Industrial Engineering and Essentialism with Kevin McManus
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Speaker 2:Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Problem Solved, the IISE podcast. I'm David Brandt, the web editor for IISE and a contributing writer for the institute's award winning magazine, ISE. My guest in this episode is a fellow ISE magazine writer and, in fact, also an IISC fellow, performance columnist Kevin McManus, whose writing I've been a fan of since I first joined the Institute many moons ago. Before we get into our discussion, I have a personal and journalistic responsibility to give you some background about what drives the primary topic of this episode, which is the parallels between work and life when it comes to the application of industrial engineering. First off, I'm a cancer survivor.
Speaker 2:I had a battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma several years ago. It goes without saying that it was a challenging time in my life, but as I've described it to friends, the most difficult part was figuring out how to move forward again after experiencing such a trauma. So, over the course of time, I devoured numerous books about self improvement disciplines, covering various -isms and -ologies, and I came across a book by author Greg McKeown called The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. A brief summary won't do it justice, but the book describes the value of committing focus to the task or decisions that matter most. In short, as McKeown writes, it explores how to best distinguish the vital few from the trivial many.
Speaker 2:And that sort of thinking helped me a great deal as I tried to determine how to best move my life from stuck to unstuck. Yet, given my many years of interviewing engineers and writing about their work and solutions, it took me much longer than it should have to realize that the core of the essentialist has great commonality with the goals and targets of industrial engineers, such as eliminating waste or determining best practices for continuous improvement. But Kevin McManus seems to have realized the connection for a long time now, as his monthly column has shown particularly over the last few years. You can find his performance column online at iise.org/ ISE magazine. But right now, you can hear more about his thoughts on how useful industrial engineering is in both work and life.
Speaker 2:Today, we're interviewing Kevin McManus. He's our performance columnist in ISE magazine. He's been our performance columnist for how many years now, Kevin?
Speaker 3:Oh, goodness. I think we're approaching twenty years.
Speaker 2:Yes. You've been a columnist since before I started here, so you've been a staple nonetheless. I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me today. I wanted to talk about the parallels that I've observed in industrial engineering applications between work and life, and the comparisons to the discipline of essentialism. After years of writing about the professions we support here at IISC, and following my personal battle with cancer in 2010, I've been practicing essentialism, which is largely based on the book by Greg McKeown.
Speaker 2:Simply stated, the goal behind essentialism is to make decisions that help focus on operating or living less but better. I've observed a sense of commonality between essentialism and industrial engineering, such as the process of continuous improvement, the removal of waste, distinguishing the vital from the trivial. In your columns over the past few years, and in your social media, you've pointed out similar parallels between ISE in your career and your personal life. Has the comparison always been obvious to you since the start of your career, or was it a discovery made over time through experience?
Speaker 3:All right. Well, first of all, David, thanks for having me. Looking very forward to sharing some thoughts with you and the audience. It's really interesting in the sense that when I went to university at the University of Arkansas, I really had no idea what type of engineering I would end up in. And it was really a lot of this has been serendipitous in my life.
Speaker 3:I think there's a bigger plan for me out there than one I set for myself. But I went to school at Arkansas. I struggled actually to get into the engineering program simply because they weren't sure if my high school calculus was good enough. But we got over that hurdle, and then I came across Doctor. John Imhoff.
Speaker 3:And just in talking with Doctor. Imhoff, it was very clear to me that that was the engineering program I wanted to get into. Now having said that, I really did not know what IEs did at that time. And I have to say that even in my first four years of employment, I really didn't have a total picture of what an industrial or systems engineer might do in life, outside of work or in work. I was learning the different skills of an industrial engineer, different skills I picked up at each of those first two plants.
Speaker 3:I got to my third plant, still was just looking at it as a job. I had no involvement with work outside of work hours. And the key distinction there is my third facility I went to got me more into facilitating teams. That's where I started using personal computers for the first time. I think that started to ignite some passions within me.
Speaker 3:I won't say, though, that I was even a time freak at that time, and I'm easily a self professed time freak right now. So as time went on, and there's nothing wrong with that in my mind, I have learned to tone it down a tad. But as I worked more with teams, I started to appreciate the human side of what the profession provides in addition to the technical side. Know? And it really had been a technical thing.
Speaker 3:We'd had teams in these other facilities I'd worked in, but I hadn't been that engaged with them. And so my interactions with folks on the floor tended to be from a time study or a project based perspective. However, as I worked more with the teams at this site, it was very high percentage of self directed teams, it made me interested in that side. And so when I went back for my MBA during that third job, I got my major in organizational development, and that just further accelerated that desire to work with groups. However, I'm still just seeing it as a job.
