Make Change Stick In Manufacturing with Ron Crabtree

What if resistance to change in manufacturing isn’t the problem we think it is?

In this episode, we sit down with Ron Crabtree, a manufacturing transformation expert whose career spans shop floor roles, major improvement programmes and large scale organisational change. Together they explore what really drives successful manufacturing change management and why most improvement efforts stall long before any tools or training are introduced.

Ron brings decades of experience supporting manufacturers across sectors and sizes. He shares why pushback is often a signal rather than a barrier, how leaders can build a clear burning platform for change, and the practical steps organisations can take to make improvements stick on the shop floor.

This conversation covers:

• Why resistance is a sign of missing clarity, not stubbornness
• How strong change charters improve alignment before work begins
• The simple formula Ron uses to predict whether change will succeed
• Why “just training people” rarely shifts behaviours
• What shop floor teams need to understand before adopting new processes
• How defining what good looks like unlocks more effective improvement
• Where leadership behaviour must shift to support sustainable change

Whether you work on the shop floor, in operations or in a leadership role, this episode offers a practical and people‑centred view of how manufacturing change management really works in today’s factories.

If you enjoy the episode, follow the show for more conversations from across the manufacturing world.

Connect with Ron:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roncrabtree
MetaOps: https://www.metaops.com

Transcript

Why Change Fails On The Floor

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How well do they understand the change? Because people will not accept a change they don't understand, right?

Martin Griffiths 0:13

Hey I'm Martin. Welcome to the Manufacturers Make Strides podcast. Today's episode is a proper masterclass in what really makes change stick in manufacturing. And it's not another let's do a bit of lean training and hope for the best. Because today I'm joined by Ron Crabtree, and his career spans from manual labour direct on the shop floor through to leading major transformation programs, including an incredible chapter at Disney's theme park manufacturing operation, where he helped to deliver some complex show and ride equipment at massive scale. But what I thought made this conversation genuinely valuable is Ron's clarity of thought on the people's side of change. Why resistance from the shop floor or from an organization isn't a problem, it's usually a signal. And then we unpack a simple framework that can help you to predict whether an improvement program has a real chance of success or whether you're heading for slow motion failure. So stick around to the end because Ron leaves you with one practical starting point that you can use today, and it's not what most teams expect. So if you're ready, let's get straight into my conversation with Ron Crabtree. Hey Ron, great to have you here on the podcast today. How are you doing? Excellent, thank you. Tell me where you're joining us from today.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Well, I'm from my home studio near near Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States.

Martin Griffiths 1:45

Okay, nice. And is that where you've grown and brought up in?

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Yeah, I actually grew up 15 miles from this house. So yeah, I grew up in this area. We moved to Southern California back in 1978. We were out there for about four years, and then we moved back to Michigan. So I've been a Michigander for most of my life.

Martin Griffiths 2:04

So tell me what first drew you towards manufacturing.

Ron’s Shop Floor Roots

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Well, you know, I decided not to go to college, right? Uh that wasn't kind of uh DMO, the blue-collar family I grew up in. So basically in Southwest Michigan, where I live, the manufacturer is one of the top employers. So I went to work straight out of high school as a factory worker, assembling travel trailers, right, as an assembly worker. And because my dad was a builder, I had learned a lot of trade skills, right? Coming, you know, growing up as a young man and a teenager of plumbing, wiring, basic carpentry, you know, working with concrete and stuff like that. So the guys at the trailer assembly manufacturing plant really liked me because I think here I was 18 years old, and after about 30 days, 45 days on the job, they had me at the end of the line fixing all the problems. When these travel trailers came to the end of the line, there'd be issues, right? There'd be leaks in the plumbing, there would be wiring that was not working like it should. There could be, you know, trim that wasn't lined correctly. I had the skills to fix all that stuff. So that was my entry to manufacturing in 1974. So I'm dating myself. Wow.

Practical Skills Versus Theory

Martin Griffiths 3:19

So you've yeah, you've been involved for for a while. Just I'm this may be jumping around a little bit, but I have a follow-up question for you there because I think this is kind of interesting. You know, of the people who go into manufacturing now, like there are people who go, and I I was one of those to be honest, I studied engineering at college. I'd, you know, kind of messed around with cars and with bikes when I was younger, but I didn't really have any most of my knowledge was theoretical going through college, and I then got into a you know to a manufacturing situation. Later on, I did get some people on the shop floor to teach me welding, cutting, things like that. But what's your thought about you know about that, about the the theoretical versus the practical skills kind of route? You know, do you think that some for people who see manufacturing as a career, sometimes those skills are overlooked?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Well, there's a lot, there's a lot to that question. A lot of it has to do with the career path, right? And you know, there's the I'll call it the skilled trades path, right? Where you're at the point of attack, involved with actually making stuff, you know, maintaining the equipment and all the things of actually physically doing the value add work on the shop floor. So that's one career path. The other career path is more on the supply chain, finance and accounting, you know, payables, receivables, sales, you know, it's manufacturing, you've got to sell something or you're not gonna make anything. So that's a really important function. So a lot of it has to do with your career path and basically what are what's the knowledge and abilities you need to be to be able to compete for those jobs. I don't know if I'm answering your question.

