a live show. Your comments and questions are welcomed.
What does RESPECT FOR THE INDVIDUAL mean? How do we operationalize it? How do we translate RESPECT into behavior? In this second week on the “Nine Tools That Build & Sustain,” Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert), presents the Visual Workplace Checklist—a core tool that value-add associates use to maintain and then improve current levels of visuality in their areas. Grounded in the I-driven principle, this checklist is wholly owned by area associates because they: 1) choose checklist items/tasks; 2) administer the checklist themselves; 3) score each item/task based on the extent to which it is complete/incomplete. Plus, checklist items evolve over time. Unlike static audits, this is a dynamic process, made even more so by the rotation of the so-called Checklist Patrol. Tune in and learn how to re-vitalize your 5S by developing knowledge, high-level application, and self-leadership. Also learn ways to make visual workplace supplies a part of your sustainment framework.
What is the true goal of sustaining improvement? The true—indeed, the only—goal is to strengthen the behaviors that lead to a continuous improvement work culture. Hard-won though they are, these behaviors can erode quickly if we do not take concrete steps to sustain them. In this week’s show, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to share nine powerful sustaining tools. First, we learn an exacting definition of discipline (one that may surprise you)—followed by the so-called Visual Workplace Code of Conduct. This code, which is practiced by value-add associates in the targeted areas, is designed to build the qualities of self-leadership into each person’s day. From resisting the temptation to vote excellence into existence—to working for true consensus and modeling the behaviors in yourself that you wish to see in others. If sustainment does not help us grow into who we really are, we are stuck with a narrow definition of ourselves and so is our company.
Where do you land on this question.Do heroes just happen in the case of rare individuals or can we take steps to groom the hero’s mindset in all of us? Which one holds the truth for you? And what is the impact of that? This week on visual workplace radio, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares her response on this in the eighth and final show in her Hero Within series. Along the way, she draws sharp parallels between heroes in the workplace—and the habits of management, habits of mind, and habits of heart. Here’s another set of questions? Why do the sharks at your city’s aquarium not eat every other fish in that pool? And why don’t elephants break free and run away when they are tied in place by a rope so tiny that even grandma could tear off? The answers to all these questions have a great deal to do with the understanding companies need to enable every employee to become a hero at work—and how visuality can help. Tune in tolearn more. Let the workplace speak.
If building a workforce of heroes is part of a company’s vision, then how can supervisors help? What is their role? Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, reveals the all-important part supervisors—and we include managers in this term—play in helping value-add associates find and cultivate the hero within. New supervisory behaviors kick in early, even before the first training session. But they aren’t easy. In fact, most supervisors loudly object to adopting them—at first. Then they learn for themselves the power behind not supervising—not managing—people who are just beginning to learn what it means to become improvement contributors. This particular bend in the methodology may surprise you as well and is especially important in a visual conversion where the individual holds the key not only to robust visual solutions but to the sustainability of those visual outcomes—and your growing profit margins. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
Is there a tried-and-true profile of a hero? A time-tested, widely-accepted persona that the rest of us can model ourselves after? Or is it possible, for example, for the hero of a tale to also be a grade-A grump? Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares her first-hand account of the shop floor story that taught her the answer and a lot of other valuable lessons. The grump in this instance was a machine operator named Charley and—harking back to last week’s show on the value field—a gripping struggle over a table that everyone (except Charley) wanted to toss into the trash. Even though everyone in his union-based plant was trying hard to learn what R-E-S-P-E-C-T meant in everyday work, Charley’s case was so extreme that his co-workers decided to take certain liberties with that definition—and they lived to regret it. In this sixth show in her hero within series, Gwendolyn provides the telling details. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
What happens when your operational methodology collides with your cultural goals? What happens is: something’s gotta give. Join us as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, links the value field (where work happens)—with the beating heart of every successful work culture: spirit (a broad equivalent to the term respect). Learn how this cultural element can work for or against your improvement goals as Dr. Galsworth shares two stories from her own deployment history. The first is about Paulette and how she and her co-workers re-defined their value field so they could drill deeper into their info deficits. The other is about Charley and the table in his value field that everyone (except Charley) wanted to toss into the trash. In this fifth show in her hero within series, Gwendolyn shares what to do/not to do when faced with grumpy people and very positive people—because they can both contribute hugely to your implementation success. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
Do we really have to like all the people all the time—especially if “some people” are not cooperating with our very important improvement agenda? Can’t we just make them? Or are we forced, in today’s PC-zealous world, to “show respect” for the individual—even when some are clearly indifferent to the corporate intent and others actively push back? Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her take on this tricky scenario. Listen as she shares The Parable of the Rowers. Learn what she advises: Don’t cave in and sacrifice your improvement vision—and don’t push your agenda strenuously. Learn instead the telling difference between inertia and resistance—and how to handle both. Keep your eye on the main event: getting visual improvement going and growing in the company. To do so, you may have to learn a new and very different way: allowing, even encouraging, people to be themselves, without fear of penalty. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
How do visual principles and practices create heroes at work? What are those mechanics? In this third show in her series, The Hero Within, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the power of the second of the two questions that drive workplace visuality: What do I need to share? Building on last week’s discussion, Dr. Galsworth maps out the details of why this question works and how to put it to immediate use in your company. Have your pocket memo pad ready! She also reveals how this second driving question builds connectivity and alignment among team members and across departments—and how it shifts the identity of the people applying it. This impact is huge. And it is important to define it so managers and executives realize they are not just investing in a 15% to 30% increase in productivity when they bring visuality on board, they are also capitalizing a spirited and engaged workforce—heroes at work. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Would it surprise you to know that operator-led visuality is not a team-based methodology? Not at first. At first, the process focuses on strengthening the individual—both in skill and identity. Listen as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes the individual journey that each individual (the “I”) engages when they learn why and how to gain control over one’s corner of the world through visual solutions. As a result, the company gains a 15%-30% increase in productivity. The individual gains that part of themselves that was previously not welcomed at work—the part they left in the back seat of the car, with the window slightly cracked so it is still there when they clocked out at the end of the shift. Operator-led visuality invites that part in—to participate, to express, and to invent visual solutions, some never been seen on the planet before. This is a boon to the corporate good. Tune in. Learn more about the journey of the I. Let the workplace speak.
What would it be like if every CEO, manager and supervisor commits to the single cultural outcome of making every employee a hero in their own eyes. What would change as a result? What would have to change? And how would they do it? Join us this week as your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her view on why becoming a hero at work is important—and how workplace visuality can help that happen. At the core of each of us is a deep and abiding need to contribute—a longing to share, or even create, something of value. Not just in our everyday lives but also at work, especially at work. There is a hero within. We want to master and excel. In Gwendolyn’s experience, this can be and has been accomplished by implementing workplace visuality—because it is a language, so practical, and I-driven. What would it be like to make that outcome a part of every boss’s job description—to ensure people become heroes in their own eyes at work. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
KPIs are a popular measurement approach. They are everywhere and here to stay. But that doesn’t mean they are a reliable way to improve. In fact, KPIs are structurally incapable of improvement—except as a kind of motivating shock like a bad report card when we were kids. Our parents get on our case; we knuckle down: get better grades quick—solve the problem. And we usually do—solve it enough for the KPI to bump up enough. A pattern forms: bad KPI + vigilant boss + enough problem solving = enough improvement. But what would happen if the measures themselves triggered improvement—without the stuff in the middle? If problem solving happened as we measured? That is exactly what visual metrics do—they stack cause and reveal the improvement pathway, in one fell swoop. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walks you through the purpose and power of visual metrics and shows you how to use them. AND that can change everything. Tune in LIVE. Call in LIVE: 866-472-5790.
POP QUIZ: Q/1: How many sets of measures do you need to improve a department’s performance? Answer: one. Q/2: Who owns that measure? Answer: The user. Q/3: Why is it critical for us to understand the importance of those two questions and how to respond to them fully and correctly? For answers, listen to Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth this week as she lays out that logic. With examples and stories, Gwendolyn shows you how to begin constructing a measurement system that drives—and why it’s mission-critical. It starts with the first brick: identify the owner of the metric and then its voice. Only then will the metric illuminate cause. Only then can it drive. Learn, as Galsworth first walks you through a set metrics that don’t work—that can’t work. Then hear how to shift them. The fact is: metrics can perform on a level far distant from and far better than merely counting and tracking. They can do more than simply monitor performance. They can improve it. Tune in LIVE and call-in: 866-472-5790.
Too often, we make the mistake of thinking that making measures visible (tacking them on a bulletin board) has the power to create improvement. It does not—and that includes your KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs show only. They monitor performance but they do not change it. Why? Because they cannot. KPIs cannot cause improvement because they are not structured to do so. But Visual Metrics are—the next tool in the supervisor’s visual leadership tool box. In this week’s show, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth—your host and visual workplace expert—defines and discusses visual metrics: a category of visual function that speaks in the voice of the user, defines performance in concrete, local terms, and illuminates cause. And because they illuminate cause, visual metrics are capable of driving down the causal chain. And driving, as you know, is the most powerful form of leading. Tune in and learn what visual metrics are, how to develop them, and how to use them to lead: to drive excellence.
Does this sound familiar? You find ourselves faced with a powerful opportunity for change—and decide you’d better take it in small doses. Better not get overwhelmed, you think. Better not lose control. So you enter that powerful opportunity, piecemeal. And then you wonder why the change seems so ordinary—not much of a change at all. Companies are like that too, especially if they are at an early moment in the switch from a command and control work culture to one of genuine empowerment. Listen this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, maps out some myths about participation that can exert a weakening influence, even in the early stages of 5S. And if 5S gets off to a timid start, not much of strength will follow. What are those myths—their names and their anxious behaviors? And how do we combat them? How do we build a powerfully engaged work culture—beginning with 5S—so we can move from strength to strength. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What does the world of work hold in common—no matter the setting? This week at The Visual Workplace, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares the answer. The single and fundamental transaction deployed a million times a day in every workplace is: the translation of vital information into behavior. In recognizing this, we understand workplace visuality’s shining purpose—to imbed information into the living landscape of work in order to imbed behavior: human behavior, machine behavior, and company behavior. This week that true purpose is front and center—along with its impact. The results! Listen as Gwendolyn shares the remarkable bottom line and cultural outcomes created by effectively implementing the technologies of the visual workplace: 15% to 30% increase in productivity, an aligned and engaged workforce on every level of the organization, and a complete transformation of the company into an enterprise of visual thinkers. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Do you remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs—and its rank order list of six powerful motivators: food/shelter, personal safety, love/friendship, the esteem of others, self-actualization, and (the gold ring) self-transcendence? Maslow did a lot to prove that we humans are not just about one thing. We are about many. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, adds one more motivator to the list: Beauty. Listen as she describes where and how beauty already exists in our companies—and where it could become even more present. Do you work in a warren of walled-in rooms, surrounded by endless hallways? Bring beauty to them and each hallway becomes a promenade. What about the world of grease and grime at the top of every overhaul & repair stream? Some simple steps can bring beauty in. And is your factory floor merely neat and clean—thanks to 5S—but not yet beautiful? Do something quick to stir the eye and inspire the heart. Beauty, the final frontier. Let the workplace speak!
What if 5S-from-Japan made a cozy—and permanent—home for itself in the West as a core and very successful part of continuous improvement? What if 5S triggered high, even dazzling, levels of employee engagement? What if 5S was a system that pulled high-impact operational outcomes into a place that fed the bottom line? Great questions to which your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, says: Why not? Tune in this week as she introduces four new elements into 5S that change—everything! These four create a powerful synergy that can transform your 5S into 5S on Steroids: 1) information deficits as the enemy; 2) motion as the measure; 3) visual devices as the solution; and 4) I-driven as the engine. Traditional 5S contains no authentic call to action—and for good reason: It is first and foremost a compliance-based (not process-based) approach. So we tick off if we did/did not do what we were supposed to do, audit style. Let’s change that! Let the workplace speak. Tune in/learn more.
What if your 5S was a creative process that engages, enlivens, educates, and elevates? What if your 5S could let the workplace speak? Let’s face it: 5S has a problem, a BIG problem. And it lies at the very foundation of the 5S approach. But this problem cannot be addressed through an audit or any other piece of paper. It’s a bigger problem than that. Join us this week as visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her take on why traditional 5S is such a struggle for far too many companies. Why they have to push their 5S agenda far too often and far too hard. The problem, as Galsworth explains, is what lies beneath the 5S logo. The problem is with 5S’s internal mechanism—its central thesis or theme. Its compelling premise. What is that? What is 5S’s beating heart? Does it even have one? If your answer is not substantive and meaningful, then 5S is merely an activity your boss requires you to undertake—an activity you have to push associates to apply. Tune in/learn more.
What’s hard about a 5S audit? Not much—except most companies can’t get them started. Or if started, can’t make them stick. And did we mention the push back and/or the indifference? But it doesn’t have to be that way. Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares six simple—but powerful—ways to tweak your approach to the 5S audit and change—well, everything. For example, have you ever considered what would happen if you let your associates own the audit format and change the items that they get audited on? Have you ever considered letting your operators audit themselves? And maybe other departments as well? Have you ever thought about actually changing audit items—so they would trigger a response that was something beyond a simple YES/NO? And how about that scoring scale? Does it work? Could it work? It’s time to rehabilitate your 5S audit—to create success for the company and develop people as well. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
When 5S came to our shores from Japan in the early 1980s, its purpose and process seemed simple, straightforward, and useful. Easy-peasy. But implementing 5S turned into an entirely different story. Though many western companies enjoyed remarkable triumphs, others struggled—or quite simply failed. Why? Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares her answers. In the process, she draws sharp differences between US and Japanese values. She also names three other culprits: 1) confusions in the English translation; 2) the mistaken notion that 5S was a surefire way to build an engaged workforce; and 3) the decision to use the 5S audit as a key sustainment tool. As Dr. Galsworth points out, that decision pitted a compliance format that required people to adhere to the rules of 5S—against the attempt to use the same audit to build creative improvement. The workforce balked. The gap was just too wide for many companies to bridge. Tune in/learn more.
Is yours one of the many companies that has given up on 5S? You tried it once—in great earnestness: Sort, Set in Order, Simplify, Standardize, Sustain (or some other set of “S” words that were supposed to work). But just as you thought you had it rolling, you got push instead of pull. Struggle instead of success. Join us this week when your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her secrets for a 5S Makeover—a 5S resurrection. Listen as she shares five simple 5S tips that can revive your 5S—and give you the leverage you need to get and sustain the 5S promise: improved performance and improved KPIs and cultural results. Who would argue with what 5S is supposed to accomplish—cleanliness and order? Who would argue with the how—the 5S audit? Gwendolyn—that’s who! She can and does dispute both. If you already put 5S in the trash, discover five simple ways to bring it back to a vibrant, long-lasting, and productive life. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
Have you committed to a new operational vision? If so, a lot is about to change—including the role of your supervisors. There are so many ways your supervisors can contribute. Are you taking full advantage? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, concludes her 3-part series on getting supervisors on board via your 5S/Visual Blitz. Don’t underestimate this opportunity. Following Galsworth’s five step process for on-boarding supervisors, you quickly see that running an operator-driven blitz is more than a task—much more. It’s a first-rate development opportunity that helps your supervisors grow as leaders and monetizes operator participation. Yes, each blitz can contribute to the corporate intent—in the work area and the company—if you follow these five simple steps, carefully executed: 1/Share the Vision; 2/Teach the Blitz; 3/Demonstrate the Blitz; 4/Practice the Blitz; and 5/Launch the Blitz. Sound too simple? Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak!
Are you taking full advantage of your weekly or monthly blitzes? Are they just about an attack on waste? Or do you position them as genuine growth opportunities? Tune in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, maps out the ways in which she uses the blitz event to provide a crucial improvement window for the keepers of the corporate intent—your supervisors. Rightly framed and prepared for, your blitz (whether visual, kaizen or lean) can become a training ground and a stepping stone for supervisors to go further and grow stronger—on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. But you have to pre-load a defined pathway that gets you there. Powerful outcomes don’t happen by accident. Listen as Gwendolyn defines her formula for this, including sharing the vision, training the Blitz format, practicing the Blitz format, and forging a strong coaching relationship between supervisors and your training function. Listen/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What’s wrong with employee engagement? What’s wrong with getting people involved? Nothing—as long as you make supervisors an active part of that. Don’t be a company that supports operator creativity but forgets that supervisors are contributors too. When empowerment ignites, it’s party time—and supervisors want to be part of it. But what part and how? Listen in this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, sets up the logic of supervisor growth—why to get your supervisor involved and how. Walk with her through her five steps for supervisor empowerment and the mission-critical contribution your five-star sergeants can—and want to—make to the corporate good. Yes, you can use the visual blitz format. In fact, you should. As long as you use it, not as an end in itself, but as a training ground and a stepping stone for supervisors to go further and grow stronger—on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
When 5S came to the West in the early 1980s, we were inspired and eager to get on board. In a blinding flash of the obvious, we asked how we could have worked for so many decades in such cluttered, dirty work places—and achieved any level of success. But the fact is we did work in such places, without a second thought—and we became a world economic power. Go figure. With the blessing of Womack and Malcolm, we forged ahead with 5S. Countless companies achieved remarkable 5S triumphs. But many other companies failed in ways both puzzling and wrenching. In some, using the term “5S” was banned forever. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes a glance into the past and begins to answer the question: Why? What went wrong? Why had these unintended—often disastrous—consequences occurred? To start, she shares her take on the origins of Japan’s 5S model, its true role, and how all that fit with the values and preferences of the West. Tune in/learn more.
Is lean alone enough? Many companies attempt to convert from traditional to the new manufacturing by relying exclusively on lean tools. Hospitals and offices too. In keeping with core lean principles, they focus on reducing the time component of a process–attacking time as a cost factor in order to increase profit margin. That means reducing cycle time as well. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, as she begins a discussion thread on the interface between lean and visual. (Fasten your seatbelts because in a few short weeks, this thread will bring us face to face with the role of 5S to help or hinder.) Make no bones about it: lean (time-based improvement) is a critical step in transforming the enterprise and increasing profit margins. But impressive gains that improving your critical path can generate will erode over time—and not that much time—if you don’t take specific steps to build sustainability through visual workplace technologies. Tune in/Learn more.