Speaker 3:Really what made the difference is when I went to my fourth employer, I had my best boss ever at that site. He encouraged me to be my best, challenged me to be my best. And that included getting involved with volunteer type efforts that were team related and process improvement related outside of work. And that is really what got me started in, I hate to say it, but almost making work, almost too much of my life at that point. But what I discovered is that had been kind of part that was missing in there, and I think that's why I really just saw it as a job during those first ten years.
Speaker 3:Another thing Don introduced me to, in addition to working outside of work from a volunteerism perspective, was the work of Stephen Covey and the work of Peter Senge. And he also had me reading Doctor. Demi, and I started seeing the parallels between those three authors and thought leaders. And the other thing that it got me into was thinking about what my personal mission was in life. And as I worked for the five years at that candy plant, I was really kind of wondering, why am I taking all this time away from work?
Speaker 3:I'm already commuting an hour each way to work. I'm leaving at four in the morning. I'm getting home about five in the afternoon. And then two or three nights a week, I'm headed off doing volunteer stuff. And I'm going, what's up with that?
Speaker 3:Well, as I worked through my personal mission, I started to realize that I wasn't getting enough of that at work, the people side of things. And my personal mission really is about helping people achieve their potential as best that I can. And that's where I really started to get engaged in it and working with it more. And from that point forward, what I was trying to do in the companies I would work with would be put in systems that appreciate the potential of all the employees in the organization, which is very different than how IE got started way back in 1910 or so with Frederick Taylor. But as I I worked with it more, I just continued to see just everyone in an organization doing great things.
Speaker 3:And I realized how that not only enhances your competitiveness, but it also enhances the sustainability of the organization. And by that point, I was sold. One of the last things I got involved in at the end of the nineties was being an examiner for Baldrige. I've been doing that for twenty years now as well. And that gave me the chance to see that there are organizations out there that truly do this and that it's integral you know, truly do engage their people in a very meaningful way across the workforce.
Speaker 3:That gave me further validation that that is the best approach for running an organization. So by then I'm sold because my personal mission is getting satisfied. I'm also getting to use the technical side of skills that I really enjoyed applying. I mean, just as much as I hate wasting time, I really like the way you identified industrial engineering related it to essentialism. You know, we do try to get rid of waste.
Speaker 3:We do try to find the vital. I found that we tend to overcomplicate things way too much. And most importantly, I enjoyed that process of continuous improvement. And as we get into some of these other questions that we've got, I think that's gonna continue to come back. But when you get to both experienced organizations that practice those philosophies, and then also see other organizations that have become very successful doing that, it just really gets your fuel going.
Speaker 3:And so my last two organizations I worked in, I just continued to refine that model. And so in the transportation company I was with, we doubled our sales in five years without doubling the workforce. And in my last job as plant manager, we doubled sales in three years without doubling the workforce. And I have to say it was industrial and systems engineering concepts that helped make that possible. But I want to stress that it's both the people side and the technical side.
Speaker 3:And one thing I'm really of relative to all that is my son is now, I think, his eleventh or twelfth year as an industrial engineering manager. And he went to school thinking he was going to be an aeronautical engineer, because he liked math. But then once he saw the people side as well, that sold him on IE, and he he's gonna be an IE for life like me. Now he's not as addicted as I am, but he I think he will be an IE for life as well.
Speaker 2:Well, that's definitely fascinating. It seems like there was definitely a career evolution that I would think of as essentialism, but applied to your work.
Speaker 3:Right. I mean, was very serendipitous. I call it divine intervention in a few cases, because there was a couple times where I mean, was actually ready to take a job at another organization, but the recruiter talked me in, into going to do a second interview at another company, and that led me down a path I really had no intention of going down. But it's amazing how those things happen. And I think sometimes that's the interesting part of being an IE, is you can plan out certain things, but you also have to leave room for the more holistic, higher level things, the meta things that could end up happening.
Speaker 3:So I I think that's our value if we can learn to convince others of that value.
Speaker 2:What was your process for learning from or extracting lessons from mistakes in your career?
Speaker 3:Foundationally, I think that's where being an IE helped because it does teach you to recognize waste. It does teach you to recognize rework. The first thing that popped into mind when you asked that question, and this is more on the technical side, I had to learn that you can't get it exactly right on paper. You know, you can you can wish for that, strive for that, but you gotta be willing to let certain things go. If want exact numbers, if you want everything to add up, that's really not the real world.
