Podcast: Overcoming manufacturing challenges by leveraging continuous improvement and tech innovations

Katie Anderson is an internationally recognized leadership consultant, speaker, and learning enthusiast best known for inspiring leaders to lead with intention to increase their impact. She is the author of "Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn" as well as the host of the Chain of Learning podcast. John Dyer is the author of "The Façade of Excellence: Defining a New Normal of Leadership." With 30 years of industry experience, John is a frequent speaker on topics of leadership, continuous improvement, teamwork, and culture change. Michael Bremer is the author of "How to Do a Gemba Walk" and "Learn to See the Invisible.” A long-time continuous improvement speaker, Michael currently works with the Association of Manufacturing Excellence leading their Excellence Award activities. Katie, John, and Michael recently spoke with Jill Jusko, executive editor at IndustryWeek, about methods to boost continuous improvement efforts in manufacturing for the coming years.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

IW: Before we move into the Q&A, I want to set the stage a little bit. I think it's fair to say that manufacturers are facing turbulent times on a lot of fronts: supply chain constraints, trade issues, worker shortages, and new technologies that ease some processes while complicating others. And those are just a few. If there was ever a time for continuous improvement to shine, it seems like now is that time. We know that developing a workforce focused on continuous improvement leads to engaged employees and a problem-solving culture, which are, of course, the building blocks of operational excellence. What we're here to do today is discuss ideas and methods to boost your continuous improvement efforts as we move into 2025 and beyond.

So, I’m going to get started with Katie. Katie, earlier this month you wrote an article on IndustryWeek titled “The Real Meaning of Kaizen.” One of the points you make early on in that article is that too many organizations don’t fully understand what Kaizen is, or at the very least, have a very restricted view of it. Could you walk us through your definition of Kaizen and how you feel it should be practiced?

KA: Absolutely. You know, the first time I was introduced to the word "Kaizen" was almost 20 years ago at the beginning of my continuous improvement journey when I was working in hospitals and healthcare systems. At that time, Kaizen was really associated with something like a week-long Kaizen event. The concept of Kaizen can be applied to events, but there's a deeper meaning. About 10 years ago, I moved to Japan, where I met Mr. Isao Yoshino, a Toyota leader, and I wrote about him in my book “Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn.” I became very interested in what Kaizen really means in Japanese culture. It’s not only about daily continuous improvement, which is typically what the word Kaizen is translated to in English, but when I learned about the Japanese origin of the word and the way it's written, it comes from symbols meaning "self" and "change for the good." So, it’s really about having the self-discipline first and foremost to make changes for yourself so that you can make changes for the good.

It's not something you delegate to other people or just an event you do. It’s a mindset—a way of thinking about continuous improvement for yourself, for the process, and then for the collective good every day. So, we need to move away from seeing Kaizen as something that we do and start seeing it as something we live. It also requires us to take a look at ourselves as leaders. I know we’ll talk more about this today, but to create a continuous improvement and problem-solving culture in our organizations, it requires us to shift our behaviors and have the self-discipline to make the changes needed to create that effective continuous improvement culture.

IW: Great. We will come back and talk more about that. I’m going to jump over to John. As I mentioned earlier, the time seems right to ramp up continuous improvement efforts in 2025, given our twin issues of uncertainty and well-defined problems like the labor shortage. I guess the question is: I made that as a statement, but do you agree with that? And if so, how would you address that in 2025?

JD: I think we have a lot of turmoil ahead of us for a number of reasons. As we mentioned earlier, this week the big discussion and debate is how tariffs will impact the economic flow of goods around the world. There may be a strong desire for more U.S. manufacturers to start bringing more business or work back into the U.S. The problem with that is that we’re already experiencing labor shortages, especially as it relates to skilled labor—machinists, welders, even good assemblers, and people who can run robotics. So, I think there’s going to be a real need to develop our workforce to a higher level than ever before and to improve our systems to get the most capacity out of our systems than we ever have before.

So, as far as where to start, I think it begins with the leaders of an organization. Leaders need to sit down together and develop a strategy to answer the question: "How do we change the way we do things?" How do we change our leadership approach? How do we spend more time on the factory floor? Michael will talk more about that—about going to the Gemba. How do we start? I think this is something we can discuss more later, but how do we start shifting the leader’s mindset from one of managing to one of coaching? I think we need to start using the word "coaching" more and more as we move down this path of continuous improvement.

MB: If I could just compliment that a little bit, John and Katie both talked about mindset, learning, and coaching. One of the big challenges is that getting a deep understanding of what highly effective improvement practices look like takes a very long time—a frustratingly long time. I mean, I’m an A3 guy, and I’m still learning new things as I work with people like John and Katie. I benefit from their experiences, and that’s part of the learning process. So, the whole idea of showing some vulnerability and being willing to admit that you don’t know it all, but even more importantly, that you’re approaching all this in the spirit of learning.

To me, at the end of the day, it’s all about this willingness to learn. I don’t know everything, and there are refinements I can make to get a deeper and deeper understanding as time goes on. In order to improve my ability to coach—like John was talking about—I really need to be actively working to increase my knowledge base so I can stay even or maybe one step ahead of the people I’m trying to coach as we move along and make progress.

JD: Michael, this is something I talk about quite a bit, and I 100% agree with what you just said. But think about how the current system is set up in most organizations as far as promoting and hiring people. They don’t tend to promote and hire people who are willing to admit that they don’t know everything, right? Because in the U.S., especially, that’s seen as a sign of vulnerability—a sign of weakness. And you know, if I’m considering someone for an executive position or some high-paid management role, the natural inclination is to hire someone who is overly confident—someone who doesn’t admit they need to learn new things, who does everything themselves, solves all the problems, and tells people what to do. I think that’s what ultimately has to change.

KA: 100%. And that’s where the self-discipline we talked about comes in. If you want an organization that’s truly high-performing and capable of continuous improvement, that capability can’t just reside with one or two people in the organization. It needs to be happening every day at all levels. To make that happen, we have to have the self-discipline to know when we’re the expert with the answer—because leaders develop expertise in their field—and when it’s our role to set the direction and provide support for people to do the problem-solving at the right levels.

We have to manage the tension between still being knowledgeable and having expertise while making sure we’re functioning at the right level and solving problems we own at our level of the organization. We’ll actually be more effective in solving real problems if leaders can take a step back and ask, “Is this mine to solve, or is this my place to support and coach, as Michael was saying?” So, I totally agree—we have this conflict in our culture, and we need to flip that script.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.