Can operators really impact the business case directly with area-based visual improvement? You bet they can—if they learn how! This week your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her discussion on how line employees can add improvement value to the company—and gain value for themselves—through the principles and practices of Work That Makes Sense/Operator-led Visuality (WTMS). First, your trainers have to train with great expectations in mind—as long as they first find them for themselves. Listen as Gwendolyn walks through the importance of your trainers doing their homework so they find the change they seek—before they train the first operator. Doing advance homework is critical for all the modules in the WTMS system. But the business impact is perhaps never more dramatic than when you help value-add associates implement Smart Placement. Tune in as Gwendolyn anchors this with examples from her Master Class in western Minnesota last month. Let the workplace speak.
What do visual workplace trainers contribute? How do they add value for the company—and gain value for themselves? Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, brings back the news from her most recent Master Class—in the cold, remote regions of western Minnesota. Listen as she shares how she trained a team of visual workplace trainers to use visuality to envision and build the company’s business case. And how, in the process, they discovered that: a) it’s a mistake to use operator-led visuality as just an expanded form of 5S; b) their role as coaches is more than simply ensuring that monthly visual blitzes get scheduled and occur; and c) they can use visuality to introduce TIME into operations—with or without lean. As they began to master visual thinking, these trainers began to see how to advance the company’s operational cpk (capability) and teach others how to surface and link up key feeder functions and let the workplace speak. Tune in/learn more.
Did you know visual management (VM) is a part—only a subset—of the visual workplace? And that there are seven other main categories of visual workplace function besides visual management? Though VM is important (especially to managers and executives), it represents only a small segment of the visual workplace continuum. Join us this week for part two of Gwendolyn Galsworth’s series on visual management. As she states, VM has one over-arching goal: to clarify the corporate intent and connect and align it with: a) corporate-level results, b) site-level results, c) area-level results; and d) value-add level results. How is this done? Visually, through an array of highly-visible but flat 2D formats: charts, schemata, graphs, templates, LCD monitors, KPI dashboards, and so on. But visual management is not visual performance. Don’t stuff all visual workplace functions under the single VM label. Expand your thinking/expand your language. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
Who doesn’t recognize the tremendous power of the visual workplace in operations—color coding, visual standards, kanban, borders, addresses, production boards, poka-yoke systems? These devices are effective because they are visual. And devices from the management side of the visual workplace are also useful: KPIs, LCD monitors, dashboards, and other visible tracking systems. Does it surprise you to hear visual management (VM) referred to as only a part of the visual workplace? If so, you are in good company. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, will define VM and locate it properly as a subset of workplace visuality. Stuffing the extensive range of visual functions under the single label of visual management is a mistake. Why? Because it keeps you and your company from realizing the full benefit that the visual workplace can contribute to your bottomline—and to growing a vibrant work culture of continuous improvement. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak
Our sustainment series wraps up today—at least for the time being. And what three things do we now know for sure? 1) A company that does not learn how to sustain its improvements will lose them. 2) A company that thinks audits creates sustainment has confused compliance with engagement—and will fail. 3) Sustainment requires a balance between people, imagination, and structure/tools. In today’s Visual Workplace show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the fourth understanding: 4) Sustaining means driving—and to drive you need a destination (a clear focus) and plenty of gas. Join us and hear specific ways to cultivate continuous engagement as part of your sustainment process. Learn how to re-fresh and re-fuel people’s thinking each month so that new ideas and inventions are continually generated and your KPIs improve. Learn more about why we say: Visuality doesn’t just drive work culture—it creates it. This is a LIVE show. Your emails and call-ins are welcome!
Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often believe that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 25%-35% of the final outcome. Nonetheless, the formula of Border + Address + ID Label for everything that casts a shadow represents the indispensable first step of that journey. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, reminds you of the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through rules, tips, and innovations associated with applying addresses. Learn to drill still deeper by applying that formula to small clusters of linked function that Galsworth calls Visual Mini-Systems. Tune in and hear, as well, training tips to help you create 5S outcomes that ignite and inspire value-add associates while directly impacting the bottom line. Your call-in comments, stories, and questions are welcomed.
What are realistic expectations about how people should and do respond to your splendid new improvement initiative? Should you get your hopes up? Should you remain detached and neutral? Or should you gird your loins for battle? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discusses what she has discovered over three decades of implementations: that people will respond to change in one of three ways. They embrace it. They resist it. Or they do not have an opinion about it one way or the other; they are neutral. We call this threesome: The Rowers, Watchers, and Grumblers. And they offer us a perspective on the I of the I-driven approach to workplace visuality. Tune in this week and hear Gwendolyn share the telling difference between inertia and resistance and the most effective way of handling the grouches. Learn what not to do and what happens when individuals are allowed, even encouraged, to be themselves, with no fear of penalty.
What does the world of work hold in common—no matter the setting? This week at The Visual Workplace, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares the answer. The single and fundamental transaction deployed a million times a day in every workplace is: the translation of vital information into behavior. In recognizing this, we understand workplace visuality’s shining purpose—to imbed information into the living landscape of work in order to imbed behavior: human behavior, machine behavior, and company behavior. This week that true purpose is front and center—along with its impact. The results! Listen as Gwendolyn shares the remarkable bottom line and cultural outcomes created by effectively implementing the technologies of the visual workplace: 15% to 30% increase in productivity, an aligned and engaged workforce on every level of the organization, and a complete transformation of the company into an enterprise of visual thinkers. Tune in/Learn more. Let the workplace speak.
What if 5S-from-Japan made a cozy—and permanent—home for itself in the West as a core and very successful part of continuous improvement? What if 5S triggered high, even dazzling, levels of employee engagement? What if 5S was a system that pulled high-impact operational outcomes into a place that fed the bottom line? Great questions to which your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, says: Why not? Tune in this week as she introduces four new elements into 5S that change—everything! These four create a powerful synergy that can transform your 5S into 5S on Steroids: 1) information deficits as the enemy; 2) motion as the measure; 3) visual devices as the solution; and 4) I-driven as the engine. Traditional 5S contains no authentic call to action—and for good reason: It is first and foremost a compliance-based (not process-based) approach. So we tick off if we did/did not do what we were supposed to do, audit style. Let’s change that! Let the workplace speak. Tune in/learn more.
What if your 5S was a creative process that engages, enlivens, educates, and elevates? What if your 5S could let the workplace speak? Let’s face it: 5S has a problem, a BIG problem. And it lies at the very foundation of the 5S approach. But this problem cannot be addressed through an audit or any other piece of paper. It’s a bigger problem than that. Join us this week as visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares her take on why traditional 5S is such a struggle for far too many companies. Why they have to push their 5S agenda far too often and far too hard. The problem, as Galsworth explains, is what lies beneath the 5S logo. The problem is with 5S’s internal mechanism—its central thesis or theme. Its compelling premise. What is that? What is 5S’s beating heart? Does it even have one? If your answer is not substantive and meaningful, then 5S is merely an activity your boss requires you to undertake—an activity you have to push associates to apply. Tune in/learn more.
What’s hard about a 5S audit? Not much—except most companies can’t get them started. Or if started, can’t make them stick. And did we mention the push back and/or the indifference? But it doesn’t have to be that way. Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares six simple—but powerful—ways to tweak your approach to the 5S audit and change—well, everything. For example, have you ever considered what would happen if you let your associates own the audit format and change the items that they get audited on? Have you ever considered letting your operators audit themselves? And maybe other departments as well? Have you ever thought about actually changing audit items—so they would trigger a response that was something beyond a simple YES/NO? And how about that scoring scale? Does it work? Could it work? It’s time to rehabilitate your 5S audit—to create success for the company and develop people as well. Tune in/learn more. Let the workplace speak.
When 5S came to our shores from Japan in the early 1980s, its purpose and process seemed simple, straightforward, and useful. Easy-peasy. But implementing 5S turned into an entirely different story. Though many western companies enjoyed remarkable triumphs, others struggled—or quite simply failed. Why? Join us this week as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares her answers. In the process, she draws sharp differences between US and Japanese values. She also names three other culprits: 1) confusions in the English translation; 2) the mistaken notion that 5S was a surefire way to build an engaged workforce; and 3) the decision to use the 5S audit as a key sustainment tool. As Dr. Galsworth points out, that decision pitted a compliance format that required people to adhere to the rules of 5S—against the attempt to use the same audit to build creative improvement. The workforce balked. The gap was just too wide for many companies to bridge. Tune in/learn more.
When 5S came to the West in the early 1980s, we were inspired and eager to get on board. In a blinding flash of the obvious, we asked how we could have worked for so many decades in such cluttered, dirty work places—and achieved any level of success. But the fact is we did work in such places, without a second thought—and we became a world economic power. Go figure. With the blessing of Womack and Malcolm, we forged ahead with 5S. Countless companies achieved remarkable 5S triumphs. But many other companies failed in ways both puzzling and wrenching. In some, using the term “5S” was banned forever. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes a glance into the past and begins to answer the question: Why? What went wrong? Why had these unintended—often disastrous—consequences occurred? To start, she shares her take on the origins of Japan’s 5S model, its true role, and how all that fit with the values and preferences of the West. Tune in/learn more.
Is lean alone enough? Many companies attempt to convert from traditional to the new manufacturing by relying exclusively on lean tools. Hospitals and offices too. In keeping with core lean principles, they focus on reducing the time component of a process–attacking time as a cost factor in order to increase profit margin. That means reducing cycle time as well. Join Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, as she begins a discussion thread on the interface between lean and visual. (Fasten your seatbelts because in a few short weeks, this thread will bring us face to face with the role of 5S to help or hinder.) Make no bones about it: lean (time-based improvement) is a critical step in transforming the enterprise and increasing profit margins. But impressive gains that improving your critical path can generate will erode over time—and not that much time—if you don’t take specific steps to build sustainability through visual workplace technologies. Tune in/Learn more.
Are you like Gwendolyn…never giving a thought to Kenya, its people or its economy—simply because you never went there? And then, like her, arriving at the Nairobi airport, have whole new worlds open—magical people, magical skies. Tune in this week as Dr. Galsworth, visual expert and your host, shares a wealth of surprises from her recent trip to Kenya. Surprises about operational excellence and the strides so many Kenyan companies are making to improve their processes and their work culture. Hear what she learned when she keynoted the 11th Annual Kaizen Conference. And on the Nairobi roads in endless traffic jams, as she observed Kenya’s entrepreneurial spirit—everywhere. Join her on safari with Daniel, her Masai warrior guide, as she encountered legendary African animals, closer to you than the nearest door: lion, rhino, elephant, zebra, gazelle, cheetah, water buffalo, giraffe—and the annual migration of 500,000 wildebeest. And 56 orphan elephants cared for by Kenya’s magical people
Do you mistakenly use the term “visual management” to refer to the full spectrum of visual function in the workplace? If so, you probably also mix up visual scheduling boards with visual displays. The first merely shows the production time table. The second—when properly built—reveals the pain of the supervisor in trying to achieve that time table: the barriers and constraints. The first merely makes the schedule visible. The second shows supervisors how to improve and get control over their corner of the world. The result? Margin—room to change. That is why your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, positions displays as the premier visual tool for supervisors on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. Tune in this week as she walks you through her unique process for creating visual displays—I-driven and capable of addressing production challenges even as work unfolds. Get really good at this and your displays will start talking to each other. Listen
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.
For his first 16 years with global packaging giant, MeadWestvaco ($5 billion sales/125 sites/ 16,000 employees/30 countries), Kendall Henry made success happen in many MWV facilities. If a challenge occurred, he turned to technical subject matter experts for solutions. And it worked—until it didn’t. Tune in this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, interviews MWV’s Kendall Henry. Hear what happened to change this executive’s definition of what success means and how to get it. Listen as Mr. Henry describes how he used his new role as plant manager at MWV/Slatersville (Rhode Island) to develop a spirited and engaged workforce of self-leaders and add to the improvement contribution that used to be the sole domain of technical experts. Learn how he is harnessing the power of visuality and lean to involve everyone in improving their own work daily—and become engrossed in and accountable for stabilizing and growing the Slatersville site. Tune in/learn more.
What happens when the workplace speaks? What happens when formerly voiceless work stations, equipment, tools, machines, and material communicate freely and precisely with us? What happens when we know vital information—the details of work—at a glance, without speaking a word, without asking (or answering) a single question? What happens when we take the muzzle off? Join us this week at The Visual Workplace where your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares how. Learn how to imbed operational intelligence into the landscape of work—intelligence you can see, intelligence that functions. Workplace visuality is rooted in a set of powerful principles that, when systematically applied, create a reliable and highly effective operational environment you can bank on and build on. Tune in and learn why your work environment can speak only if you give it a voice. And you can only find that voice if you can “see” what is there—and more importantly what is not. Tune in/learn more.
Q: Given the array of powerful visual tools that help executives learn to lead more effectively, what tool can we use to share a sense of improvement urgency and direction on the value-add level? A: The Operations Roadmap. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, drops into place, this final visual leadership tool. Deployed by supervisors and managers, the roadmap is a stepdown version of the X-Type Matrix, naming the company improvement goals and objectives for the year—but connected to a specific set of departmental projects and tasks. While each work area’s roadmap is locally different, it is globally framed within the company’s overall direction. The roadmap provides each department with its own window on the corporate intent and how to contribute to it. In this final show in the series, Galsworth concludes with the roadmap and brings together all six visual leadership tools so their synergy becomes plain and compelling. Tune in/learn more.
Why is a Visual War Room important? What’s its purpose? Why not rely on a rich array of data-sharing LCD monitors? Why meet daily—and ONLY for 19 minutes?! What do we meet about anyway? So many questions/so little time. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, answers them all and builds your War Room understanding. As she maps out the three War Room stages, she explains that most organizations have to spend at least one year in Stage 1 before they even consider moving on to stage 2. Why? Because they are not ready and they know it. They know about their readiness because one of a War Room’s four purposes is to reveal (and then build) the company’s current level of leadership competency. Stage 1 companies realize what it will take to make the jump and respond to the demands of the next stage. They value those demands—and do they elect to prepare for them. This is a powerful turning point in visual leadership and for the enterprise. Tune in/learn more.
What does driving look like when you are a visual leader? It looks like a Visual War Room—a space that is intensely focused on paying special daily attention to a narrow group of time-sensitive objectives on which the daily life of your operations depend. These are not a loosely-held array of KPIs—quality, safety, cost, and delivery—that you and your operations team monitor and check but a set of tightly-defined measures, specifically chosen by the ranking site executive. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, maps out the third tool of visual leadership for the executive: the War Room—how to structure it, when to schedule it, how to advance it and where to begin. Along the way, she outlines and corrects the most common War Room mistakes and mis-conceptions. Listen as she describes the key role your continuous improvement leaders can play in making a War Room a success and why the best War Room teams meet daily but for only 19 minutes. Tune in/learn more.
Now that you constructed your X-Type Matrix, how are you going to use it to carve out an improvement pathway—to help you lead? Because that is the proposition: The principles, tools, and practices of visual leadership shift us away from mere managing and help us strengthen and shape our skill and effectiveness as leaders. In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, reminds us of the power of the visual leadership construct (tool) called the X-Type Matrix—and why it is entirely worth developing and using. Included in this discussion is her related set of don’ts—pitfalls that have too often rendered this superb executive leadership tool a pale copy of its real potential. Developing a format that fits your annual plan on a single page (which is what the X-Type does) is a handsome accomplishment. But the real victory lies in using it to lead and then drive your company to a visionary horizon that means stability, prosperity, and growth. Tune in/learn more.
How do you define “leadership”? Do you use the time-honored words of Vance Packard, marketing guru of the 1960s: “Leadership appears to be the art of getting others to do something you are convinced should be done?” If so, you are mis-quoting Packard’s truly brilliant contribution. Just two little words missing—and, with them, all meaning. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, supplies the two missing words and explains how the first of her five visual leadership tools helps leaders decide on and organize the corporate intent. At first glance, her Operations System Improvement Template (OSIT) may appear to be yet another take on the Toyota House (temple) that frames TPS—and as such a likely candidate for the boardroom wall. Yet when fully understood, OSIT can be the premier tool for selecting your company’s improvement horizon and connecting it directly with credible tactical targets that represent its dynamic growth. Tune in and learn more (866-472-5790).
CEOs and plant managers are right to question their status as ranking site executives. Though they may want to lead their companies to victory, they often spend most of their time merely managing and maintaining. They are right to ask: What do effective leaders do? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes the heart of the bona fide leader—in her language: the barracuda leader. Her jumping off point is last week’s discussion on the maturity model the software industry developed so more of its projects would succeed. Though by no means a complete model, that model does provide a type of roadmap that at least gets the organization to the starting line. Authentic leadership, however, is so much more. Gwendolyn develops the theme of structure as a key element for transmuting executives into effective
Why is the X-Type Matrix either thrilling to those just discovering it—or a worst nightmare for those who have used it (or as they’d emphatically state: “Tried to use it!!)? In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walks you through the basics of the X-Type Matrix: its sections and their meaning, how it is commonly used, how she prefers to have you use it—and its triumphs (which are impressive) and pitfalls (which are common but not mandatory). The fact is, the X-Type Matrix is a powerful executive leadership construct (tool) that can provide your company with your annual plan for the entire year—actionable and on a single page. Galsworth places it second, only after the Operational System Improvement Template (“House”) as a key executive framework for leading and growing the enterprise. She explains not just how the X-Type Matrix works but why its works in terms of cultural alignment and brain function (the so-called third focus). Tune in/learn more.
Why is the notion of still point important to executives—visual leaders of strategic improvement? And what the heck does “still point” mean anyway? Today, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, anchors last week’s discussion of chaos theory and the strange attractor in two practical examples—projects that hold the promise of transformation if associated improvement leaders hold steady to their project course. Only then is life-giving breakthrough possible. Frequently touted but rarely understood, the kaizen principle is not the preferred way to achieve and sustain continual improvement. “Better makes us best” is an appealing slogan that may help us embrace a more progressive values set but does not necessarily drive excellence. It can, instead, be a trap. This week Gwendolyn continues her visual leadership series for the executive function. As time allows, she begins the discussion of the X-Type Matrix, the second powerful executive leadership construct. Tune in/learn more.