Speaker 3:So that's one of the first hurdles that I had to get over, and it's also one of the hurdles I know my son's had to get over. I think the other challenging part, learning to work with people in a true relationship building way. You know, IEs already have that hurdle to overcome to begin with. I mean, a lot of us are sent out to do time studies or work studies or just watch people work and come up with improvements. And if we can't learn how to build those relationships first as we're doing that, we're going to go through some rough spots, because people think we're, you know, we're playing cop, we're spying on them.
Speaker 3:It was interesting because in my very first job, my direct boss was a big proponent of engaging employees. But his boss, the VP that was at the toy company, he would hide behind pillars with a pieces per hour watch. He would time the people working on his pieces per hour watch that gave no allowance for any kind of fatigue or other types of things that could delay their true output. And then he'd come back to us and say, you guys have your standards wrong. You need to go out and raise your standards.
Speaker 3:I just time these folks. And so it was interesting to, know, in hindsight, to watch how that played out. And I think even my first boss, I was fortunate to have someone that appreciated the human side and helped me kind of put industrial engineering into perspective. So that was, you know, learning to work with people better, that was a challenge. Also, not always having it perfect on paper was a second challenge.
Speaker 3:And then I think the final one was, and this is where a lot of IEs end up going, was what happens when you have to supervise people? Because then the role shifts even more because now we're not just building almost a peer type relationship. We do have a formal reporting relationship that we also have to work with. And, again, you have to find that balance. My first time around as a supervisor, I was way too soft because I wanted to be liked.
Speaker 3:It was kind of more the IE side of it versus the IE slash manager side of it. And I hate to say it, but I kind of got walked over. But the next time around after that, I learned to find that balance, but you have to be able to find that balance in a way that doesn't damage the relationships. So those are the three main things I know I've had to get over hurdle wise, as my career progressed.
Speaker 2:In your February 2018 column, you talked about establishing process capability for purposes of goal setting. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that topic for our audience and explain a little bit more about your best practices for goal setting.
Speaker 3:Sure. I would love to share that because I also think it's an example of looking at vital from the trivial and less but better. One of the things I get to see in working with Baldrige and also through my other work where I get to see a lot of different organizations, it's amazing how weak the work system for setting goals is. And I just want to sure we leave this thought before we get too deep into other things. I think ISCs are responsible for redesigning our work systems in organizations.
Speaker 3:And so if we can come back to that a little bit later, I'd like to comment on that a tad bit more. But goal setting is a great example of that because even in some of the very good companies, they still use a very simple process, which is look at this last year's number, bump it up by a percentage, and then try to get it. And that totally ignores, you know, the systems that produced last year's number. And process capability, I mean, you can get real deep into the heavy math with it and get into design of experiments and Taguchi's work and all that type of thing. But it's really just about what is the process capable of doing from a statistical perspective.
Speaker 3:Really, when we go to set goals, we should be running those control charts on the systems that we're setting goals for, and we should be looking at the probability of achieving whatever goal we might desire and be realistic about that. The other key thing we need to do is look at the action plans that are part of our strategic plan and time out how those action plans are going to impact last year's number. And it's not a complicated thing, and it's one of those examples where you don't have to get the exact numbers right, but it's a far cry better from what most organizations do. A lot of organizations will set a goal for the coming year that they probably have a five or ten percent chance of achieving if you actually looked at the control limits that were part of the systems that produced the prior year's number. That's a very frustrating thing for the people, in any department.
Speaker 3:It damages relationships. It affects the credibility of the leader in a negative way. And I think one of the things, and this is the Deming side of me coming out, but Doctor. Deming said many years ago, if he had to boil it down to one thing, the simplest thing, the most vital thing, yeah, I added those words there. But he said it's all about reducing variation.
Speaker 3:And yet very few managers even know the difference between common cause variation and special cause variation, let alone how to create a basic control chart and get probabilities from that control chart. So it's no more complicated than that, but it's just a step above on the technical side than what most managers are willing to get into. So I don't think we realize the damage that our current approaches are causing, but we so often set goals that are unattainable, especially in the near term. So it's one of the things I probably battle on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Isn't it a bit of a human instinct for us to chomp off more than we can chew sometimes? Perhaps when we've set the bar so high that maybe we fall just short, and then it causes us to scale back a bit as a precaution. Is there a way to overcome that feeling, as to say that just because you didn't hit that mark doesn't mean that it's not achievable?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think there is. And the way that I suggest that folks look at it is it's good to have ideals. And I'll give you the most common example I come across. It's in the world of safety and environment where people want zero incidents. You know, they don't want anything bad to happen.
Speaker 3:And that's an admirable ideal, but from a goal perspective, a system gives you what it's designed to give you. And I think where we get challenged is we're not willing to make the fundamental system changes necessary to achieve the goals that we aspire to. And I think at the root of it is we don't understand the systems that we're setting goals for. Our weakness in understanding our processes and systems from a numerical perspective is really quite weak. We're lucky if you see very many processes at all that are trended over time.
Speaker 3:So often it's snapshots that we try to manage by. We reward people for being under budget without really looking at the waste. One saying I've come up with in the last couple years is if managers knew the true cost of the daily errors that were occurring, they'd make very different decisions. And I think that's where, again, industrial and systems engineers have a role to play in using technology to come up with easy ways to capture those daily problems, analyze them, break them down, and help show people how if we truly wanna go after these goals or achieve these ideals in a shorter time frame, here's where the leverage is. Folks understand that in the financial world in some regard, in terms of investing, things like that.
Speaker 3:But often when it comes to work systems, we don't realize there's leverage points in these systems, but they are waste driven. I mean, meeting waste is a great example. If you simply track your meeting defects, I would say over a four to six week period, and review those trends during that time frame, you will eliminate most of the things that make meetings wasteful. And yet I've met so many managers that don't want to treat meetings as a process, even though they're highly repetitive and occur quite frequently in organizations. So, it's a bit of a mystery, but I'm hoping that we can take a role in turning those light bulbs on, hopefully sooner versus later.
Speaker 3:I've got my own plans for trying to do those types of things, at least in terms of sharing content. But I think the folks that are in organizations, we need to start turning our industrial and systems engineering lenses further up in the organization versus staying on the front lines. I think we've about optimized a lot of the frontline performance from a micro scale, and we have to start getting much more macro with how we apply our tools.
Speaker 2:You wrote a really interesting post on your Facebook page. It appeared in late April, this being the Facebook page for Great Systems. And I'm going to describe for our audience the image and the text you applied with it. The image is basically a sign at a local soccer field, and it lists some instructions for visitors and I guess primarily adults. The sign says, Please remember, one, these are kids.
Speaker 2:Two, this is a game, three, the coaches are volunteers, four, the referees are human, five, this is not the World Cup. And the text that you wrote with it reads as this, the relationship between work cultures and social cultures is a symbiotic one. They feed each other. This sign at my local soccer park reflects poorly on our social culture. One can only wonder how the same systems and behaviors that created the need for this sign are also affecting daily job performance.
Speaker 2:Cooperation and true teamwork, not ultra competitiveness, is needed for higher performance. Change systems to shift culture and keep improving. To what degree can our competitive nature in athletics be used to achieve tasks in our work?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It was interesting because I drive by that sign when I'm home, about every other day. And I probably went by it 10 times before I said, I'm going to take a picture and make a post on this because it's just bugging me too much. But I also think about because, you know, I get where it's coming from. And I think we've even heard people talk about this in the mainstream media, where so many parents in the current generation are living through their kids.
Speaker 3:And I think it says a lot about what's happening at work, because I believe if you were getting more significance from work, if you felt that you were contributing more and gaining more benefit from work, growing more from work, then you wouldn't have to look at your kids so much as validation that you're a good person or a good parent. So that's the first thing that I see. In terms of competitiveness, I think competitiveness is necessary in the world of business, but it's the type of competitiveness that we need to really give heavy thought to. And this is another thing I learned from Deming, but one winner systems, they're harmful. They may give some short term benefit to the one winner, but what did they tell all the other people that tried real hard to contribute in one way or another?
Speaker 3:And I know with myself, I support this philosophy that I've heard some others share on other podcasts, where don't worry about your competition as much as compete with yourself. Are you getting better year over year, month over month, day over day? Mean, do you have evidence that you're truly practicing continuous improvement? I would say I'm probably overly competitive with myself, and I know my Apple Watch has made me competitive in managing my sleep. It's made me competitive in managing my fitness even more than I already was.
Speaker 3:I know if I started punching in food data into that thing, I'd get even more competitive there. And so I think if we compete with ourselves, we're okay. But when we start singling out individuals that count on a team to be successful, that's where we really get into trouble. I know in our trucking trucking company, when we were able to double sales in five years, one key change we made is we eliminated sales commissions. And what we found is that our salespeople were more focused on getting any kind of business that they could find, whether that compromised the effectiveness of the freight system or not.
Speaker 3:And so they'd land a new customer 10 to 15 miles away from any existing delivery route just to get the revenue. And now we had to add a new truck, dedicate more equipment, dedicate another driver in the driver's time just to go out there and pick up that new freight. And it was amazing how the focus on the commission was detracting from the focus on the larger work system. Conversely, in organizations where I've seen the team focus on a team set of metrics that are process based, and they all share equally in the benefits, or equally from a relative perspective based on skills and contributions, that tends to work very, very well. I think the athletic world is very interesting in this regard because I think a lot of teams and individuals do compete with themselves.