Do your efforts to lead improvement ever seem random and erratic—producing results that are unpredictable or inconsistent? Do you, as a result, decide to abandon the endeavor and start over on some other improvement target—the notorious flavor-of-the-month syndrome? Do the so-called glories of leading improvement sound like so much hype to you—a distraction from the real business at hand: making a profit? If so, you may have unworkable notion of how improvement progress is made and long-lasting results achieved. This week your host and visual expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, examines what most of us take for granted: improvement as a positive and staying-the-course as a leadership imperative. At its heart, the discussion is about the mysterious, nearly miraculous, role that stillness plays in leading improvement. Join us as Gwendolyn re-launches her series on visual leadership/the executive function and links dynamic systems with the role of the strange attractor. Tune in/learn more.
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. Listen LIVE!
Standards are the bedrock of all work, paving the way to repeatable, precise, and predictable outcomes. What manager/supervisor does not pursue standards, standard work, and standardization as the starting point of control and the end of human error? But where do Visual Standards fit in? And can they ensure exact, stable performance? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, maps out the conceptual and application profile of visual standards: what they are, how they work, and what they can and cannot contribute to operational excellence. Here is the stuff and substance of Doorway 2, the category of visual function owned and led by managers, supervisors, and engineers—but also often mis-understood by them. While she is at it, Galsworth describes the trap we can fall in if we try to build adherence by standardizing visual devices instead of cultivating visual inventiveness. Tune in. You won’t want to miss this important discussion.
How do we know we’ve lubricated the machine enough? How can visual devices help us be sure? Can visuality also help us avoid the wrong lubrication? In all cases, the answer is a loud and definite YES. In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth completes the fourth and final episode on The Visual Machine®. She presents the Six Big Mistakes in Machine Lubrication and how visuality can help us avoid many of them. brbr 1.Mistake 1: Not Enough/Not Often Enough brbr 2.Mistake 2: No Lubrication At All brbr 3.Mistake 3: Too Much Lubrication or Too Often brbr 4.Mistake 4: Wrong Lubricant brbr 5.Mistake 5: Improper Procedure brbr 6.Mistake 6: Introducing Contaminants brbr brbr Time permitting, she walks through a summary of the discussion so far, highlighting the main visual opportunities in surfacing information deficits related to the machine so they can be into an imbedded system of visual devices. Let the machine speak! Gwendolyn resumes her series on Visual Leadership for the Executive on February 5, when she returns from Scotland.
Did you know: 70% to 80% of all machine failures are due to lubrication problems? Chief among the many reasons is: People don’t realize lubrication is the cause or there is something they can do about it. Did you also know that the most common response to a lubrication problem is to add more—even though over-lubrication is one of the six BIG lube mistakes? The result? Machine downtime, lost production, bad quality—and often wrecked machines. Proper machine lubrication is a serious challenge; it is also a huge opportunity. Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares her machine lubrication approach: visual and effective. Don’t expect her to name the right vs. wrong type of oil, grease or process lubes. Do expect to learn how to build a visual lube function—and how your people, tools, and targets can make it so. As part of that, she walks through those six BIG lube mistakes—and, as time permits, the visual part of their solutions. Let the workplace speak!
Why bother to apply visual thinking to a machine if you’ve already decided which devices you will put on it? Just stick them in place and do the minimum. It’ll help—a little. But why not go further? Why not get the machine to cough up its secrets? Tell you its worries and woes? Why not make a partner of the machine so it can help you in your work? Listen as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares more of her approach to the visual machine. Hear her six principles of visual thinking, specifically ordered for equipment-based visuality. Use them to spot motion and information deficits hidden deep in the routine of buzzing machines. Use them to develop devices that do not resemble so many cookies in a row—but rather a yummy layer cake of visual inventions that clarify work content, illuminate problems, and make a huge performance difference. Learn to think visually and develop true visual innovations, never been seen on the planet before. Tune in/learn more.
Do you have unplanned machine downtime? Are quality problems related to machine and operator performance plaguing your planning? Are quick changeovers not quick at all? The Visual Machine® solves these challenges and more. When machine visuality is missing, we are forced to resort to memory, word-of-mouth, costly trial-and-error—and tons of struggle. Let your machine speak by installing vital operational information through visual devices and mini-systems. Tune in this week and hear Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, share her insights and tools for imbedding vital machine information into the landscape of the equipment. When you do, machines become self-explaining—and you become self-regulating. Make all relevant information available at a glance through machine visuality: performance data, SOPs, calibration protocols, metrics, safety procedures, lube points, standards of usage—as well as preventive maintenance activities and schedules. Let the machine speak.
Do you mistakenly believe the visual workplace is merely a series of point solutions—helpful, even clever—but not much more? If so, your expectations of visuality are too small for the quantity of information deficits in your company. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, puts her series on Visual Leadership on pause in order to share five telling perspectives on workplace visuality. This begins with the fact that visuality is a dynamic language, an imbedded vocabulary that makes your operational system reliable and robust. Tune in and learn why Gwendolyn says: 1) Lean does not include visual; 2) Visuality and lean are equal partners in operational excellence; 3) Visuality puts 5S on steroids; 4) visual technologies create a spirited, engaged work culture, even on the executive level; and 5) Visual thinking provides a new core competency that not only reduces waste but also aligns and unifies. Upgrade your expectations—and your results. Tune in/learn more.
What’s missing from the Toyota Temple and its many clones? Why aren’t stairs, four pillars, and a roof enough? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, completes her treatment of her Operations System Improvement Template, constructing the bottom two levels during the show: Tactical Targets and the Methods/Tools that drive TIME out of the equation. Which improvement targets are mission-critical—and which are optional? As Dr. Galsworth explains, an organizing template is of little importance unless a link can be forced between the customer and the improvement direction of the enterprise. Without a laser focus, a company may simply engage in improvement activity because: “Everyone knows better makes us best.” That kind of logic may work on a day-to-day level but it will mislead us when we attempt to engage a macro-strategy. Listen as Gwendolyn walks you through your six tactical choices and how they link to what is/is not in your tool chest. Tune in/learn more.
Who would dare ask this question: How much waste reduction is enough? ‘Sounds like heresy, doesn’t it? But to the executive leader it could start sounding pretty darn smart. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, responds to this and other questions about your operational improvement strategy. She will also her survey of the meaning and application of the House, a core mechanism of Visual Leadership/The Executive Function. That discussion reaches into the importance of finding and deploying a tactical focus in order to achieve strategic outcomes. You won’t be able to harness the improvement power of your House if you stop short of selecting viable, mission-critical tactical targets. What will it be: product development? Process improvement? Defect reduction? More machine uptime? Better customer service? You can’t do it all—and you don’t want to. How do achieve world-class and still not do everything? How much waste reduction is enough? Tune in/learn more.
How do you decide where to apply resources in order to improve? And how do you know you made the right choice? So many improvement opportunities/so little time. As part of her current series on Visual Leadership/The Executive Function, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues to un-nest the strategy of waste reduction and its macro-metric (including the story of how the West discovered it). She then explains how to harness the improvement power of your house by naming its tactical targets. Will you target product improvement—or your process? Quality or machinery? Service/support or people? You cannot do it all—so which will you do? How do you say YES to the few and WAIT to the many? And once you decide, which methods will you apply to ensure improvement happens. Tune in and learn how to turn your House into a work horse, make it whinny for its supper, and then plow up the treasures you need to improve, sustain and grow your company? Tune in/Call in: 866-472-5790.
How do you turn your “house” from a pretty poster on the boardroom wall—into a real-time improvement driver? In her on-going series on Visual Leadership/The Executive Function, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the next three elements of her Operations System Improvement Template (OSIT) and a new paradigm of thinking: 1) your company’s overall improvement strategy (there’s only one that counts), 2) the macro metric that tracks the success (or failure) of that strategy, and 3) the strategic principles that anchor the people-side of moving forward. It’s time to turn BORG thinking on its head. As time allows, Gwendolyn explains the next OSIT element: Tactical Targets—and how to determine the most critical to the company’s current need to improve and grow. She encourages all listeners who are visual-leaders-in-the-making to develop their own OSIT Template, in real time, as she explains the elements in each show. Tune in and learn. Questions? Call: 866-472-5790.
How do you turn a time-worn idea in an enterprise driver? How do you make what is as obvious as wallpaper striking and relevant—so you not only see it with fresh eyes but know exactly how to use it to drive operational improvement? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, starts the construction of the house she calls her Operations System Improvement Template (OSIT)—from the top down: customer, vision, mission. Who doesn’t think they know what these oh-so-familiar terms mean? Who doesn’t throw them around like popcorn? Join Gwendolyn on a walk through the construction site. Take the first concrete steps with her as you expand your responsibilities and learn to become a visual leader of improvement—spearheading the change you want for your company in yourself first. Gwendolyn encourages all visual leaders in-the-making to tune into the next ten shows and do the action homework that each describes—with her, in real time. And call in questions/comments: 866-472-5790.
How do you define “leadership”? Do you use the time-honored words of Vance Packard, marketing guru of the 1960s: “Leadership appears to be the art of getting others to do something you are convinced should be done?” If so, you are mis-quoting Packard’s truly brilliant contribution. Just two little words missing—and, with them, all meaning. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, supplies the two missing words and explains how the first of her five visual leadership tools helps leaders decide on and organize the corporate intent. At first glance, her Operations System Improvement Template (OSIT) may appear to be yet another take on the Toyota House (temple) that frames TPS—and as such a likely candidate for the boardroom wall. Yet when fully understood, OSIT can be the premier tool for selecting your company’s improvement horizon and connecting it directly with credible tactical targets that represent its dynamic growth. Tune in and learn more (866-472-5790).
Where did our new ideas about leaders come from? What triggered the change so many leaders now seek? Should Japan really get all the credit? In today’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, responds—and also provides an overview of the five visual constructs (tools) the new leader needs in order to understand and operationalize the corporate intent: 1) Operations Improvement Template; 2) X-Type Matrix; 3) Metrics That Drive; 4) War Room; and 5) Operations Roadmap. These five leadership tools capitalize on visuality’s power to structure in thinking and behavior—and create a new leadership paradigm that ties into the job profile presented last week. This week, Galsworth introduces the first of the five constructs: Operations Template, an advance visual organizer that provides the executive with a crystal understanding of the organization’s strengths and deficits—and what growth means for the company. This will take several shows to unfold. Tune in/call in: 866-472-5790
Is this the choice? Charismatic executive leader—born to the role and with an insatiable appetite for improvement versus some competent decision-maker who has to (and wants to) learn how to do that? It’s the wrong question. The truth is the profile of executive as improvement leader is new or new-fangled to almost everyone, including executives.Equally untried is the notion that the principles and practices of visuality will not only help but are pivotal and indispensable. Why? That is exactly what your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to un-nest and explain in this week’s show. In the process, she walks you through the seven elements of that define the executive leadership profile, paired and contrasted with the set of seven for supervisors/managers: 1) Decide vs Stabilize; 2) Align vs Measure; 3) Inspire vs Target; 4) Drive vs Deploy; 5) Verify vs Coach; and 6) Grow vs Model—which all roll up to the crowning pair: 7) Lead vs Improve. Tune in / learn more.
CEOs and plant managers are right to question their status as ranking site executives. Though they may want to lead their companies to victory, they often spend most of their time merely managing and maintaining. They are right to ask: What do effective leaders do? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, describes the heart of the bona fide leader—in her language: the barracuda leader. Her jumping off point is last week’s discussion on the maturity model the software industry developed so more of its projects would succeed. Though by no means a complete model, that model does provide a type of roadmap that at least gets the organization to the starting line. Authentic leadership, however, is so much more. Gwendolyn develops the theme of structure as a key element for transmuting executives into effective
What is an effective organization? And what is the role of leadership in making it so? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, resumes her series on visual leadership, this time focused on executives (she covered supervisors/managers last Spring). She begins by posing the two questions leaders must answer before they launch an excellence initiative: 1) Do we know what to do? 2) Do we know how to do it? In other words, is my organization ready? Readiness is a particularly thorny issue—and one that visual leadership is geared to help the executive not just answer but shape. In support, Gwendolyn converses with Alex Bleier—IT consultant and veteran of decades of IT project management—about the Software Engineering Institute Research Project on Capability Maturity Levels (Carnegie Mellon/1989). The result? A critical framework of thinking and insight for leaders—especially visual leaders-in-the-making. As relevant today as when it was published. Tune in/learn more.
The problem with using the term “line” interchangeably with “border” is that a line is a geometric coordinate. It does not have a performance function. But a border not only tangibly contributes to the nature and performance of work, it also functions dynamically as an operational partner in how, when, and where work gets done. The more we understand this, the more we recognize how borders can help us create work that makes sense. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) discusses ways you can add dimensions of meaning to your borders so they can extend, control, and reveal the work itself. When we get very clever with borders, we can even make them imbed time into the process. Yes, borders change our understanding of the flow and changes in work content. As a result, our visual intelligence grows. And as we get smarter, our borders get smarter as well. Tune in and learn more. Amp up your 5S/Border approach! Another great Summer ENCORE.
Until a company understands the logic and power of borders, borders are merely treated as so many lines—useful for neatness and order but not much more. Few people will expect performance to improve because of them, let alone positively impact KPIs. What a surprise to discover that borders (especially when combined with robust addresses) can measurably increase productivity on the area level, even while helping build a work culture of continuous improvement if there is none. And if such a culture already exists, borders will strengthen it. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) presents the reasons that justify borders on a functional AND cultural basis. Tune in and learn how borders help to make the workplace transparent, building accountability and a PDCA loop into the floor and onto work surfaces. Listen as Galsworth describes dozens of examples—and you imagine/re-imagine the role robust borders can play in your company. Another great Summer ENCORE!
Borders are the work horses of operator-led visuality—but rarely used to their full potential. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth reminds us of to first position and connect workplace items in terms of their functions. In this way, we can capitalize on the power of Smart Placement and its core formula: Function + Location = Flow. Then she tells us how to nail that connection through borders, addresses, and (if possible) ID labels: how to implement the visual where. Begin with borders, starting from the floor up. Then move to walls, benches, shelving, cabinets, and drawers—and then to what’s inside each of them. In the end, borders get installed for everything that casts a shadow—a requirement that applies equally to easy-to-move items and to those items that never budge (machines and tall shelves). Join her and learn not only how to apply borders effectively—but how to let your borders get smarter as you get smarter. Build your visual performance vocabulary.
We are visual beings and therefore we live in a visual world—and not the other way around. The world did not teach us how to communicate visually—or why. We taught it. We are sensory beings, equipped and eager to send—and receive—messages. That is why human-based environments are flooded with visual devices. Our roads and highways are only one stunning example. Why not also the workplace? In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) explains the natural connection between visuality and us—and work. The workplace also needs to be a visual—sense-based— environment because we are a visual, sense-based, beings. Sensory beings. Without visuality at work, we are quite literally lost. We have no navigational anchor. That puts us in a state of risk. Without visuality, work can get complicated and unproductive. We struggle and it shows in our bottomline and our hearts. Tune in LIVE—and learn more about why visuality at work is not just important, it is indispensable.
How do supervisors contribute to a successful visual workplace conversion? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her series on “Becoming a Brilliant Visual Workplace Trainer”—this time focusing on the crucial role your supervisors play in your visual success. But that role is probably not what you or they think. Yes, everyone knows it is vital for supervisors (and managers) to get and stay on board. But what if they hurt process because they don’t fully understand the nature of the change visuality represents for their direct reports? Even highly successful, natural-born supervisors may need to adjust their approach. What has this got to do with becoming a brilliant trainer? EVERYTHING! Tune in as Gwendolyn discusses the four remaining principles of effective visual workplace training. When she does, the indispensable role of the supervisor may take on new meaning for you/your company. Another great ENCORE show while Gwendolyn teaches Mistake-Proofing.
What does employee involvement mean in a booming economy? Why should a company go visual when it is already selling everything it can produce? How can growing market demand make the most compelling case for a visual workplace, more compelling than the potential for cost savings could ever represent? The economy in question is China. For your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, her recent trip to China triggered more questions on her return than were raised while she was there. But the short of it can be expressed in five words: Where does visuality fit in? Why bother? Last week, Gwendolyn shared impressions and startling discoveries (like the dragon under a super highway in Shanghai). This week she targets more strategic themes: Why does China need visuality? How does that support an already booming economy? What do US companies have in common with those in China? And why is the government of China as interested in solid responses to these questions as she is? Tune in LIVE.
China! What is the link between its 1.35 billion people and visuality? Does that carry over into factories? Where does visuality fit in with China growing economy? These questions and more are on the mind of your show host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth. This is her first real week back since she started to travel in mid-May—last stop China. The riot of experiences, impressions, and questions that have piled up over these past few months have begun to sort themselves into an array of themes that Gwendolyn wants to begin sharing this week. But there is no question about the fact that China is impressive. For her, perhaps the most stunning aspect of her trip was the level of modernity in the visual infrastructure that girds the Chinese economy. It’s all there in stunning multiples: the self-explaining roads and highways, glutted with self-regulating traffic that is wildly populated with bikes, go carts, motorcycles—and the unexpected. Tune in LIVE/Call in LIVE: 866-472-5790.
When does standardization fail? Is its real purpose a uniform and static outcome? Or is there a more dynamic result? In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual expert and your host) shares her view that standardization provides us with a platform for discovery—a jumping off place for the next iteration. We are mistaken if we take a standard as an unalloyed good. If we do, our pursuit of excellence is short circuited. The goal of excellence is not a static replication of the current definition of good. In the same vein, we are sometimes surprised to learn that the Japanese educate their children in the art of discovery: how to think. Not where to find the answers but how to find them. This is exactly what Shigeo Shingo demonstrated when he sat in front of a machine for five months in order to discover the first pivotal steps in quick changeover. Tune in this week as Gwendolyn contemplates the commonalities between the Lewis & Clark Expedition and our modern pursuit of excellence.
Why do the Sami people in the Arctic have 180 words for snow and nearly 1000 for reindeer? Because words matter. Words are different because different meanings are needed. In much the same way, it is important to question why we have so many different improvement approaches and to probe our assumptions about what we believe their differences are. Our results can only be as good as our thinking. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual expert and your host) takes us through the three remaining components of the BORG mind: Borg Quality, Borg Empowerment, and Borg Standardization. What happens when we buy the marketing and not the product? Or eat the packaging instead of the meat? What happens when we organize our improvement initiatives around mistaken beliefs and fuzzy hopes? Why can’t Six Sigma eradicate defects? Why is an empowerment mandate never enough? When does the pledge to standardization defeat long-lasting improvement solutions? Another great ENCORE while Gwendolyn is in China.