Speaker 3:And I think some coaches or managers could set whatever goals they would like. And I think the athletes are just naturally going to compete with themselves more. I'm not going to say that's across the board, but I do see I mean, if I look at where metrics are used the most effectively right now, and this is the higher level metrics, you know, the algorithms, the meaningful ratios, things like that, it's in both sports and gambling, where there is a high incentive, but anyone can win if they achieve the goal. So it's going to be very interesting to see where that plays out, because those two groups are just doing unbelievable things with really their IE skills. It's simulation, it's Monte Carlo simulation, it's regression analysis, and it's basic statistical process control.
Speaker 3:But they're taking those, what I consider to be industrial and system engineer's tools, and they're using them to really understand those systems. I mean, the ability to predict player value, both in the near term and in the longer term, is just accelerating in terms of accuracy. If you just look at I think the oldest pitcher in Major League Baseball is now I think we might have one that's 40, and I think the next one's 37, and all the rest are under 35. Just the way the average age of a Major League Baseball pitcher has dropped. And it is all database.
Speaker 3:Those are database choices. And, I think it's very interesting to look at how data is being used in these high dollar industries to help people make better choices. And my argument is, if you look at corporations, a lot of them aren't that much different. It's just the money's allocated differently. But it's amazing stuff for me to watch.
Speaker 3:Of course, I'm a bit of a sports fan, but at the same time, it's great examples of how you can use data to both optimize systems, identify performance potential, and just to understand the system in general.
Speaker 2:I'm constantly thinking about how much ISE principles can positively impact a workspace or home life. I practice it at home myself now. I always think of things in terms of value add because aside from practicing essentialism, also practice minimalism. So, I'm constantly thinking about what would an ISE do in my apartment, you know? Like, what what would they do to help improve how I can use my space for work, how I can sort of keep my bedroom just to be for rest and not for, you know, bedroom plus office plus television, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 2:But it seems that the roles and capabilities of ISCs are still misidentified at large, and in some cases, slightly mythical. I sort of think the general public understands notions of supply chains and logistics thanks to companies that have marketed themselves as such, you know, UPS, Amazon, etcetera. Then again, pop culture has sometimes misled people about what it really means for a business or organization to be efficient. It doesn't just mean fire everyone like the Bobs in the movie Office Space. So my question for you is, what are your thoughts on the exposure and or the public perception of industrial and systems engineers?
Speaker 2:What needs to change to better clarify who, for lack of a better term, makes things better?
Speaker 3:It's interesting because, you know, you use the example of yourself, and I would suspect that just, you know, all the time you've spent both studying and writing about and living in the world industrial and systems engineering, you've done the tangible things that exist in your world. And I think supply chains were one of the first things we attacked that were more nebulous, you know, less tangible, more holistic. And even now it's not even a chain in a lot of people's minds, it's more of a network. So I think that's the challenge, is how can we make tangible the types of things that we can do? And it's interesting to me because it really has to be about, I think, making life better for people, both a work personal life.
Speaker 3:I struggle to find any examples in the media, and I tend to watch a little more pop culture than maybe I should. But I rarely see work talked about as something that could ever be good. It's almost like work is expected to be bad, and you're expected to live for the weekend because work's never going to change. We see the same type of thing with the Baldrige process. And I think one thing we need to do well, maybe two things come to mind there.
Speaker 3:One is we need to make much more visible what industrial and systems engineers have done in organizations. And often they do that as managers. It's really amazing to me how many managers and directors and vice presidents and folks like that that I come across that have been industrial and systems engineers. And I think, you know, inside in their heart and in their brain, they still are. You know, I think they practice both the more direct tangible skills on a regular basis, but I also think they can see systems better.
Speaker 3:And I think there's some value there. And so maybe with technology, we're going to have the ability to help people better visualize, first of all, what is a work system, and then how can industrial and systems engineers help out with that. But I think telling stories is probably the best way to reach people, and that's telling stories of success, you know, both success in the role that had that title, but also success in changing departments, changing plants, changing organizations, using industrial and systems engineering skills as a foundation. If if we can't make it tangible, I don't think we have much of a chance. And I know people relate to stories better than anything else.
Speaker 3:And I think we have to speak to the people side. You know? How can we make work not only a better place, but that's where we spend so much of our waking hours. How can we make it a place we almost desire to go? Because I think even in the high performing companies, people would rather be with their families.
Speaker 3:They'd rather be out having fun. Work's not a number one priority. But it's back to that thing, you know, about the the social and the work culture. What takes place away from work affects what goes on at work and vice versa. And somehow I think we need to tie that together.