Why is getting improvement going so tricky? Why do companies so often bail in the early stages—long before they have had time to fail? Why is it that the start stops us? Building on last week’s show when we learned the difference between the HOW of deployment and the WHAT, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, maps out five factors that can doom our best efforts to launch successful improvement initiatives. The first factor, discussed last week, is the mistaken pursuit of perfection. Secondly, we are often far too casual about choosing the methodology itself—or it lacks a separate and robust implementation protocol. The third factor that can defeat us is when managers demand results too quickly and, in doing so, rob the organization. Fourth, our trainers begin to train groups for the wrong reasons. Fifth, implementers decide to re-shape the methodology long before they have learned it. It’s the start that stops us. Another great ENCORE show! Gwendolyn is in China.
It is a well-recognized fact that understanding WHAT to do is only half the battle in operational improvement. The other half is HOW—and then doing it. Knowledge + Know-how. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares the lessons she has taught—and learned—about getting the HOW going. If you’ve already cracked this code and learned how to deploy and make it stick, launching another improvement initiative will only strengthen you. But if you are a newcomer (or have a history of “almost-made-its”), the challenge of putting knowledge in place—so it can be and is used—can be a mighty challenge. So much is at stake: 1) promised bottom-line results; 2) cultural growth; 3) hope and confidence; and 4) the reputation of the people who promised success. Your reputation. But few authentic roadmaps exist to help with this subtle, behind-the-scenes process. It’s the start that stops us unless we know that and what to do about it. Gwendolyn is back next week.
Visual Metrics play a mighty role in effective problem solving because they illuminate cause, show us how the problem behaves, and drive us down the causal chain. They are the vector force of the process: thrust plus direction. But metrics alone do not trigger robust and sustainable solutions. People are needed for that. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains part two of her Visual Problem Solving process: getting people engaged in developing rich problem descriptions and creating a wide array of viable solutions. To do this, we lead stake holders through a step-by-step method that allows them to share their insights and expertise in order to un-nest levels of viable solutions—and then implement them systematically. Eliminating problems is rarely a silver-bullet set of answers. We focus instead on identifying an exact array of good causes that have been tried, tested, and, through visuality, made sustainable. (An ENCORE show while Gwendolyn is in the UK.)
How is it that Sheldlah choose to pursue problem solving (“PS”) with such strength that, in 1987, it adopted this definition: “A problem is any thing that inconveniences anyone downstream?” All problem solving is fundamentally about creating new standards—new reliable procedures— that allow us to repeatedly achieve the value/specs our customer wants. In many companies, PS merely organizes the noise around a problem and makes it more approachable—instead of doggedly pursuing cause. But chronic problems exist on a nested or multi-layered level; there can be no silver bullet solution. This week (in the first of two shows on the topic), Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and your host, shares her perspectives on solving chronic, costly, complex problems, indispensable to operational excellence. Join her as she shares the definition of a standard that Dr. Ryuji Fukuda revealed to her in 1985 that almost made her drop her teacup. An ENCORE Episode while Gwendolyn travels.
The pursuit of causality is a powerful but underutilized component of leadership. It remains only a concept until we harness people’s interest in cause and can steer them down the causal chain. As Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, resumes her discussion of supervisors as Leaders of Improvement, she introduces a third visual tool for supervisors: dynamic problem-solving. Gwendolyn focuses on: a) how to use the so-called ScoreBoard technique to get and keep people involved, b) the vital activity between sessions, and c) the joy and adventure of traveling down the causal chain. Pushing on easy solutions may gain us inches but it will never turn us—or the enterprise—into a driving force for improvement. In this final episode in her current treatment of supervisor-as-visual-leader, Gwendolyn describes how to use the ScoreBoard Diagram to empower people and target and hold their improvement fervor as they discover, understand, and control. Tune in LIVE/call in: 866-472-5790.
Back briefly from her travels, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, shares highpoints and hitches from her recent trip. She covers a wide range of topics, many of them lessons not yet learned—or learned but forgotten. Why, for example, is quick changeover important—and why track the time of each and every machine set up? Or how is it that six sigma is not effective in detecting or reducing defects? And here’s another puzzle: What’s the difference between operational excellence and continuous improvement—and why should we care? Having straight, unambiguous answers to such questions can make the difference between the growth of the enterprise and a constant erosion of that same company’s potential. This trip was a powerful reminder of the importance of getting the thinking straight first—and letting actions and metrics flow from that. Tune in LIVE and hear Gwendolyn’s commentary on these matters—as well as why it is important to not standardize visual devices.
Why is getting improvement going so tricky? Why do companies so often bail in the early stages—long before they have had time to fail? Why is it that the start stops us? Building on last week’s show when we learned the difference between the HOW of deployment and the WHAT, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, maps out five factors that can doom our best efforts to launch successful improvement initiatives. The first factor, discussed last week, is the mistaken pursuit of perfection. Secondly, we are often far too casual about choosing the methodology itself—or it lacks a separate and robust implementation protocol. The third factor that can defeat us is when managers demand results too quickly and, in doing so, rob the organization. Fourth, our trainers begin to train groups for the wrong reasons. Fifth, implementers decide to re-shape the methodology long before they have learned it. It’s the start that stops us. Another great ENCORE show! Gwendolyn returns next week.
Understanding WHAT to do is only half the battle in operational improvement. The other half is HOW—and then doing it. Knowledge + Know-how. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares the lessons she has taught—and learned—about getting HOW going. If you have already cracked this code and learned how to deploy and make it stick, launching another improvement initiative will only strengthen you. But if you are a newcomer (or have a history of “almost-made-its”), the challenge of putting knowledge in place—so it can be and is used—can be a mighty challenge. So much is at stake: 1) promised bottom-line results; 2) cultural growth; 3) hope and confidence; and 4) the reputation of the people who promised success. Your reputation. But few authentic roadmaps exist to help with this subtle, behind-the-scenes process. It’s the start that stops us—unless we know that and what to do about it. Another great ENCORE show while Gwendolyn travels.
Strange that most of us believe we know how change happens. Strange how we believe companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we’re making by attending to exact technical causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain and an all-but-undetectable logic produces these tangible, knowable outcomes? Suddenly reality ain’t what it used to be—or is supposed to be. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields, sharing research on how companies evolve and learning happens—based on the largest gap in understanding that exists: “what we don’t know we don’t know.” Tune in and you may be surprised to learn that even monkeys can point the way to what’s really going on when we learn, implement, and improve. Gwendolyn is traveling and so we present this very cool ENCORE show!
How does a supervisor or manager use problem-solving to become a more effective leader? How are problem-solving and driving the corporate intent connected? In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth your host and visual workplace expert, continues to un-nest the power of visual problem-solving by detailing the process she calls ScoreBoarding—whose ancestor was CEDAC, Ryuji Fukuda’s masterful process for creating new standards from the detritus of the past. Tune in as she connects her recent discussions on visual metrics/stacked metrics to the creation of a sequence of good causes that become your new SOPs—and your problems solved! This is a rare opportunity to get an audio primer on a robust methodology that produces a system of long-term solutions for those complex, chronic problems that often seem out of the control of operations. Listen as Dr. Galsworth describes how to use the ScoreBoarding architecture to get the control back—and lead! Tune in/call in: 866-472-5790.
As supervisors and managers embrace their new identities as Visual Leaders of Improvement, they will be faced, at a some point, with the nitty gritty part of that role: problem-solving, actual and real. As your host and visual expert, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains: This is not delegated to an underling but lead by the leader him or herself (at least until the mold is set and the practice oiled and well-understood). Leadership depends on the right understanding of both the destination and the road to it. This week, Gwendolyn shares her perspectives on solving chronic, costly, complex problems—as a segment of her Visual Leadership model. Linked tightly to the visual (stacked) metrics she has discussed in the past three shows, visual problem-solving has a definite perspective on cause, causality, and the causal chain—and creates the three outcomes needed: solutions, alignment, and profit. A3 offers some help but is not a complete answer. Learn more. Tune in/call in: 866-472-5790.
How do I use visual metrics in a food processing plant? In an office? What if no one in my area wants to measure anything? How many stacked metrics can I track at a time? Who updates the metric? How do I handle two shifts that want to measure different things, without piling a lot of work on me, the supervisor: day shift wants to track quality—night shift wants to track downtime? This week is a Mail Bag Show at The Visual Workplace where your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, responds to questions and comments you emailed in. The focus is her recent shows on measurement systems and how supervisors can use them to become leaders of improvement. Tune in for your savvy questions—and pretty darn good responses. Remember: If we use your question on air, we send you one of Gwendolyn’s prize-winning books—FREE. Learning about visual metrics is important. Putting them into action is even better. Your questions show that you are ready to take this on. Tune in/call in: 866-472-5790.
KPIs are a popular measurement approach. They are everywhere and here to stay. But that doesn’t mean they are a reliable way to improve. In fact, KPIs are structurally incapable of improvement—except as a kind of motivating shock like a bad report card when we were kids. Our parents get on our case; we knuckle down: get better grades quick—solve the problem. And we usually do—solve it enough for the KPI to bump up enough. A pattern forms: bad KPI + vigilant boss + enough problem solving = enough improvement. But what would happen if the measures themselves triggered improvement—without the stuff in the middle? If problem solving happened as we measured? That is exactly what visual metrics do—they stack cause and reveal the improvement pathway, in one fell swoop. This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walks you through the purpose and power of visual metrics and shows you how to use them. AND that can change everything. Tune in LIVE. Call in LIVE: 866-472-5790.
POP QUIZ: Q/1: How many sets of measures do you need to improve a department’s performance? Answer: one. Q/2: Who owns that measure? Answer: The user. Q/3: Why is it critical for us to understand the importance of those two questions and how to respond to them fully and correctly? For answers, listen to Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth this week as she lays out that logic. With examples and stories, Gwendolyn shows you how to begin constructing a measurement system that drives—and why it’s mission-critical. It starts with the first brick: identify the owner of the metric and then its voice. Only then will the metric illuminate cause. Only then can it drive. Learn, as Galsworth first walks you through a set metrics that don’t work—that can’t work. Then hear how to shift them. The fact is: metrics can perform on a level far distant from and far better than merely counting and tracking. They can do more than simply monitor performance. They can improve it. Tune in LIVE and call-in: 866-472-5790.
Too often, we make the mistake of thinking that making measures visible (tacking them on a bulletin board) has the power to create improvement. It does not—and that includes your KPIs (key performance indicators). KPIs show only. They monitor performance but they do not change it. Why? Because they cannot. KPIs cannot cause improvement because they are not structured to do so. But Visual Metrics are—the next tool in the supervisor’s visual leadership tool box. In this week’s show, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth—your host and visual workplace expert—defines and discusses visual metrics: a category of visual function that speaks in the voice of the user, defines performance in concrete, local terms, and illuminates cause. And because they illuminate cause, visual metrics are capable of driving down the causal chain. And driving, as you know, is the most powerful form of leading. Tune in and learn what visual metrics are, how to develop them, and how to use them to lead: to drive excellence.
“How do I start leading visually—I’m a supervisor?” “How can I lead when I spend most of my time filling out reports?” “What the difference between visual leadership and supervisor standard work?” “How does leading visually help my operators?” These are just a few of the questions you emailed in to your host, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, across the first eight episodes of her Visual Leadership series. Questions are always the first part of learning anything new—including new ways of being and behaving. Your questions show you want to learn a new way—or help others learn it. (Plus five of you will receive one of Gwendolyn’s books as a thank you.) Here are some more of your questions: “I can’t change what my boss wants on my scheduling board, but that board doesn’t help me—it helps her. What do I do?” “Who updates a visual display—and what happens if they forget?” This is a live Q&A show. Call in with your own question and we’ll send you one of Gwendolyn’s books: 866-472-5790. Listen!
Do you mistakenly use the term “visual management” to refer to the full spectrum of visual function in the workplace? If so, you probably also mix up visual scheduling boards with visual displays. The first merely shows the production time table. The second—when properly built—reveals the pain of the supervisor in trying to achieve that time table: the barriers and constraints. The first merely makes the schedule visible. The second shows supervisors how to improve and get control over their corner of the world. The result? Margin—room to change. That is why your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, positions displays as the premier visual tool for supervisors on their way to becoming leaders of improvement. Tune in this week as she walks you through her unique process for creating visual displays—I-driven and capable of addressing production challenges even as work unfolds. Get really good at this and your displays will start talking to each other. Listen
What are the visual tools of the new leadership for supervisors? Last week your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, presented their seven-element new role description. After a short reminder of how supervisors begin to practice these new skills, Galsworth introduces a nested framework of visual functions, designed to equip traditional supervisors and executives to take on their new leadership roles. The first of these visual functions is Visual Displays: multi-layered information delivered in single, interactive format. Displays enable us to see the relationship between complex information at-a-glance, understand status, and take correct, timely, and independent action—based solely on the info in that display. Tune in and learn why effective displays are always I-driven and how they help harried supervisors: a) secure control over their corner of the world, and b) gain the internal margin needed to become effective visual leaders of improvement. Call-in LIVE: 866-472-5790.
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 LIVE and learn how these elements work together and how your supervisors can gain skills and experience in each. Call-in: 866-472-5790.
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. Invite your staff to listen LIVE. Call in: 866-472-5790.
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 imbedded? 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. Call in questions/comments: 866-472-5790.
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. This is a LIVE show. Call in: 866-472-5790.
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. Listen LIVE!
Shall we resume? Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, has been ill and away from her radio microphone since the end of November. Now she is back and raring to tell you about the two plants she visited in December: Genie/Terex, a lean classic outside of Seattle—and Fast Cap, an innovation jewel near Canada, about to expand ten times its current size. Both plants have tremendous operational strengths. And both are visual—after a fashion. And that is exactly what makes their stories so interesting. Tune in this week—when Gwendolyn is back LIVE—and hear what she learned as she toured these two lively companies and quietly assessed their visual presents and futures. Listen as she frames a discussion about growing a company’s improvement level so it is scalable to an expanded future. Learn how to create this in your company using principles as the fresh base of change instead of simply trying to repeat the past. This is a live show. Call ins are welcome: 866-472-5790.
Standards are the bedrock of all work, paving the way to repeatable, precise, and predictable outcomes. What manager/supervisor does not pursue standards, standard work, and standardization as the starting point of control and the end of human error? But where do Visual Standards fit in? And can they ensure exact, stable performance? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, maps out the conceptual and application profile of visual standards: what they are, how they work, and what they can and cannot contribute to operational excellence. Here is the stuff and substance of Doorway 2, the category of visual function owned and led by managers, supervisors, and engineers—but also often mis-understood by them. While she is at it, Galsworth describes the trap we can fall in if we try to build adherence by standardizing visual devices instead of cultivating visual inventiveness. Tune in. You won’t want to miss this important ENCORE SHOW.
Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often believe that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 25%-35% of the final outcome. Nonetheless, the formula of “Border + Address + ID Label for Everything That Casts a Shadow” represents the indispensable first step on that powerful journey. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, reminds you of the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through rules, tips, and innovations associated with applying addresses. Learn to drill still deeper by applying that formula to small clusters of linked function that Galsworth calls visual mini-systems. Tune in while she shares training tips to help you create 5S outcomes that ignite and inspire value-add associates even as these outcomes directly impact the bottom line. Our Encore show for a Happy Holiday.
The world of work can sometimes resemble politics—where the method of choice for handling differences is often further polarization: Go to your corners and come out fighting. Though trendy, playing our differences against each other is rarely effective. In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, recounts the true story of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice groups doing the hard work of seeking and finding common ground. Though polar opposites, they learned a new way and broke the myth of either/or choices. The same is possible in the workplace—beginning with an executive decision to invert the power pyramid and develop a new power proposition with value-add associates. The result? Alignment and the simultaneous definition of areas of commonality and areas of enduring differences. The outcome: unity. And throughout, managers and supervisors are caught in the middle. Another great ENCORE show. (Sorry: Though Gwendolyn is much better, her voice has yet to return.)
Who has not heard the discussion of employee empowerment begin with the well-worn top/down pyramid and its seeming opposite—the bottom/up pyramid? The question is not which of the two pyramids to reject but rather how do we blend the two into a single framework of excellence. In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to map out that process and the new paradigm of leadership and participation that results. At the heart of that paradigm is the re-distribution of power—beginning with the role of executive as leader in charge of identifying, articulating, and driving the corporate intent. This is the realm of the executive WHAT and WHY. Contrast this, Galsworth urges, with the bottom-up or empowerment pyramid with its steady focus on the value-add level HOW: operational performance. This order of aligned enterprise is a perfect blending of the two. Another great ENCORE show. (Sorry, Gwendolyn is still sick as a doggie; we expect her back next week.)
What’s special about scrubbing the workplace? Or about safety for that matter? And what’s the real reason we implement so-called “lines and labels?” (In fact, there are eleven such reasons.) In this show on 5S, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the engines behind the four of the five Ss (or six, depending how you count). Listen as she tells you why she calls her approach to industrial housekeeping “5S on Steroids”. And learn about the logic of smart placement, the step Gwendolyn developed to make sure when you lay down the lines, they contribute to metrics-driven performance and the bottom line. Hear about many different types of borders, and the powerful role an address plays, even when your borders are color-coded. Speaking of color-coding, do you know how that can go wrong, very wrong? Join us and find out. This is the show when 5S ramps up beyond neat and clean and soars into visuality! Another great ENCORE episode.
What is a visual workplace—and why is it important? How do you develop workplace visuality in operations and company wide? These are just a few of the questions Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and award-winning author, answers on this week’s show. Tune in while Dr. Galsworth shows you: why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together, how it strengthens lean initiatives yet remains its own distinct strategy—and why visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberating the human will. Learn how visuality is used to translate information into exact behavior and make the workplace speak. Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, engineering office, military depot or open-pit mine, listen and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them. Another great ENCORE show. And Happy Thanksgiving!
All trainers are in training. The act of training others is in itself a learning experience—a closed loop feedback system. So how do we help our Trainers steadily improve—become more effective and get better results? In today’s show, Dr. Galsworth, your host and visual expert, continues her discussion of The GRID: a tool she uses to discover how the trainers she trains are faring—in terms of the business impact, their inner stability, and the support they do (or do not) receive. Along with that, Gwendolyn introduces The PYRAMID—another tool she uses to help her diagnose the learning readiness of trainers or any group. Whether trainers, operators, engineers or CEOs, the pyramid helps her gauge the extent to which they are ready for tasks—or still need more process. And, finally, she concludes her description of The DEBRIEF PROTOCOL she follows when coaching a trainer, one-on-one—so that hearts and minds stay open to feedback, especially when it is tough. Listen LIVE. Call in!
Do you spend much time thinking about how to support your visual workplace trainers? Are you wise about ensuring your feedback to them is positive yet precise? Do you know how to care for and nourish these fine individuals upon whom so much of the success of your visual conversion depends? As you’ve learned over the past many shows on “Becoming a Brilliant Visual Workplace Trainer,” these instructors cannot simply walk through the material and hope it sticks. A great deal of planning and preparation goes into every session—at least for the first few training cycles. And then there is the inevitable homework, as you learned in our last trainer show. No doubt about it: It’s a big job. This week, Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert and award-winning author, discusses the quality and quantity of feedback visual trainers need so they can continue to get the job done—and do even better. Listen LIVE as Gwendolyn shares her own protocol for doing just that. Thursday/10 am/Pacific.
Workplace information can change quickly and often—products, schedules, specifications, tooling, parts, methods, and the thousands of other details on which the daily life of the enterprise depends. How can busy (often harried) supervisors and managers stay on top of this ever-shifting detail and still make sound, timely decisions? The answer is: visual displays/production control boards, the category of visual function that is Doorway 3 in the Ten Doorways framework. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your show host and visual workplace expert) defines visual displays: physical presentations of multi-layered information in single, interactive formats. Their purpose? To enable us to see and understand complex information at-a-glance, understand a situation's status, and take correct, timely, and independent action. Tune in and learn how displays get developed (I-driven) and help us gain control over our corner of the world, even when the pressure is on. Another great ENCORE show!
In school, teachers love to give homework. But what about in the workplace? What does homework mean there? And what homework do Trainers do to make the grade? In this week’s show (at our new Thursday time), Gwendolyn Galsworth, author and visual workplace expert, focuses on just that as her series on “Becoming a Brilliant Visual Workplace Trainer” continues: the importance of trainers doing their homework so they come to the training room prepared to help others learn. The savvy trainer, for example, knows she can’t implement visually in a multi-shift operation simply by letting people “improve things.” In multi-shift improvement, she knows she has to factor in that different people (sometimes a lot of them) share the same real estate—and never even see each other, let alone confer. What to do? Do your homework, Mr. Trainer! And listen to Gwendolyn as she shares how she handles this situation—often across five shifts! Tune in/call in at our new time: Thursdays, 10:00 am/Pacific.
What happens when trainers engage our senses and our brain in the training room? We learn! We learn through the body/brain connection. Savvy trainers know that whatever our senses experience gets transmitted to the brain. If we feed the senses as we share knowledge, the learner absorbs more of that knowledge—and hungers for more. This week on The Visual Workplace (at our new time), Gwendolyn Galsworth, author and visual workplace expert, continues her discussion on teaching visuality through knowledge principles and our senses. Why? So we invent visual solutions that work seamlessly and with precision. Just like the device a herd of cows in Colorado encountered one day as they moseyed from pasture to pasture. The cows did exactly the right thing (even calves)—the very thing these cows would have wanted to do anyway. They did it seamlessly, without uttering a single moo. Vital information, visually shared. But how? Tune in and find out at our new time: Thursdays, 10:00 am/Pacific.
How does a visual workplace instructor produce “new thinking” as a training outcome? Why bother to provide a “feast for the mind?” How do we use examples of great visual solutions to stimulate and inspire? These are only a few of the questions Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, answers in this week’s show as she continues to describe the actual training process—as part of her current series on “How to Become a Brilliant Visual Workplace Trainer.” Listen and learn why visuality must be taught with precision, flair, and rigor in order for participants (visual thinkers-in-the-making) to understand what drives visual information sharing— and, as a result, to invent splendid visual solutions of their own. Tune in and learn about: a) the two primary principles of workplace visuality; and 2) how to use motion as a lever. Note: On Thursday/October 24, our show moves to a new time—Thursdays at 10:00 am/Pacific Time. Same great show—at a more convenient time for you!
What’s next? The physical training room is in tip-top shape, you as a trainer know whom to train—and how to handle some quirky issues that surface on your way to your training launch. And thanks to last week’s show, you also better understand what supervisors and managers do during training sessions (Gwendolyn will finish up the last three of the nine principles she started last week). What’s next? Now we get down to brass tacks: Just what do trainers teach? What do you talk about? What do you explain? How do you get people to learn about and apply visuality? How do they become visual thinkers? And what does Galsworth mean when she tells us (repeatedly!): Trainers have to do their homework or the learning won’t happen? What is that about? Tune in this week and get the next dose of how to become a brilliant visual workplace trainer, as Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, continues her series on just that. This is a LIVE show. Call-ins welcome!
How do supervisors contribute to a successful visual workplace conversion? This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her series on “Becoming a Brilliant Visual Workplace Trainer”—this time focusing on the crucial role supervisors play in a visual transformation. But that role is probably not what you or they think. Yes, everyone knows it is vital for supervisors (and managers) to get and stay on board. But what if they spoil the process because they don’t fully understand the nature of the change visuality represents for their direct reports? Even highly successful, natural-born supervisors may need to adjust their approach. What has this got to do with becoming a brilliant trainer? EVERYTHING! Tune in as Gwendolyn discusses the four remaining principles of effective visual workplace training. When she does, the indispensable role of the supervisor may take on new meaning for you and your company. This is a LIVE show. Your call-in is welcomed!
Did you listen to our very first all-call-in show a few weeks ago when folks emailed or called in a comment or burning question for Gwendolyn, our host and visual workplace expert? We heard from Colin (an industrial engineer) who wanted to know how to become a visual workplace trainer. Whitney (from HR) also called in: Her boss wants her to “improve” the traditional 5S Audit the company has been using for years—but which, to quote Whitney, “is boring and only about neat and clean.” Bob also called in to find out how to get borders to stick on a shop floor made in the 1890s. And we heard from Margie who started developing visual devices in her office cubby based on the need-to-know/need-to-share; now she wants to go further. Great questions! Great responses! Plus, each of these listeners got one of Gwendolyn’s books FREE as a Thank You. And we are going to do it again this week! Call in with your comments and issues at: 866-472-5790. Or email them to: radio@visualworkplace.com. THANKS!
Whether you are new or very experienced as a trainer, there are special things to learn in order to become an exceptional visual workplace trainer. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, award-winning author and visual workplace expert, continues her trainer series and shares the first five of her Nine Principles of Effective Training—principles that build knowledge, understanding, skill, and confidence for trainer and learner alike. Listen as Gwendolyn discusses: 1) Principle One/Inspire First, Then Inform; 2) Principle Two/Start Small (growth is faster/deeper as a result); 3) Principle Three/The First Cycle is for the Trainer; 4) Principle Four/Everyone Gets Trained (representative training is not effective); 5) Principle Five/Make the Training Room Physically & Psychologically Safe for Learning (operationalize “Respect for the Individual”). In support of Principle 5, Galsworth shares two sub-techniques: “Normalize the Room” and “Talk Amongst Themselves.” Tune in for all this and more!
Let’s mix it up! This week we continue our discussion on becoming a brilliant visual workplace trainer—but with a twist: You will be the biggest part of the show! Yes, we will begin a real-time conversation between you and Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host, visual expert and prize-winning author. Call in to comment on or ask questions about—well, anything. Your experiences as a visual trainer? Or what you discovered about the best material for borders on an epoxy floor? Or ways to use color-coding to strengthen quality? Or how about sharing your thoughts on getting more management buy-in? Or how to imbed visual info on a machine? You choose. Gwendolyn happily responds. September 20 marks the start of our third year on the air. Just over 100 shows. Add yourself to the equation and be part of the show. The following week, Gwendolyn will share more on becoming a truly impressive trainer of visuality. But this week, it’s time to call in: 866-472-5790. Or email us: radio@visualworkplace.com
Are there natural-born visual workplace trainers? Is training visuality so different from training other topics? How much is a trainer responsible for people’s learning—and for their implementation results? What are some common training mistakes? What are the tricks—and the golden secrets? In today’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and prize-winning author, shares insights and guidelines into successfully training workplace visuality so the results build the bottom-line and strengthen employee engagement and cultural alignment. Tune in and learn the importance of: a) the training room space, b) giving/receiving trainer feedback, c) continuity in teaching, d) relying too heavily on people’s creativity, e) the central role of supplies on hand, e) not standardizing too soon, f) doing your homework, and g) training effectively across multiple shifts. While we are at it, what are reasonable expectations of support from senior management? This is a LIVE show. Call in!
What is Visual Thinking? Our ability to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it—and then to eliminate both through solutions that are visual. A main outcome of a visual conversion is the emergence of a companywide competency: people who know how to think visually—Visual Thinkers. Such thinkers see workplace problems in a new way and solve them using a set of principles called The Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Listen as host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and award-winning author, introduces the first of these building blocks, sharing the two I-driven questions that power workplace visuality. I-driven is Galsworth’s way to involve all operational levels in creating an enterprise-wide visual language. From operator to CEO, manager to supervisor, engineers to purchasers and marketers, this is the dynamic that makes visuality rich, robust, relevant, and sustainable—the key to an aligned and empowered work force. A great ENCORE show!
What happens AFTER the Visual Where (“5S”) is in place? Do visual contributions from value-add associates stop? If no, then how do line employees continue to visually build a robust operational language for day-to-day work? That’s the topic of this week’s Visual Workplace show. In it, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how operators can extend their visual thinking to new areas of challenge: motion triggered by information needed by internal (and later, external) customers and suppliers. She calls this extended or advanced visual thinking: “Customer-Driven Visuality,” one of the keys to sustainability through visuality. In this fourth show on SUSTAIN, Galsworth answers the double-sided question: How do we use visuality to anchor and sustain continuous improvement—and to also improve and extend visuality itself? When do, continuous improvement becomes a way of life in the company—and, with it, a spirited and engaged workforce. This is an Encore show.
What does “perfection” mean in a world of stress, struggle, and disease? What does it mean in our lives—and for our health? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, takes a pause from visual workplaces to have a talk about the health and well-being of the people who work in them. She interviews Dr. Brian Clement, who for over 30 years has been researching and practicing natural health and progressive nutrition. For that many years, Dr. Clement has also been director of the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, world famous for building and re-building one’s immune system through whole, plant-based foods, consumed raw. Dr. Clement has worked with thousands of people, suffering from every imaginable ailment—heart disease, hepatitis, rheumatoid and osteo arthritis, Alzheimers, anorexia, and all forms of cancer. His take on “perfection,” not surprisingly, maps closely to Gwendolyn’s. Tune in to our LIVE show on the secrets of green health. Your call-in is welcome!
Why is getting improvement going so tricky? Why do companies so often bail in the early stages—long before they even have had time to fail? Why is it that the start stops us? Building on last week’s show when we learned the difference between the HOW of deployment and the WHAT, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, maps out five factors that can doom our best efforts to launch successful improvement initiatives. The first factor, discussed last week, is the mistaken pursuit of perfection. Secondly, we are often far too casual about choosing the methodology itself—or it lacks a separate and robust implementation protocol. The third factor that can defeat us is when managers demand results too quickly and, in doing so, rob the organization. Fourth, our trainers begin to train groups for the wrong reasons. Fifth, implementers decide to re-shape the methodology long before they have learned it. It’s the start that stops us. Tune in LIVE and find out why.
It is a well-recognized fact that understanding WHAT to do is only half the battle in operational improvement. The other half is HOW—and then doing it. Knowledge + Know-how. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares the lessons she has taught—and learned—about getting HOW going. If you’ve already cracked this code and learned how to deploy and make it stick, launching another improvement initiative will only strengthen you. But if you are a newcomer (or have a history of “almost-made-its”), the challenge of putting knowledge in place—so it can be and is used—can be a mighty challenge. So much is at stake: 1) promised bottom-line results; 2) cultural growth; 3) hope and confidence; and 4) the reputation of the people who promised success. Your reputation. But few authentic roadmaps exist to help with this subtle, behind-the-scenes process. It’s the start that stops us unless we know that and what to do about it. Tune in LIVE. Call in.
Despite heroic efforts on the part of many, three decades after JIT/Lean reached our shores, most companies have not yet achieved one-piece flow or its material corollary, zero inventories (not more than three hours of WIP). In fact, many organizations are still packed to the rafters with stock—and just about everything else. Whether you fit this profile or not, today’s show is for you! In it, Gwendolyn Galsworth (yes, she’s back!), your host and visual expert, shares examples of addresses that support material handling and other such variable needs as changeover. Learn about, for example, addresses that are especially designed to handle unpredictable material movement. Also learn about the final of the three automatic recoil elements of the visual where: ID Labels. In powerful partnership with borders and addresses, ID Labels help to establish the accuracy, stability, and transparency needed to imbed flow into the living landscape of work. Tune in LIVE. Your call-ins are welcomed!
Imagine reaching such high levels of quality control—at such a low cost—that quality becomes free? Or actually pays? Last week, Martin Hinckley (quality expert and author of Make No Mistake) described the difference between mistakes and variation. This week, he explains that while many organizations still view variation as the enemy, few have learned how to control it without Statistical Process Control (SPC). They have yet to learned what Martin knows: mistake-proofing is the way to not only control variation and the other two sources of defects—but, at the same time, eliminate forever the need for data collection, process tracking, downstream inspection, and statistical analysis! For all their brilliance, W. E. Deming along with the developers of Six Sigma at Motorola (Mikel Harry & Rigel Stewart) failed to recognize this: how to reduce defects without using SPC. Tune in this week and learn more about achieving world-class through mistake-proofing. (Gwendolyn returns next week!)
Do you chase down defects with in-process inspection and SPC—and yet fail to control quality in your company? If so, it is not your fault. You, and millions of others, are looking for solutions in the wrong places. This week (while Gwendolyn presents on Visual Leadership in England), Martin Hinckley, world-renown quality expert and author of “Make No Mistake,” hosts the show and shares his expertise on the role of mistakes in defects and why statistical methods are useless in controlling them. Hear Dr. Hinckley disclose: 1) the inability of SPC/Six Sigma to ever predict system-level defects, 2) how statistical methods mask mistakes; and 3) the unique role that poka-yoke devices (Gwendolyn calls them visual guarantees) plays in addressing the exceptional challenge of mistakes. Get ready to change your mind about—well, about everything. We don’t just believe you can achieve defect-free work. We know you can! (This is a LIVE show, the first of several on this topic this summer.)
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 thirty years of hands-on visual workplace conversions. Her learning curve was like that of most: some important early 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 by ignoring them. Tune in and hear lessons learned and make them part of your own process. This is an ENCORE SHOW for the 4th of July Holiday.
Addresses are like all visual devices: Standardizing too soon can create death by sameness. This week your host and visual expert Gwendolyn Galsworth discusses the importance of rich, vibrant, relevant addresses and the danger of robbing the company (and its employees) of this outcome by attempting to standardize them too soon. One of the hallmarks of a spirited and engaged workforce and a genuinely effective visual conversion is what she calls the “weird” factor—or, in polite company, the “local” factor. If your addresses look suspiciously similar and seem to occur on the same level of mind/imagination, something is not right. Either: 1) The “good enough” bar is set too low; or 2) No time—or not enough time—is set aside for improvement activity. In either case, your visual improvement process is short-circuited, along with excellent addresses. Tune in this week and learn about the importance of setting standards for your addresses—but not the standards most people think we mean.
What are the three things we now know for sure about sustainment? 1) A company that does not learn how to sustain its improvements will lose them. 2) A company that thinks audits creates sustainment has confused compliance with engagement—and will fail. 3) Sustainment requires a balance between people, imagination, and structure/tools. In today’s Visual Workplace show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the fourth understanding: 4) Sustaining means driving—and to drive you need a destination (a clear focus) and plenty of gas. Join us and hear specific ways to cultivate continuous engagement as part of your sustainment process. Learn how to re-fresh and re-fuel people’s thinking on a regular and scheduled basis (monthly/daily) so new ideas and inventions are continually generated and your KPIs improve. Learn more about why we say: Visuality doesn’t just drive work culture—it creates it. This is an ENCORE show. Gwendolyn is on-site in Mexico and back next week.
Which way is forward? What is progress? Is perfection really the goal? Back from her work in England, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares insights from her encounters there—with corporate giants, privately-held shops, and many continuous improvement (CI) specialists. Some of these companies are active in their deployment of visuality; others barely at the starting gate. Galsworth speaks frankly of the surprising similarity in their challenges and misconceptions as they seek a more effective and complete operational model. They go forth—boldly or meekly/sincerely or cynically—like so many spokes of a wheel. Though aligned closely to its neighbors, each spoke seems the opposite of the facing one. Yet all move toward the same compelling center: prosperity, stability, continuous improvement, and personal contribution. In short: unity. As ever, Galsworth stresses the relevance, usefulness and power of thinking—and warns us against its opposite: marketing. Tune in LIVE.
How do you achieve a fully-functioning visual enterprise and a workforce of visual thinkers? The roadmap for getting there is The Ten Doorways, a central framework that matches up specific company groups (managers, associates, CEOs, engineers, supervisors, etc.) with categories of visual function (methods): operators/visual order; engineers & managers/visual standards; supervisors/visual displays; executives/visual leadership; planners , engineers & managers/visual pull systems; and so on. It requires the entire enterprise to create a workforce of visual thinkers. This week your host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and award-winning author, introduces you to the overall logic of her ten-door template. Then she delves into Doorway One: Visual Order/Visual Inventiveness, a category of visual function many refer to as 5S. But hold on to your hats! When Gwendolyn defines 5S, it is more like “5S on Steroids.” This is an Encore Show. Gwendolyn is in the UK for one more week.
What is Visual Thinking? Our ability to recognize motion (the enemy) and the info deficits that cause it—and then to eliminate both through solutions that are visual. A main outcome of a visual conversion is the emergence of a companywide competency: people who know how to think visually. Visual thinkers see workplace problems in a new way, solving them through the principles called The Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Listen as host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual expert/award-winning author, shares those Building Blocks and how to use them to create a fully-functioning, visual work environment and a spirited and engaged workforce. When you do, expect powerful, long-lasting visual solutions that directly and dramatically improve safety, delivery, quality, cost, and morale. If you’re just starting, stalled or well on your way, learn how to apply visual thinking to your company—whatever the work venue, from bank to dry cleaners. This is an Encore Show. Gwendolyn is in the UK.