Speaker 2:Real quick follow-up. In 2012, I wrote about the presidential election for ISE magazine. It was called Industrial Engineer at the time. And I wrote about the adaptation of Lean Six Sigma from, say, the executive branch. There was a gentleman from Motorola who wanted the candidates to sign a pledge saying that they would implement Lean Six Sigma if they were elected president.
Speaker 2:Of course, the only two candidates who didn't sign the pledge ended up being Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. My point to all of this is to ask the role of the industrial engineer in government from a civil perspective. Is it frustrating sometimes observing, just in whether it be in communities, at the state level, at the national level, our inability to solve problems sometimes, simply when you know there may be, an ISE principle that could be applied and just make it happen?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Most definitely. The polarization of our country bothers me significantly, and I don't think it bodes well for our future. Just like with organizations, there are communities out there that are doing excellent things. And I would imagine that there's industrial and system engineers working behind those communities.
Speaker 3:And I think maybe some research is needed to go out and find those folks. Similar to health care, we've got some very good health care systems out there now, and I think that number's slowly growing, but it's not growing near as fast as it should. And I know industrial and systems engineers are involved with a lot of those organizations. I think a lot of it's just a better job of promoting who's doing what and what are some of the great things they're doing, and maybe build some mass in terms of attracting more people to a profession that can have that kind of impact. And I know that speaks to the hearts of a lot of our younger generations.
Speaker 3:If work isn't a good place to focus, let's look at the community. Let's look at systems that support the community other than the workplace. I think there's some value there, and I don't know of any specific ones, but I do think there's some universities that are starting to try to position the industrial and systems engineering focus to start to include some of those things. I look at what John Corliss is doing relative to sustainability up in the Northeast. And John, I think, has had some pretty significant impact outside of the workplace in terms of talking about sustainability with industrial and systems engineering at the root of this.
Speaker 3:Know, and John's an engineering fellow. In fact, I think he's leading the fellows group right now. Very active in that kind of thing. I think he's done some very powerful things. And so I think it's just taking models like that, promoting them, attracting interest to maybe something that's outside of work.
Speaker 3:And then that feeds back into the workplace of biosbosis.
Speaker 2:To your knowledge, in academia now, are professors and instructors sort of teaching students to just always keep an eye out for a problem that needs solving?
Speaker 3:I really couldn't speak to that. I would have to defer to someone that lives in that world. I think they're somewhat bound by the curriculum. And I would say that if we started looking globally at industrial and systems engineering departments, we might have a little better chance of finding that. I know I worked with, the University of MAIAB down in Northern Yucatan, and they are making curriculum modifications to look lean more, look at teams more, you know, look at problems that go outside of the traditional US industrial engineering curriculum.
Speaker 3:I imagine if we looked at other universities around the world that are teaching this, we would probably find some examples of where this is occurring. Just as I think they are in The United States, the percentages are just so small, and and and that's where I'm hoping technology can help spread the word. I know that's one thing I wanna do as I go forward is, you know, find ways to share best practices, get them out there, and maybe attract some desire to start improving, what's going on.
Speaker 2:Okay. And another column you wrote last year in ISC magazine, you quoted Socrates. You said, The only thing I know is that I don't know it at all. Becoming the web editor for IISC invited me into the world of coding, and it's an education that I've pursued that helps me improve how well I can digitally build and code. And it makes me think of an article that I read on the seven stages of software engineering, which in short give guidance on how someone goes from being an innocent toward a skill or disciplined worker and then to being a master of a particular skill.
Speaker 2:When it comes to continuous learning and improvement, given the many, many distractions in this digital age, how do we best gauge our own progress? How do we know when we've been appropriately tested? Or do we just never stop asking ourselves, am I a master of the skill or will I always be just a journeyman?
Speaker 3:I think it depends on your worldview. If you limit yourself to, your department or your plant or your hospital, your little small world, then I think you may see yourself as a master. But just the pace of change in today's world and then whatever's going to build off of what's already going on, I'd be surprised if we ever got close to mastering it. I mean, I think you can master certain approaches, but that's a relative mastery. As time progresses, what once was mastery level of proficiency ends up becoming almost apprentice again.
Speaker 3:So I learned a quote from Peter Drucker, I think it was about, oh, thirty years ago now. He started talking about every two hundred years we have a significant transformational change. You know, things like, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and now what he was calling the information age back when, he was talking about that every two hundred years concept. And that one really stuck with me. It's probably 1992, 1993 when I came across that.
Speaker 3:And that plus Moore's law, what that's doing with technology, it is just so radically changing everything. I know myself, but I won't ever quit learning. I won't ever get to the point where I consider myself a master of I don't even know of a certain type of code. I mean, I look at all I learned five languages in my undergraduate degree, and all of them are irrelevant now. And I think by the time I learn, you know, something like Swift or Xcode or something like that, it may also be obsolete.
Speaker 3:I think I've just committed myself to almost learning something new every year. It's the reason, you know, with my own stuff, I do it all myself just for the purpose of learning. I pay money to have someone do it, but to me, that's not the value. I think it's just constant skill upkeep, because if nothing else, it's how do I apply technology to more effectively do what I've been doing in the past with lesser technological tools? But the other key piece, and I don't know, maybe there's people that are masters of this, but it's that relationship component.
Speaker 3:It's the ability to work with people. And as our world gets more diverse, it just gets harder and harder to ever I think to ever say you're a master at developing relationships. I think you can do it with folks that are more like you or folks that are closer to what you're used to. But as we just get more and more diverse, and I think this is partially why we're polarized so much, we haven't seen relationship building as really the foundation to making all of this work. The technical piece are tools you apply once the relationships have been established, but the relationship piece is key, and maybe that's something we need to teach more as well.
Speaker 3:But, to me, that's the difference. And so with technology changing, building on itself, world becoming more diverse and more global, I mean, we are global now, the relationship piece makes it just equally hard, if not who knows, a factor of five or 10 harder to become a master at something. You know, it's not like it'd be like if we took a violin and we're changing the design of the violin on a regular basis, or we're changing the way music is written or the way, you know, music is played. I think you become a master within certain worlds, but I think in terms of the larger perspective, that's a pretty tough thing to do with all the change going on.
Speaker 2:Very true, very true. Referring back to essentialism, Greg McEwen's book talks a lot about priority. Priority meaning one. There aren't multiple priorities. It's a word in its plural form that was just made up at some point.
Speaker 2:Point. But priority means one. So in the context of that, what do you think is the priority for ISCs in respect to a particular industry or segment of our culture that needs help right now, that needs some type of improvement most immediately?
Speaker 3:I think it's the work systems that shape organizations. So things like the way we develop our leaders, the way we do strategic and action planning, very much the way we engage customers, both our internal customers and our external customers, the way we use technology to both analyze processes better and also just lean data capture, you know, to capture more data in less amount of time and then learn to sort out what is the meaningful data from what is not, and just get back to a process based focus on improvement. Because we're creatures of habit. I think that's the article I'm about to write for this, magazine article I'm working on for IISC this coming month. People are creatures of habit, and they do repeatable things.
Speaker 3:And those repeatable things are called processes, and all processes produce results. But we often don't see that. And I'm working on a book that kind of has a higher work system focus. And in doing my research, I came across Aaron Dignan's book on Brave New Work. And it's more of a conceptual focus, but at the same time, it's interesting to see that he starts off the book talking about Frederick Taylor and how Frederick Taylor designed his practices around a certain type of workplace.
Speaker 3:And part of his presentation, he shows an org chart from early 1900s, which was really coming out of the railroads. And that org chart hasn't changed much, and that's really his thesis. And I agreed with him a 100%. That's why I was drawn to the book. If we look at our work systems, those things I just mentioned, how we do them, they haven't changed that much in a hundred years, and they definitely have not changed with the advent of technology.
Speaker 3:And you know Moore's Law, you know, I do. Memory density and processing speed doubles every 18 months on average. And that curve, we're still climbing that exponential curve. And every day we go by without modifying how we approach work from a management work systems perspective, we're losing ground. And eventually someone's going to catch on to that, whether they're doing that in The States or whether they're doing that in India or China or some other part of the world, and they're going to have just tremendous leverage on other organizations where they can learn how to drive.
Speaker 3:It's almost like driving work in an engagement focused manner, and a process focused manner. And if they do that, then think about if we truly had essentialism in the workplace. You know, we only focused on what was truly important. It would radically change how organizations are structured. And I think that's where Aaron's coming from in his brave new workbook, and that's also something I would like to see happen.
Speaker 3:So that's what I'd like to see occur before I pass, is that we can actually make that that transition and bring our workplaces up to the 20 century, if not the mid twenty first century by the time it happens. I hope it doesn't take that long.
Speaker 2:And neither do I.
Speaker 3:Well, we're not off to a good start, but
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I can see that argument, definitely. Finally, what are you working on now? I know you mentioned you're working on a book, you've got, of course, another column coming for us in the magazine. Posting on social media, to which I'm going to take partial credit for, because I think I mentioned to you years and years ago the power of blogging and being on social media. And I remember coming to the twenty sixteen Annual Conference.