Answer this: How did knowledge first reach us about JIT, one-piece flow, employee empowerment, suggestion systems, SMED, X-Type Matrix, Total Productive Maintenance, and cellular design? If you say from Japan or even Toyota, you are only partly right. The truth is these world-changing methods arrived on our shores thanks, in great part, to the tireless efforts of Norman Bodek. Rightly dubbed “Dr. Improvement,” Norman nearly single-handedly brought the knowledge wealth of the then “Japanese Miracle” and turned it into courses, videos, and nearly 100 splendid books. In today’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth interviews her past boss, asking him to share the telling details of how, in the 1980s and 90s, he did this with such speed and on a stunning scale. Then hear how Norman re-invented himself in the last decade to become author of now seven books on productivity, continuous improvement, and the power within. Hear about his latest amazing discovery: The Harada Method. This is a live show.
Far too many companies apply addresses in a kind of get-it-over-with manner. Cookie-cutter fashion, they plaster white labels everywhere and on everything—usually with black numbers and letters (the most ineffective combination)—in the mistaken belief that this fulfils the requirement (usually under the umbrella of 5S). It does not. Small wonder that the very people who put these sad little addresses in place lose the will and the interest to maintain them. The standard has already been set: good enough, the enemy of excellence. This week, your host, visual expert, and award-winning author, Gwendolyn Galsworth, continues her series on addresses and drills down into the detail. First she reveals her Six Unbreakable Rules on addresses and then she shares insider tips on maximizing address effectiveness. Addresses, the prefect border partner—both indispensable elements of The Visual Where. Tune in LIVE. (Our interview with Norman Bodek is postponed another week while he fully recovers.)
An address is not just a label with a name on it! The logic of addresses goes far beyond simple naming. Yet, in far too many companies, addresses are overlooked or merely given lip service. Like a road map without any city or street names, without excellent addresses we have little chance of finding the vital workplace items stored on racks, shelves, on the walls and, yes, on the floor. Worse than that, without effective addresses, shortages, mix ups and even accidents are bound to occur—along with late deliveries, unhappy customers, and increasingly long lead times. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and award-winning author, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins her series on addresses. Count on at least three shows as Gwendolyn reveals what she has learned about addresses over the past 30 years: their importance and their very wide variety (although next week will probably feature the interview with Norman Bodek we missed today because of his emergency operation). Tune in LIVE.
You know what we know: borders are an indispensable and a powerful element in your language of operational visuality. Whether you are in discrete manufacturing, continuous process flow, high or low volume production, in a hospital or in a laboratory, borders can visually capture the where, what, who, when, how many, and how of performance. Add an address for that message to become robust. Today, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walks you through the step-by-step process she created for developing a sturdy color-coded system for borders—or for vetting the one you already have. Get your pen and paper ready, this will be in detail and immediately applicable—categories of visual function that each border color represent, how much floor space each color commands, which colors need to be in held common across the enterprise and where flights of fancy are permissible. Full disclosure. Call in with a question or comment and receive our color-code border system template.
Our exploration—and exultation—of the power of borders continues. Completing the agenda from last week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, provides three stunning examples of the double-border function—highly useful applications you can bring to your own company and your own area. She then moves on to color-coded borders and the secret of their success (as well as the most common mistakes). As time permits, Galsworth will detail two other border-strengthening processes. First, her tips for laying down borders that last a year but can be removed overnight. Then she shares her 11-Step Procedure for developing a color-coded system for borders that, among other things, ties each color to the percentage of floor space that color category actually occupies. This is a call-in show so don’t hesitate to tell us about your own border/color-code challenges. Time is not an issue. Anything we don’t finish this week, we can complete during next week’s show.
The problem with using the term “line” interchangeably with “border” is that a line is a geometric coordinate. It does not have a performance function. But a border not only tangibly contributes to the nature and performance of work, it also functions dynamically as an operational partner in how, when, and where work gets done. The more we understand this, the more we recognize how borders can help us create work that makes sense. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) discusses ways you can add dimensions of meaning to your borders so they can extend, control, and reveal the work itself. When we get very clever with borders, we can even make them imbed time into the process. Yes, borders change our understanding of the flow and changes in work content. As a result, our visual intelligence grows. And as we get smarter, our borders get smarter as well. Tune in and learn more—especially if you want to amp up your current 5S approach.
How do you assess a workplace for visuality? How do you determine the current level of a site’s visual competency? What are the considerations? What do you look for—and how do you know decide what it means? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, returns to her favorite topic—The Visual Workplace—and shares her secrets and insights about conducting a visual site assessment (the first of two to three shows on this subject). Hear how she sets up her walk about and how she looks for and assesses what is there. Learn what she means when she states that her job is to tell merely by looking—and then to tell the difference merely by looking. Things get even more interesting when she reveals her other big job: to see what is not there. And what happens when she suddenly discovers that 10-15 other people want to join her as she tours. Listen as she seeks evidence of a system—first of a production system; second of an improvement system; and third of a system of visuality.
Until a company understands the logic and power of borders, borders are merely treated as so many lines—useful for neatness and order but not much more. Few people will expect performance to improve because of them, let alone positively impact KPIs. What a surprise to discover that borders (especially when combined with robust addresses) can measurably increase productivity on the departmental level, even while helping build a work culture of continuous improvement if there is none. And if such a culture already exists, borders will strengthen it. On this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host, author, and visual expert) presents the reasons that justify borders on a functional as well as cultural basis. Tune in and learn how borders help to make the workplace transparent, building accountability and a PDCA loop in the floor and work surfaces. Listen as Galsworth describes dozens of examples and you imagine or re-imagine the role robust borders can play in your company.
Borders are the work horses of operator-led visuality—and rarely utilized to their full potential. Over the past several weeks, your host, author, and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, has walked us through the Smart Placement formula (Function + Location = Flow) so we can position workplace items in locations that connect and align their functions. Now nail that relationship in place through borders, addresses, and (if possible) ID labels—a trio of device categories that imbeds the visual where. We begin with borders, starting with the floor and moving up to walls, benches, shelving, cabinets, and drawers. In the end, borders get installed for everything that casts a shadow—a requirement that applies equally to easy-to-move items as well as to those that never budge (machines and tall shelves). Plus when you learn to apply borders effectively, they can get smarter as you get smarter. Join us this week LIVE! Learn about borders and their powerful visual performance vocabulary.
Visuality based in principles means you can continue to expand workplace transparency far beyond the first cycle. Over the past two months, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, has explained and described a set of 14 Smart Placement Principles and how to imbed them into the living landscape of work. The result? The flow of work content based on the actual function of the things that populate the work environment. In today’s show, this discussion is completed and next steps described. In addition, Galsworth shares key insights from the project she has undertaken in parallel to her show: revitalizing and strengthening her approach to poka-yoke/visual guarantees. In it, the true meaning of 100% Source Inspection becomes clear: the conversation between attributes. And the real use of poka-yoke devices comes to light: imbedding those attributes deeply into the process of work—or better yet into the design of the product so it can only be made right. Tune in for more.
The final three of the fourteen principles of Smart Placement focus on opportunities hidden in thin air. What, for example, is meant by “negative space?” And how do you turn it into a positive factor that helps the enterprise succeed? This is just one of the many imbedded questions this set of principles reveal. In this final Smart Placement show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) discusses this and other important content that can help you utilize Smart Placement, either as an powerful doorway to robust 5S or as a set of stand-alone lessons that can be used by any work area keen on improvement—whether assembly area, hospital floor or engineering office. One thing is sure: The past eight episodes of The Visual Workplace have demonstrated that where the things of work are located is of vital importance and there is more to learn about that than has ever been contemplated. Tune in and find out for yourself. This a LIVE, call-in show. Let us hear from you!
Piles of things is a known trigger for massive motion. As we continue our journey through the fourteen principles of smart placement, we learn not only how to order those piles but how to organize them to support our performance outcomes. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, walks you through Principle 9: ways to sort not only components and supplies into a coherent pattern but, if need be, the entire layout of your area. Or in the case of Scania Trucks, the entire production floor; the result: a 30% increase in productivity and cancellation of plans to build a new plant. Then, in Principle 10, you learn how co-locate different workplace items for a specific task. Called “Design-To-Task,” this approach is indispensable to complex machine change over, patient delivery or assembly processes. Then on to “Use the Existing Architecture,” one of the many double-up functions in workplace visuality. Tune in and learn how to utilize these in your company.
Flow is pull’s foundation. Pull is flow under demand, driven by time. This week we focus on Principle 8/Let The Flow Do the Work in our continuing march through the 14 Smart Placement principles. In 8, we look at the macro-layout in a work area and at its overall flow line. How would you describe that flow? Fluid? Stalled? Using the Could-Be/Dream Map to illuminate motion, we contemplate the placement of what’s easy-to-move and what needs approval before it can be re-located. If you are a regular listener, you know you are in the Land of Big Ideas (yellow post-its)—and they have to be considered carefully. Not handling Big Ideas correctly can cause your smart placement efforts to crash and burn. Do not confuse “I-driven” with open-handed permission. If you do, associates may get the mistaken notion that thinking of a BIG improvement idea is the same as doing it. This is not so. Listen and hear how to handle those decisions and keep the spirit of inventiveness and engagement alive.
This week on The Visual Workplace, we continue our march through the fourteen principles of Smart Placement. Last week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) walked us through the first four. Today, we are bound to pick up three or four more—maybe five: Principle 5/Put It On Wheels; Principle 6/Make It Ergonomically Sounds; and Principle 7/Make Function Appear & Disappear At Will. Those three conclude the basic set of easy-to-make changes on a micro-level. Then we move on to thinking that is more abstract and more conceptual, beginning with Principle 8/Let The Flow Do The Work. You will also learn more about how to maximize the use of the Could-Be Map that teams created to help them see, think, and re-envision the layout of function in their work areas. Listen as Gwendolyn tells you how to keep groups engaged and thinking and how to set up a Charge Chart that captures that thinking, without overpromising. Join us for another practical session of how-tos and what-ifs.
How do we get smart about the placement of function at work? If you’ve been listening to The Visual Workplace, you now have a growing understanding of the HOW and the WHY of that. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) continues to share the details of this core methodology—which she developed so operators could deploy higher dimensions of 5S and become more culturally aligned. This is where 5S and visual thinking begin their dance. After a quick review of the learning so far, hear the first four of the 14 Smart Placement Principles, principles that operators apply directly to their Could-Be or Dream Maps. Because these first four principles are simple, they get heads nodding and pave the way, gradually, to more complex considerations as value-add associates re-engineer the layout of function and create an accelerated flow of material, information and themselves into and through their work areas. Join us for an hour of practical, hands-on listening.
If employee ownership is crucial to continuous improvement (and who would deny that?), then what happens when people want to own their improvements too much? What do you do when hourly associates falsely assume their creativity guarantees their ideas will get deployed? How do you handle the outliers—people with innovative but un-popular improvement notions? And what happens when operators cannot agree amongst themselves on what is needed and why? How do you handle that? Do you step in and pull rank? Do you let associates “duke it out?” In this third show in her current Smart Placement series, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) tackles these questions and shares her “Four People Process Tools” for getting people involved and managing the boundaries. In parallel, she completes the details started last week of the Smart Placement Mapping process, a core step in her 5S protocol for making borders meaningful. This is a LIVE show. Call-in comments and questions welcomed!
Question: On your way to the Visual Where, what do you do before laying down floor borders? Answer: You implement Smart Placement. This is a surprise step Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) discovered twenty-two years ago when her then-attempts at traditional 5S failed. Part of that failure, she realized, stemmed from people laying down lines that simply traced where workplace items were—instead of validating the current location of the functions those items represented or improving it. In response, she inserted a step before implementing borders: Smart Placement. This week in the second show in the series, Galsworth walks you, step by step, through Smart Placement mapping. She also emphasizes the need for trainers/coaches to do their own homework in advance while also preparing for messy people issues associated with new layouts. Listen and learn how to amplify and anchor your 5S in visual thinking and operator inventiveness. This is a LIVE show. Call-ins welcome!
Does the location of things at work matter? You bet! Finding that right location can accelerate the flow of work—or slow it to a standstill. This is the logic of Smart Placement and its formula: Function + Location = Flow. Over the next several shows, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, shares her Smart Placement approach—that indispensable step before laying down borders. Today, she defines the problem of placement that is not smart and shares a mapping tool so you/your teams can discover the level of motion (moving without working) in your area currently triggered by un-smart location—the un-conscious placement of function. Smart Placement doesn’t just show us where things are. It ensure that things are in the right place—not simply a designated location (as in “a place for everything/everything in its place”)—but the smart place for a function (item), its right location in relationship to every other function in the area. Tune in and learn more.
Why do the Sami people in the Arctic have 180 words for snow and nearly 1000 for reindeer? Because words matter. Words are different because different meanings are needed. In much the same way, it is important to question why we have so many different improvement approaches and to probe our assumptions about what we believe about why they are different. Our results will only be as good as that thinking. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual workplace expert and your host) takes us through the three remaining components of the BORG mind: Borg Quality, Borg Empowerment, and Borg Standardization. What happens when we buy the marketing and not the product? Or eat the packaging instead of the meat? What happens when we organize our improvement initiatives around mistaken beliefs and fuzzy hopes? Why can’t Six Sigma eradicate defects? Why is an empowerment mandate never enough? When does the pledge to standardization defeat long-lasting improvement solutions? Tune in and find out.
It is not the number of visual devices that transforms a company into a highly-functioning visual work environment. It is the power of those devices. That’s what separates watered-down, copycat devices from highly-effective visual solutions…and cosmetic visuality from authentic visual function. In this week’s episode, Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and your host, defines what visual devices are—and how to make them increasingly effective by applying the steps of visual power. Tune in and learn about visual indicators, visual signals, visual controls and visual guarantees (poka-yokes). See how the principles in these four power levels can turn any visual device into a performance driver—a mechanism that ensures the outcomes you require: safety, speed, flow, accuracy, and perfect quality. This is a two-episode show. Listen to both and learn what the four power levels are, how they function, and how you can create more powerful visual devices in your own company.
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!
While many improvement leaders produce impressive, lasting results, some pursue their duties as though their minds have been taken over by aliens—or, as Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual workplace expert and your host) says it: by BORG, as in “resistance is futile.” BORG quality, BORG empowerment, and BORG standardization are topics of upcoming shows. Today she looks at “BORG cellular design.” When “5 Days & 4 Nights” arrived in the US from Toyota in 1986, it caused a revolution of speed, invention, and just do it change. In the 1990s, it morphed into the Kaizen Blitz and grabbed our national attention. We never looked back. But we should have. Why? Because since then, far too many companies (innocent and hopeful the Blitz was the new best way) did inadvertent harm to their companies and culture, even as flow distance and time shrank often by 80%? No one told them that Toyota confined the Blitz to its supply chain alone—and for good reason. Tune in today and hear the rest of the story.
Strange how most of us believe change happens. Strange how we believe companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we’re making by attending to exact technical causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain and an all-but-undetectable logic produces these tangible, knowable outcomes? Suddenly reality ain’t what it used to be—or is supposed to be. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields, sharing research on how companies evolve and learning happens, based on the largest gap in understanding that exists: “what we don’t know we don’t know.” Tune in and you may be surprised to learn that even monkeys can point the way to what’s really going on when we learn, implement, and improve. This is a live show. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed!
The world of work often seems to most closely resemble politics, with further polarization the method of choice for handling differences: Go to your corner and come out fighting. Though trendy, playing our differences against each other is not the only way. In this week’s show, 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. These polar opposites demonstrate the importance of our learning a new way and breaking the myth of either/or choices. No less so in the workplace. That 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 a word: unity. And throughout, managers and supervisors are caught in the middle. Tune in and learn more.
Who has not heard the discussion of employee empowerment begin with the well-worn top/down pyramid and its seeming opposite—the bottom/up pyramid? The question is not which of the two pyramids to reject but rather how do we blend the two into a single framework of excellence. In this week’s show, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to map out that process and the new paradigm of governance and participation that results. At the heart of that paradigm is the re-distribution of power, beginning with the role of executive as leader and the need to identify, articulate, and drive the company’s vision, mission, values, strategy, systems, resources, and structure. This is the realm of the “what,” the “who,” and the “why.” Contrast this, Galsworth urges, with the bottom-up or empowerment pyramid with its steady value-add level focus on the “how”—operational execution. An effective work culture is perfect blending of the two. Tune in and learn more.
If you don’t diagnose your site correctly, how can you expect to improve it? Last week your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, mapped out how to learn to see differently—both what is there and what is not. This week, Gwendolyn will use her Ten-Doorway Model to help you pinpoint specific opportunities for increased visuality by assessing the need for what she calls “categories of visual function.” Which are present in your workplace? Which are weak? Which are non-existent? Even when you get that, the rush is not to simply fill in the gaps. They may not all be relevant to your purposes. The rush is to determine which visual functions are most critical for your company’s next steps. Hope is ever in abundance, but most other resources are limited. You have to choose your next visual improvement steps for what they will contribute to your bottom line. In short, they must support your business improvement model. Most companies do not have one. And yet they hope to improve.
Do your performance measures monitor? Or do they drive? If you are in hot pursuit of operational excellence, your answer tells us lots about your success. In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) opens and defines the fourth doorway in her 10-Doorway Visual Workplace model: “Visual Leadership,” with visual metrics as its first crucial step. Visual Metrics are a category of measurement function that speaks in the voice of the user, names performance in concrete, local terms, illuminates cause, and then drives us down the causal chain. Drives us where? To highly-improved, sustainable performance. Yes, we also need metrics that monitor (KPIs), usually because our boss requires them. Too often, however, we make the mistake of thinking that making measures visible (tacking them on bulletin boards) has the power to create improvement. It does not. Tune in and learn what visual metrics are, how they get developed (I-driven), and how to use them to drive excellence.
How do you assess a workplace for visuality? How do you determine the current level of a site’s visual competency? What are the considerations? What do you look for—and how do you know decide what it means? This week, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, returns to her favorite topic—The Visual Workplace—and shares her secrets and insights about conducting a visual site assessment (the first of two to three shows on this subject). Hear how she sets up her walk about and how she looks for and assesses what is there. Learn what she means when she states that her job is to tell merely by looking—and then to tell the difference merely by looking. Things get even more interesting when she reveals her other big job: to see what is not there. And what happens when she suddenly discovers that 10-15 other people want to join her as she tours. Listen as she seeks evidence of a system—first of a production system; second of an improvement system; and third of a system of visuality.
How do you dis-mantle complexity and keep customer choice strong? Answer: systematically. In this week’s show, the final in the Smart Simple Design series, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and author of the book of the same name) outlines the Variety Effectiveness Process (VEP). Hear how to prepare for the process, what teams to organize, how to assess and validate reduction opportunities, and the importance of early victories to keep skeptics at bay while the harder work of in-depth analysis gets underway. Learn how to organize a special team to analysis company products from a marketing perspective and propose reductions that eliminate unneeded variety but do not endanger the company's market position. Or a team that surveys all the part types in the company's parts universe and often eliminates enough near or actual redundancies to reduce parts inventories by 40%-60%. Learn how to apply the concept of “shared versus unique” to dismantle or even prevent complexity. Tune in. Learn more.
Unrestrained variety is not a requirement for increasing market share. When a choice is pointless (offering 87 types of steering wheels), it is negative. Negative variety adds cost, not value. It burdens the corporation with complexity and expense. Ultimately, the customer pays. Positive variety, by contrast, adds value, increases sales, and can even cut costs. Understanding negative variety and rooting out its causes is the topic of this week’s show. In it, your host and author of Smart Simple Design, Gwendolyn Galsworth shows us how the actions of virtually every part of the enterprise can either help or hinder these efforts. Whether formal or informal, such actions (which Galsworth calls “policy triggers”) reflect what is expected and, to a large extent, what is done. Where are the policy roots of negative variety? Look in these five company functions: 1) Accounting; 2) Marketing & Sales; 3) Product Development; 4) Data Systems; and 5) Operations. Tune in and hear more.
What causes complexity? What are its triggers? Two of them are out-of-date accounting systems and a big, bad bungling parts classification system. Today, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and author of Smart Simple Design, continues to peel back the onion on negative variety—complexity you can’t sell but have to manage nonetheless. Start with the realization that traditional accounting triggers variety proliferation. Why? Because GAAP is not designed to identify, track or quantify complexity or illuminate its causes. Instead, it can and often does trigger parts congestion. In contrast stands True Cost (Variety Costs + Function Costs + Control Costs)—the accurate means for determining the actual cost of putting function and difference in place and tracking them. The second negative trigger she discusses is a parts classification system, flooded with inaccuracies, redundancies and conflicting, useless, obsolete, incomplete data. Tune in and hear her eight guidelines for cleaning that up.
Simplification is a mindset and a process. We need executives who see past “tools” and understand the impact of decisions made at the top on the whole organization. This week your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth, interviews Eric Lail, Vice President/Performance Solutions at Total Insight, a North Carolina firm, offering services in extended lean across the full supply chain. In this third show of the Smart Simple Design series, Eric’s long years as a furniture maker pay off in stories gruesome, glorious and otherwise that show us mistakes on the shop-floor or front office only affect a small percentage of the enterprise. Mistakes at the top, by contrast, impacts 90%-100% of the company—and those are almost always mistakes of complexity. Whether you’re in marketing, manufacturing, service or distribution, it’s time to recognize that the number of parts/options in the system can have negative impact on your service, inventories, overhead (space, buildings, rent, dies, etc.). Tune in.
What went wrong? To gain market dominance, Company A offers customers endless choice. Gross sales soar but profits do not improve. The company re-groups and develops still more products. The result? Profits not only do not increase, sales on previous products plunge. What went wrong? This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host, presents the second in her Smart Simple Design series on negative variety. Learn why Visual and Lean are simply coping mechanisms for the seemingly innocent introduction of “just one new part.” Costing a mere $0.35, it triggers a long causal chain of cost and complication. Why? Because: All costs adhere to the part! To help better grasp this, we walk through The Parts Index—a simple but shrewd yardstick for measuring product complexity and its corresponding organizational impact. Instead of simply counting each part on a bill on material, you multiply it by the number of times each part occurs across all products. The result: YIKES! Tune in and learn more.
Consumer demand for choice drives today’s market. Product and service variation is exploding—and, with it, enterprise complexity and a choking internal congestion. In this week’s show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins the first of a series of shows, based on her book, “Smart Simple Design.” In it, she describes the triggers of negative variety and ways to minimize them so we can continue to offer our customers choice and still make a healthy profit. Tune in and hear why many thriving companies are heading for a crash because they don’t see the negative consequences of mushrooming product and service variety. Or because they mis-name the problem as “deteriorating profits” or “excess inventory.” As a result, they pursue solutions—such Lean and Visual—that are not designed to address the real problem. The real problem is not the production system. It is not quality, service or delivery. It certainly is not the customer. The real problem is the product itself.
Engineer by training, master lean practitioner, continuous improvement expert, Maria Elena Stopher drives excellence with the heart of a leader…a soulful leader in private practice and in national and international arenas. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host, interviews Ms. Stopher on her 25 years in the trenches of manufacturing and at the board table—driven by a single abiding vision: to change the world. First as head of the MEP Network, Maria Elena developed an excellence curriculum connecting hundreds of field technicians in a national mission to help small manufacturers. Ten years later she launched a private practice (Ultimate Lean) and brought the same lean and visual fire to government agencies. As she continues that work, she also chairs AME (Association of Manufacturing Excellence), an all volunteer not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating networks of leveraged learning across 50 States. Tune in this week for a story and a vision—told from the heart.
Is workplace visuality recognized as a vital part of operational excellence? Does it really make a business difference? If you are challenging for The Shingo Prize it does. Tune this week when your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, asks these questions (and more) of Robert Miller, executive director of The Shingo Prize. Under Bob’s visionary leadership, The Prize has re-defined its assessment criteria and anchored them in a tight framework of principles, systems, and tools (in that order). Hear how visuality aligns those criteria and facilitates their achievement. Having led or assisted at over 100 Shingo site visits, Bob Miller has a unique, first-hand appreciation of the dynamic partnership between visuality and excellence. As we listen, we come to know what they know: “Visuality doesn’t just create a lean enterprise culture—it drives it.” This is a LIVE Show. Call ins welcome. (Visit shingoprize.org for a copy of the new Shingo Model and Application Guidelines.)
What’s the big deal about S1 anyway? What’s 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 visual expert, answers these questions and more. Learn the three premises for S1 success. Hear about Charley’s Table, the real meaning of S1, and what’s really at stake when people’s so-called “junk” is removed against their wishes—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’ve been doing 5S for years, tune in and learn how to re-invigorate your current approach and go even further. Learn to use S1/SORT to build operator-led visuality and value-add empowerment.
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.
Workplace visuality is not rocket science. You see it. You get it. That is one of its powers. Implementing visuality in the enterprise so it has a long and vital life, however, is another matter. Setting up a visual workplace steering can help—a lot! In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host) continues describing this team of associate volunteers who help the company stay the improvement course and meet its impact potential. With 30 years of hands-on experience in implementing visuality, Gwendolyn provides the telling details. This week she adds to your understanding of how this team: 1) gets groomed through a self-process of norm setting to take on a leadership role that has no authority; 2) learns to discern the difference between process and task and deploy that in its interactions; and 3) leads not just by example but also by helping to set standards which the company may not realize it needs. Empowerment on steroids continues! Emails and call-ins welcomed!
How involved should value-add associates be in making a visual workplace conversion a success? If you ask Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visuality expert: a lot! One of the major mechanisms for doing this is “The Visual Workplace Steering Team”—the topic of today’s show. Call this team what you will, it consists of hourly employees who volunteer to monitor the visual roll out in the enterprise and provide feedback and recommendations to help ensure its success. Its members collaborate with management to make sure the company keeps true to the cultural values and implementation principles it professes to embrace. While this team, by design, has no positional authority, it does have significant responsibility. In short: empowerment on steroids! Tune in for the details on: what this team is, how it functions (autonomously), what it contributes—and how it governs itself and learns to govern itself. Galsworth provides the fine points. This is a LIVE show. Emails and call-ins welcomed!
Healthcare organizations are under renewed pressure to improve quality and reduce costs. Kaizen, as a methodology, lets front-line staff engage in a process of everyday improvement that results in safer patient care, better patient care, and a more rewarding care-giving experience. As these improve, costs shrink. This week at The Visual Workplace, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) interviews Mark Graban, lean healthcare expert, speaker, blogger (www.leanblog.org), and author of Lean Hospitals. His brand new book (co-authored with Joe Schwartz) is Healthcare Kaizen: a comprehensive overview of Kaizen thought—loaded with tons of examples, quotes, tools, pictures and stories. Tune in and listen as Gwendolyn and Mark discuss the role of Kaizen in the world of health today and the many powerful steps you can take to apply this powerful tool to your own enterprise. While healthcare is the setting, continuous improvement is the focus. Get your pencils ready.
Our sustainment series wraps up today—at least for the time being. And what three things do we now know for sure? 1) A company that does not learn how to sustain its improvements will lose them. 2) A company that thinks audits creates sustainment has confused compliance with engagement—and will fail. 3) Sustainment requires a balance between people, imagination, and structure/tools. In today’s Visual Workplace show, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the fourth understanding: 4) Sustaining means driving—and to drive you need a destination (a clear focus) and plenty of gas. Join us and hear specific ways to cultivate continuous engagement as part of your sustainment process. Learn how to re-fresh and re-fuel people’s thinking each month so that new ideas and inventions are continually generated and your KPIs improve. Learn more about why we say: Visuality doesn’t just drive work culture—it creates it. This is a LIVE show. Your emails and call-ins are welcome!
What happens after the Visual Where (“5S”) is in place? Do visual contributions from value-add associates stop? If no, then how do line employees continue to visually develop a robust operational language for day-to-day work? That’s the topic of this week’s Visual Workplace show. In it, your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains how operators can extend their visual thinking to new areas of challenge: motion triggered by information needed by internal (and later, external) customers and suppliers. She calls this extended or advanced visual thinking: “Customer-Driven Visuality,” one of the keys to sustainability through visuality. In this fourth show on SUSTAIN, Galsworth answers the double-sided question: 1) How do we use visuality to anchor and sustain improvement? and 2) How do we use visuality to sustain (and extend) visuality? That’s when continuous improvement becomes a way of life in the company. This is a LIVE show. Your call-in questions/comments are welcome!
What are realistic expectations about how people should and do respond to your splendid new improvement initiative? Should you get your hopes up? Should you remain detached and neutral? Or should you gird your loins for battle? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discusses what she has discovered over three decades of implementations: that people will respond to change in one of three ways. They embrace it. They resist it. Or they do not have an opinion about it one way or the other; they are neutral. We call this threesome: The Rowers, Watchers, and Grumblers. And they offer us a perspective on the I of the I-driven approach to workplace visuality. Tune in this week and hear Gwendolyn share the telling difference between inertia and resistance and the most effective way of handling the grouches. Learn what not to do and what happens when individuals are allowed, even encouraged, to be themselves, with no fear of penalty.
Is your visual workplace (or 5S) roll out a little stuck? Is your empowered approach to improvement suddenly at a standstill? Does a slowdown have you baffled—not knowing if it’s you, your breath, or simply a bad implementation plan? Tune in to The Visual Workplace this week and hear your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discuss exactly this situation with Clifton Doll, who is in charge of continuous improvement and operator-led visuality at the Doosan Bobcat in Wahpeton, North Dakota. Listen as Clif describes his goals, process, why he feels stumped by the current level of engagement—and how he hopes to “fix the problem.” Then hear Gwendolyn’s assessment, plus her recommendations on how Clifton can move forward. This is the first show of real-time un-rehearsed visual coaching. If you and other listeners show interest, there’ll be a regular spot to sign up for and get free expert coaching from Gwendolyn, on-air, on your own conversion challenges.
What company champion (site executive, CEO, plant manager, GM) does not seek ways to sustain and extend hard-won improvement results. But few such executives rightly understand what sustainment means or how to attain and extend it. Instead, they mistakenly insist upon mechanisms that track—or even enforce—compliance: Audits are a case in point. But, says Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert), they would do better to look for specific ways to use their positional power to: 1) cultivate employee engagement; and 2) drive improvement. In this week’s show, Galsworth presents the third segment in her on-going discussion on “tools that sustain.” This time she focuses on the role of the Management Champion (aka, site executive) and two mechanisms that champions can use to help drive the improvement process—without driving over employees in the process: The Management Watch and The Laminated Map. This is a live show. Your comments and questions are welcomed.
How do you make a poor, unglamorous visual standard (with no real power of its own) meaningful and engaging? First, make sure value-add associates not only own the information in each standard but also decide how it is formatted. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) interviews Jeff Nelson, founder/president of Expert OJT, a firm that specializes in helping associates create standards that are both visual and highly effective. Jeff calls these: “job aides.” With over 25 years in the field, he knows better than nearly anyone that “people who own the work own the job aide.” Tune in and hear Jeff explain S.M.A.R.T., his formula for ensuring that each job aide is complete, systematic, relevant, crystal-clear, actionable—and worth the time to develop. Then learn his “15 Tips for Making Your Job Aides Visual”—practical rules for providing the right steps, in the right order, so that the right details are factored in and unimportant details are filtered out.
What does RESPECT FOR THE INDVIDUAL mean? How do we operationalize it? How do we translate RESPECT into behavior? In this second week on the “Nine Tools That Build & Sustain,” Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert), presents the Visual Workplace Checklist—a core tool that value-add associates use to maintain and then improve current levels of visuality in their areas. Grounded in the I-driven principle, this checklist is wholly owned by area associates because they: 1) choose checklist items/tasks; 2) administer the checklist themselves; 3) score each item/task based on the extent to which it is complete/incomplete. Plus, checklist items evolve over time. Unlike static audits, this is a dynamic process, made even more so by the rotation of the so-called Checklist Patrol. Tune in and learn how to re-vitalize your 5S by developing knowledge, high-level application, and self-leadership. Also learn ways to make visual workplace supplies a part of your sustainment framework.
What is the true goal of sustaining improvement? The true—indeed, the only—goal is to strengthen the behaviors that lead to a continuous improvement work culture. Hard-won though they are, these behaviors can erode quickly if we do not take concrete steps to sustain them. In this week’s show, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to share nine powerful sustaining tools. First, we learn an exacting definition of discipline (one that may surprise you)—followed by the so-called Visual Workplace Code of Conduct. This code, which is practiced by value-add associates in the targeted areas, is designed to build the qualities of self-leadership into each person’s day. From resisting the temptation to vote excellence into existence—to working for true consensus and modeling the behaviors in yourself that you wish to see in others. If sustainment does not help us grow into who we really are, we are stuck with a narrow definition of ourselves and so is our company.
What do you do when you want to challenge for The Shingo Prize—but know that lean is not the right place for your company to start? When Moog QuickSet (outskirts of Chicago) faced that question, its answer was: We need to begin with operator-led visuality. Join us this week on The Visual Workplace, when Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual workplace expert) interviews Brian Hallstrom, Operator Division Manager at QuickSet, and Jay Alfonso, engineer, supervisor, and new visual workplace coach/trainer/coordinator in charge of visuality on the production floor. Learn about their roles in the visual conversion underway at QuickSet—along with early victories, challenges, and personal changes. Hear what Brian and Jay stay glued on and why there are miles to go before ANYONE “sleeps.” You’ve heard Galsworth present the elements of her model for the past 30 weeks. Now it’s time to examine them in action, warts and all. This is a live show. Get ready to call in with comments and questions.
Strange how most of us believe change happens. Strange how we believe companies learn and improve. Stranger yet is how we seek to validate the progress we think we’re making by attending to exact technical causes and the concrete logic of the physical. But what if an entirely different set of causes pertain and an all-but-undetectable logic produces these tangible, knowable outcomes? Suddenly reality ain’t what it used to be—or is supposed to be. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, takes you into the world of chaos theory, fractals, and morphogenic fields, sharing research on how companies evolve and learning happens, based on the largest gap in understanding that exists: “what we don’t know we don’t know.” Tune in and you may be surprised to learn that even monkeys can point the way to what’s really going on when we learn, implement, and improve. This is a live show. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed!
Did you know? Visuality is contagious. So is employee engagement and continuous improvement. Better watch out! They are spreading around the globe, in places as far flung as India, England, Australia, Mexico, and Brazil—and in the US from Boston to Utah. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, shares what she has seen and experienced on her travels since January when she took her visual workplace model on the road through seminars and visual site assessments. Tune in and hear her observations about companies and countries that are new to the quest for operational excellence—as well as those that are second- (even third-) generation achievers in the challenging journey of continuous improvement, cultural alignment, and increased profit margins through workplace visuality. No one ever said it was going to be easy. But everyone knows it’s going to be rewarding. This is a live show. Your call-in questions and comments are welcomed!
It is not the number of visual devices that transforms a company into a highly-functioning visual work environment. It is the power of those devices. That’s what separates watered-down copycat devices from highly-effective visual solutions…and cosmetic visuality from authentic visual function. In this week’s episode, Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and your host, defines what visual devices are—and how to make them increasingly effective by applying the steps of visual power. Tune in and learn about visual indicators, visual signals, visual controls and visual guarantees (poka-yokes). See how the construct of these four power levels can turn any visual device into a performance driver—a device that ensures the outcomes you require: speed, flow, accuracy, safety, and perfect quality. This is a two-episode show. Listen to both to learn what the four power levels are, how they function, and how you can create more powerful visual devices in your own company.
It is not the number of visual devices that transforms a company into a highly-functioning visual work environment. It is the power of those devices. That’s what separates watered-down, copycat devices from highly-effective visual solutions…and cosmetic visuality from authentic visual function. In this week’s episode, Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and your host, defines what visual devices are—and how to make them increasingly effective by applying the steps of visual power. Tune in and learn about visual indicators, visual signals, visual controls and visual guarantees (poka-yokes). See how the principles in these four power levels can turn any visual device into a performance driver—a mechanism that ensures the outcomes you require: safety, speed, flow, accuracy, and perfect quality. This is a two-episode show. Listen to both and learn what the four power levels are, how they function, and how you can create more powerful visual devices in your own company.
“Never in U.S. history has the subject of healthcare costs been so visible or so contentious….” Thus begins Naida Grunden’s groundbreaking new book, Lean-Led Hospital Design (Charles Hagood/co-author). This week on The Visual Workplace, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, interviews Ms. Grunden on her concept of lean-led hospital design and why she considers it is indispensable to minimizing soaring healthcare costs. Hear why, when asked “When do you build?“ Grunden responds: “Build when process improvement cannot take you any further.” In traditional hospital planning, the focus is on the architecture, not operations and merely imports and prolongs old systems and the chronic problems tied to them. Grunden offer us instead a way to construct a building that is borne out of continuous improvement. Tune in and here this fresh perspective on the power of a design paradigm that can take 40% of the building cost out before a shovel ever goes into the ground.