Speaker 2:I was doing a freelance job then for IISC, and I remember you thanking me at the Honors and Awards dinner for it because you said you were getting a lot out of it. What should we expect from you in the near future?
Speaker 3:Well, I have to say, up until the last year, you were probably the only one that was prompting me. So you had more of an effect than you realized. I mean, I just turned 60 last year, so it does take a little while to become convinced of what's out there. Now I'm plugged in in terms of the concept. I'm sold on the concept.
Speaker 3:I have not gotten my daily habits up to where I'd like them to be. So I do this for learning purposes, but also my goal is to get, I guess, the in my brain that I think would be value added. I'd like to get that out on the web before I'm not in a position to do that anymore. And I think I've got many years left to do that, but that's my primary goal. And I've also been convinced by folks at least in their early forties, if not late thirties, that giving content away is the best way to do that.
Speaker 3:And so I want I'd like to start getting, some podcasts of my own going where I am I'm interviewing people just like you are. I wanna share I want to interview folks that have achieved great things in their organizations, that have built better workplaces. So that's one goal, is to get that podcast going. I'd like to start getting a couple videos up a week, really build the capacity of the YouTube channel, and then just continue going out and finding tools and best practices and examples of better work systems that can help out with just help others learn. I strongly believe that the more we share, the more we'll build on each other's ideas just help make the world a better place.
Speaker 3:And I think just through this conversation, I'll probably expand my research to where I'll start looking both outside the workplace and then I'll also start looking for examples around the world versus, more local examples. You know, it's very hard for us to break away from what we're used to, but, I just want to use, you know, at least use YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook to some degree. But, you know, I've got I'd love to have folks follow me on those platforms. I'm not sure if I'll get into Instagram even though I've got my account and I'm tempted to do it. And it's also just keep there's gonna be something new coming down the pipe.
Speaker 3:So, you know, they're all in different innings, so to speak of the baseball game.
Speaker 2:Well, to that end then, briefly, what would you like to see from other ISEs on social media? What sort of information are you looking to find?
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for asking that question. Okay. I meant to mention that, and I forgot to mention that. I might have phrased the question differently in terms of what's the biggest downside you currently see with ISCs on social media, is we're not sharing enough. There are so many others that are my age or even ten years younger than me that have had super experiences.
Speaker 3:And I think the technology is keeping them away. You know? They don't wanna get their foot in the water. Us older industrial engineers and even younger industrial engineers, you know, we've gotta start contributing more. And it's not hard to do.
Speaker 3:I'm quite if anyone is interested, I'm quite happy to share with them the real basics of how to do it. I think the main thing we have to get over is fear of what others might say. And I know that's my biggest challenge with social media, and we can't worry about that. I've taken I've looked at some of the greatest rock videos in history, and someone's gonna give it a thumbs down. You know?
Speaker 3:And we just have to get be you know, we have to get let go of that and just realize that by sharing content, we can really make a difference in people's lives. Because I know there's so much great content that well, the scary thing is so much content hasn't even been digitized. You know, a lot of people haven't taken stuff prior to 1995 and ran it through a scanner scanner and digitized it and put it on the web. And if that's where most people are going for their info, we're kind of in trouble. And so let's get out there.
Speaker 3:Tell stories. Share best practices. I know there's so many other people that can do that, and I hope some of them will even listen to this podcast because I know the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers has many members that are my age or around my age, and we have so much to share. So that yeah. Thanks for asking that because, just as I'm hoping I'm setting an example as much as anything.
Speaker 3:I mean, because I think we can make a difference if we get the momentum going. Social media is unbelievably powerful.
Speaker 2:On that note, we'll leave it there. Kevin, thank you so much. We certainly look forward to seeing more of your columns in years and years to come, and we certainly appreciate, all the advice and, the discussion you're having with us today.
Speaker 3:You bet. And if anybody wants to DM me, it's kevin@greatsystems.com. Otherwise, you can just look me up on LinkedIn is probably the main platform that I'm communicating through right now. And I'm quite happy to take comments, questions, anything that I can do to help, further the profession.
Speaker 2:That was Kevin McManus, the Chief Excellent Officer at GREAT Systems and the performance columnist for ISE Magazine. Kevin, thanks again.
Speaker 3:Thank you, David. This
Speaker 2:has been an episode of Problem Solved, the IISC podcast. If you like what you've heard, then please share this podcast with your friends and colleagues. If you're an IISE member, you can participate in discussions about this and other episodes at connect.iise.org. If you're not a member yet, then you can learn all about the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers at our website, iise.org. Thanks for listening to our show.