What are realistic expectations about how people should and do respond to your splendid new improvement initiative? Should you get your hopes up? Should you remain detached and neutral? Or should you gird your loins for battle? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, discusses what she has discovered over three decades of implementations: that people will respond to change in one of three ways. They embrace it. They resist it. Or they do not have an opinion about it one way or the other; they are neutral. We call this threesome: The Rowers, Watchers, and Grumblers. And they offer us a perspective on the I of the I-driven approach to workplace visuality. Tune in this week and hear Gwendolyn share the telling difference between inertia and resistance and the most effective way of handling the grouches. Learn what not to do and what happens when individuals are allowed, even encouraged, to be themselves, with no fear of penalty.
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!
“What do I do when my COO says he wants us to be creative then floods us with his ideas?” “Can I use visual to get other people to do the right thing, like show up to meetings on time?” “How come 5S in the West is only about neat-clean-labels-lines and how can I get beyond that?” These are just some of the questions your host and visual expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, has received over the past few weeks. In this show, she responds in ways that make sense to her. And, she hopes, you will call in with responses, comments, stories, ideas of your own. And maybe more questions. It’s time to pause and check for understanding and application. Here are some more we have received. “Can I use Kaizen Blitzes to get visual inventiveness going with my operators?” “What’s wrong with standardizing on our visual devices? How can we make our processes reliable without that?” “Where do the 5 Whys fit in?” Are these your questions too? Tune in. Call in. Your comments and responses are part of this show!
Napoleon, Churchill, Roosevelt, Gandhi, Bernstein, Jobs, Battenburg. Natural leaders all. How did they naturally lead? They set the direction, assigned resources, and held steady to the course. What natural leaders do intuitively, we can learn through the practiced use of visual leadership tools. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual expert, delves into three such tools: Business Systems Improvement Template, X-Type Matrix, and Operations Road Map. These high-level Doorway 4 mechanisms (combined with visual metrics and visual problem solving) help us simulate the remarkable behaviors of natural leaders and turn them into practical skills we can use everyday. What behaviors? Visually name the horizon, assign resources, set the pace, confer valence, and drive relentlessly drive. All the while, we never give up our humanity: nice on the outside/toast on the inside. Whether you work as a supervisor or executive, tune in and find the leader in you through workplace visuality.
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 do we mean by a fully-functioning visual workplace. What do we mean when we say a company has reached a showcase level of workplace visuality? This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, announces the three first recipients of The Visual Workplace/Ten Doorways Prize: Delphi Deltronicos in Mexico, Parker Hannifin in California, and Royal Nooteboom Trailers in Holland. The purpose of The Prize is to confer recognition and appreciation on companies that have cultivated a level of operational visuality that is sufficient to demonstrate to others what a visual workplace is, how it functions, and precisely why it is indispensable to the dual business benefits of cultural alignment and dramatic bottom-line results. Listen as Galsworth describes the visual work environment of each of these prize-winners and where, within her Ten Doorways framework, their distinctive visual contributions cluster. Then compare and contrasts those with your own efforts.
Visual Metrics play a mighty role in effective problem solving because they illuminate cause, show us how the problem behaves, and drive us down the causal chain. They are the vector force of the process: thrust plus direction. But metrics have only limited use without deep and sustainable solution making. People are needed for that. This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, explains part two of the Visual Problem Solving process: getting people engaged in developing rich problem descriptions and then create a wide array of viable solutions. To do this, we gather stake holders and lead them through a step-by-step method that allows them to share their insights and expertise in order to un-nest levels of viable solutions that they, in turn, implement systematically. Eliminating problems is rarely about silver-bullet answers but instead focus on identifying an exact array of good causes that have been tried, tested, and, through visuality, made sustainable.
What happened at Sheldlah that allowed it to pursue problem solving (“PS”) with such strength that, in 1987, it adopted this: “A problem is any thing that inconveniences anyone downstream.” Though not widely recognized, all problem solving is fundamentally about creating new standards, new reliable procedures, that allow us to repeatedly achieve the value/specs our customer wants. In too many companies, PS merely organizes the noise around a problem so that it becomes approachable instead of doggedly pursuing cause. But many problems exist on a nested or multi-layered level so there can be no silver bullet solution. This week (in the first of two shows on the topic), Dr. Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual workplace expert and your host, shares her perspectives on solving chronic, costly, complex problems, indispensable to operational excellence. Join us as she shares the definition of a standard that Dr. Ryuji Fukuda (Sumitomo) revealed to her in 1985 that almost made her drop her teacup.
Do your performance measures monitor? Or do they drive? If you are in hot pursuit of operational excellence, your answer tells us lots about your success. In this show, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your host and visual expert) opens and defines the fourth doorway in her 10-Doorway Visual Workplace model: “Visual Leadership,” with visual metrics as its first crucial step. Visual Metrics are a category of measurement function that speaks in the voice of the user, names performance in concrete, local terms, illuminates cause, and then drives us down the causal chain. Drives us where? To highly-improved, sustainable performance. Yes, we also need metrics that monitor (KPIs), usually because our boss requires them. Too often, however, we make the mistake of thinking that making measures visible (tacking them on bulletin boards) has the power to create improvement. It does not. Tune in and learn what visual metrics are, how they get developed (I-driven), and how to use them to drive excellence.
What do we mean by a fully-functioning visual workplace. What do we mean when we say a company has reached a showcase level of workplace visuality? This week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, announces the three first recipients of The Visual Workplace/Ten Doorways Prize: Delphi Deltronicos in Mexico, Parker Hannifin in California, and Royal Nooteboom Trailers in Holland. The purpose of The Prize is to confer recognition and appreciation on companies that have cultivated a level of operational visuality that is sufficient to demonstrate to others what a visual workplace is, how it functions, and precisely why it is indispensable to the dual business benefits of cultural alignment and dramatic bottom-line results. Listen as Galsworth describes the visual work environment of each of these prize-winners and where, within her Ten Doorways framework, their distinctive visual contributions cluster. Then compare and contrasts those with your own efforts.
Workplace information can change quickly and often—products, schedules, specifications, tooling, parts, methods, and the thousands of other details on which the daily life of the enterprise depends. How can busy (often harried) supervisors and managers stay on top of this ever-shifting detail and still make sound, timely decisions? The answer is: visual displays/production control boards, the category of visual function that is Doorway 3 in the Ten Doorways framework. This week, Gwendolyn Galsworth (your show host and visual workplace expert) defines visual displays: physical presentations of multi-layered information in single, interactive formats. Their purpose? To enable us to see and understand complex information at-a-glance, understand a situation's status, and take correct, timely, and independent action. Tune in and learn how displays get developed (I-driven) and help us gain control over our corner of the world, even when the pressure is on.
Standards are the bedrock of all work, paving the way to repeatable, precise, and predictable outcomes. What manager/supervisor does not pursue standards, standard work, and standardization as the starting point of control and the end of human error? But where do Visual Standards fit in? And can they ensure exact, stable performance? In our show this week, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, maps out the conceptual and application profile of visual standards: what they are, how they work, and what they can and cannot contribute to operational excellence. Here is the stuff and substance of Doorway 2, the category of visual function owned and led by managers, supervisors, and engineers—but also often mis-understood by them. While she is at it, Galsworth describes the trap we can fall in if we try to build adherence by standardizing visual devices instead of cultivating visual inventiveness. Tune in. You won’t want to miss this important discussion.
What is the set of mechanisms and conditions that must be in place before a company can successfully launch a process that establishes continuous systematic improvement as a way of life in the enterprise? That discussion started last week as your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, described what an improvement framework or infrastructure is, its three main outcomes, and the first three of its eight requirements. This week she continues, defining the accountability structure (3-Legged Stool); the crucial role of an Improvement Time Policy; and how to find, hold, and drive your improvement focus through The Laminated Map, an Area Hit List, and the Visual Workplace Blitz. Listen as we drill deeper into this vital behind-the-scenes preparation that supports the march of improvement through work areas, across functions, and onto your bottom line. Once again we understand that the destination of a journey is its first step. Your comments/questions are welcomed.
There are many useful improvement methodologies in the world. But far too many fail early on for one or both of two reasons. First, companies do not put a success framework in place prior to launch. Second, they have no plan that will help them track early victories and harvest them into powerful next steps. This week on The Visual Workplace, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, begins to share the set of specific elements or requisites she helps companies structure in at the start of every visual conversion, insurance for long-term sustainable success. Tune in and learn about: the Three Outcomes that serve as an enduring focus for every transformation; the importance of naming a Vision Place; the tracking of bottom-line results; the role of the so-called Three-Legged Stool for input and accountability; and the crucial role of an Official Improvement Time Policy. This is the first of a two-part series you won’t want to miss. Call in your comments and questions.
Operators who implement the Visual Where (5S) to their level of need often believe that the company is 90% through its journey to a fully-functioning visual workplace. Instead, fully-implemented, the Visual Where can only ever represent 25%-35% of the final outcome. Nonetheless, the formula of Border + Address + ID Label for everything that casts a shadow represents the indispensable first step of that journey. In this week’s show, Gwendolyn Galsworth, your host and visual workplace expert, reminds you of the purpose, power, and function of borders. Then she walks you through rules, tips, and innovations associated with applying addresses. Learn to drill still deeper by applying that formula to small clusters of linked function that Galsworth calls Visual Mini-Systems. Tune in and hear, as well, training tips to help you create 5S outcomes that ignite and inspire value-add associates while directly impacting the bottom line. Your call-in comments, stories, and questions are welcomed.
How do you become a visual thinker? How do learn to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it; and then learn to eliminate both through solutions that are visual? The answer is the eight building blocks of visual thinking. In a previous show, your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual system expert and award-winning author), introduced you to the first of these: I-driven. Now she presents the other seven: standards, six core questions, information deficits, motion, work, value field, and motion metrics. Listen as Dr. Galsworth walks you through this logic and shows you how to use it in your work and in your company to create a fully-functioning, sustainable visual work environment—and a spirited and engaged workforce. Whether yours is a factory, bank, hospital, dry cleaners, engineering office or military depot, tune in and learn how to think visually and help others do the same! Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed.
Products are getting more complex and supply chains are getting longer—and not just because they are located in other countries. Some companies are doing it right, focusing on an integrated supply base. Others don’t think much about supply chain, content to let the chips fall where they may! In this week’s show, your host and visual system expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, interviews Tricia Moody, supply chain expert and author/co-author of more than a dozen business improvement books, including five on Strategic Sourcing (or as experts in the field call it: The Spend). Listen and hear savvy ways to select your suppliers and help them improve their own processes instead blaming them for their failures. Hear what changes supplier behavior as Ms. Moody presents dozens of proven steps you can take to squeeze the cost out of your supply chain. Tune in and learn about companies that are doing it right and doing it better. Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed.
What’s special about scrubbing the workplace? Or about safety for that matter? And what’s the real reason we implement so-called “lines and labels?” (In fact, there are eleven such reasons.) In this third show on 5S, your host and visual workplace expert, Gwendolyn Galsworth, un-nests the engines behind the four remaining Ss (or five, depending how you count). Listen as she tells you why she calls her approach to industrial housekeeping “5S on Steroids.” Tune in and learn about the logic of smart placement, the step Gwendolyn developed to make sure that when you lay down the lines, they contribute to metrics-driven performance and the bottom line. Hear about not less than ten different types of borders, and the powerful role an address plays, even when your borders are color-coded. Speaking of color-coding, do you know how that can go wrong, very wrong? Join us and find out. This is the show when 5S ramps up beyond neat and clean and soars into visuality! Your call-ins are so welcomed.
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.
What is a visual workplace? Why is it important? How do you develop workplace visuality in your own work and company wide? These are a few of the questions Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and author of seven visual workplace books, answers on today’s program.
Tune in while Dr. Galsworth shows you why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together, how it strengthens lean initiatives yet remains its own distinct strategy, and why visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberating the human will.
Join Gwendolyn on her premiere show on Voice America/Business and learn how visuality is used to translate information into exact behavior and make the workplace speak.
Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, engineering office, military depot or open-pit mine, listen and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them.
How do you bring visuality to a manufacturing setting that sometimes requires a full year to complete and ship a single product? How do you ignite and maintain interest? And what role does management play in keeping the momentum strong? In this show, host Gwendolyn Galsworth is joined by two master practitioners at Brandt Engineered Products (Canada): Stewart Bellamy, Quality Assurance/Lean Manager, and Barry Freeman, Paint/Assembly Manager. Listen as they share insights, expertise, and stories about deploying workplace visuality on the operator level and describe the challenges and triumphs of deploying visual and lean in a high complexity/low volume setting. Learn as they tell how they are teaching Brandt production teams to populate their work areas with robust, innovative, location-specific visual solutions so work is easier, safer, more accurate, cost effective, spirited, and very satisfying. Tune in and learn what it takes to implement visuality for results that last.
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!
What is the key to sustainability? This is a question Brent Allen, VP of Strategic Improvement, asked himself repeatedly over his career at Lifetime Products (Utah). Overtime, he realized that many lean tools can trigger good results. But results don’t last if they are not operator-led. In today’s show, Mr. Allen discusses this with host Gwendolyn Galsworth, leading visual workplace expert and award-winning author. He explains why Lifetime chose workplace visuality and how the company uses it to widen leadership ranks to include operators as self-leaders. As a student of world-class manufacturing for nearly thirty years, Brent knew most supervisors would love to get operators to take on more responsibility and make more decisions. The question is how? How do supervisors learn to transfer the doing from themselves to operators? This, Brent shares, requires finding a balance between structure and free will, two elements workplace visuality offers in abundance. Tune in. Call in.
How do you achieve a fully-functioning visual enterprise? The roadmap for getting there is “The Ten Doorways”—a central framework that matches up specific company groups (managers, associates, CEOs, engineers, supervisors, etc.) with specific visual methods (or functions). Groups take responsibility for specific methods: visual order, visual standards, visual displays, visual metrics, visual problem-solving, visual leadership, visual controls, visual pull systems, and visual guarantees (poka-yoke). It will require more than several shows to cover all ten doorways. This week, your host Gwendolyn Galsworth, leading authority of workplace visuality and award-winning author, introduces you to the overall logic of her ten-door template. Then she delves into “Doorway One: Visual Order/Visual Inventiveness”—a category of visual function many refer to as “5S.” But hold on to your hats! Dr. Galsworth’s definition of 5S is more like “5S on Steroids.” Your comments and questions are welcomed!
Have you noticed? When you engage in a change process, at least one key moment will occur when the values and principles of that proposed change are tested. This is a “moment of truth” and the outcome of all your hopes and efforts hangs in the balance. In today’s show, host Gwendolyn Galsworth interviews thought leader, Carol Shaw, who for over 30 years has designed change curriculum, introduced subject experts, coached leaders, and taught seminars to thousands of companies as they pass through their own moments of truth on the way to operational excellence. Hear why many miss the learning in those moments and what happens instead. Learn why the entire workforce must understand (in heart as well as mind) why the change is needed and how “we will get there together.” Listen and gasp that there are no moments of truth in Fake Lean or Fake Visual. Recognize that how you respond to your moment of truth determines how long the change lasts after the consultants are gone. Tune in. Call in.
How do you become a visual thinker? How do learn to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it; and then learn to eliminate both through solutions that are visual? The answer is the eight building blocks of visual thinking. In a previous show, your host, Gwendolyn Galsworth (visual system expert and award-winning author), introduced you to the first of these: I-driven. Now she presents the other seven: standards, six core questions, information deficits, motion, work, value field, and motion metrics. Listen as Dr. Galsworth walks you through this logic and shows you how to use it in your work and in your company to create a fully-functioning, sustainable visual work environment—and a spirited and engaged workforce. Whether yours is a factory, bank, hospital, dry cleaners, engineering office or military depot, tune in and learn how to think visually and help others do the same! Your call-in comments and questions are welcomed.
Did you know that an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 people die each year in US hospitals due to medical errors? The number of people injured—or requiring prolonged hospital stays—due to errors is ten times that. Other research shows 5%-10% of all pharmacy prescriptions contain errors, 70% are significant, 14% serious, and 16% potentially fatal. In today’s show, host Gwendolyn Galsworth interviews poka-yoke expert, Martin Hinckley, on the sources of error in healthcare and how simple, inexpensive mistake-proof solutions can eliminate them forever. Mistake-proofing (aka, poka-yoke or visual guarantees) is a visual workplace method that targets non-conformance due to variation, errors, and complexity. Highly effective in every workplace, poka-yoke devices excel in life-sensitive medical settings. Yet, they are rarely used. Instead, efforts often reflect little understanding of the attributes of mistakes and basic mistake-proofing principles. Tune in. Call in. Join the discussion.
What is Visual Thinking? The ability of a person to recognize motion (the enemy) and the information deficits that cause it—and then to eliminate both through solutions that are visual. A main outcome of a visual conversion is the emergence of a new companywide competency: people who know how to think visually—Visual Thinkers. Such thinkers see workplace problems in a new way and solve them using a set of principles called The Building Blocks of Visual Thinking. Listen as host Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and award-winning author, introduces the first of these building blocks, sharing the two I-driven questions that power workplace visuality. I-driven is Galsworth’s way to involve all operational levels in creating an enterprise-wide visual language. From operator to CEO, manager to supervisor, engineering office to purchasing and marketing, this is the dynamic that makes visuality rich, robust, relevant, and sustainable—the key to an aligned and empowered work force.
What is a visual workplace? Why is it important? How do you develop workplace visuality in your own work and company wide? These are a few of the questions Gwendolyn Galsworth, visual system expert and author of seven visual workplace books, answers on today’s program.
Tune in while Dr. Galsworth shows you why workplace visuality is the glue that holds all other improvement methods together, how it strengthens lean initiatives yet remains its own distinct strategy, and why visuality creates cultural alignment by liberating information and, in the process, liberating the human will.
Join Gwendolyn on her premiere show on Voice America/Business and learn how visuality is used to translate information into exact behavior and make the workplace speak.
Whether you work in a factory, bank, hospital, engineering office, military depot or open-pit mine, listen and build your knowledge and know-how of visual workplace technologies and the principles and practices that drive them. Call in with your questions!