Martin Griffiths 4:58

Yeah. I I guess what I'm saying is do you think you know, even for people who maybe go into engineering or manufacturing, do you think who maybe go in straight from college, do you think the they're maybe missing out on some of those the knowledge of those shop floor level skills?

SPEAKER_00 5:17

Well, absolutely. I mean, if you're going to be working in a profession associated with manufacturing, it's really, really important to understand how the what are the values actually generated, right? So I was talking with, you know, the guy that used to run uh Polaris, uh a big chunk of Polaris, which is you know the big uh manufacturing organization involved with uh motors and snowmobiles and so you know stuff like that. And he was a real fan of the Danaher operating system, actually worked for Danaher along the way. And Mark was saying, hey, you gotta go to Gunba, you know, you've got to be out the shop floor, you have to understand because it's the actual conversion of the raw material into the product the customer wants to buy, that's the true value add. It's at the point that we're making chips and welding and converting that into the product that's crucial. So his advice, which I would echo, anybody involved with manufacturing would do themselves a real favor to go out to where we actually do the value and understand what makes why shouldn't people buy our product? You know, what makes us better or different from our competitors, right? Understand the juice of what's really bringing value to the marketplace. And I think it's it's a crucial understanding that you know we're leaving ourselves short if we don't, you know, become inquisitive and understand what it takes to to create actual value. Even if our job may have nothing to do with creating that value, we're there to support the people who do create the value.

From Top Down To Enabling

Martin Griffiths 6:47

Yeah, so when understanding that key to kind of the key ingredients and the key differentiators, that's good, that's good advice. So thinking back to those first few roles that you had in manufacturing then, you were kind of singled out as having the unusual set or you know, the the set of technical skills that could really help out. What were what was your progression then? What responsibility did you get given?

SPEAKER_00 7:13

Well, I mentioned the travel trailer assembly, and it was a seasonal business, so they would do a layoff in the fall when the orders dried up. So I was newly getting married. When I was 19, I got married. So I needed a job to make sure I was ready to support my wife. So I went to went to work in a cardboard manufacturing, cardboard box manufacturer, right? Where you make corrugated cardboard that was one part of the plant, and the other plant was converting that into the finished cardboard boxes. So you're thinking about machines that would print, cut, fold, and create cardboard boxes, right, ready for, you know, companies to use. And I was very fortunate, you know, to start out, you know, at the bottom as a union worker catching sheets coming off the corrugator. Got over into the finishing department. And over a three-year period of time, I learned how to operate every single piece of equipment they had. Actually was a lead man running a second shift, and then I got promoted into the office to actually schedule the entire plant. So here I am, 19 years old, with high school education, and in three years' time I've learned how to operate every piece of equipment they had for finishing, and I'm actually scheduling all the manufacturing for this entire plant. Well, yeah.

Martin Griffiths 8:27

Yes, that's that was that was a lot fast. Are there any from those early days or throughout that career, are there any specific successes or failures in challenges that you would say have changed how you approach improvement today?

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Absolutely. So every mistake you can make, I got to make. Right? Because, you know, in terms of you know, how do you how do you plan for and lead improvement initiatives? You know, back in the in the 80s, you know, I was kind of of this mindset that, you know, if you got the ERP system, you can model the data, you can really control everything tightly from the office, right? A very top-down, I'll tell you what to do. You just need to execute. And that was kind of my opic. And as I moved into actually getting closer to the shop floor and needing to actually make things happen at the point of attack, that's when I began to realize the criticality of being able to communicate with people, be able to meet them where they are, to really understand what they need to be effective at the point of attack. So, yeah, having a great plan to have the materials on time is great, but they don't have the right tools, the equipment, the capabilities to execute and perform, then you know it's all gonna be for naught, right? If they're making too much scrap or machines are breaking down or people are getting hurt, that's really gonna be a challenge. So I I learned painfully to adapt and adopt, right? How I approach things to move away from being so technically focused and more on the soft side of it, what it takes to get people engaged. I'm kind of a closet industrial psychologist. I really am fascinated by how organizations work and then how we're actually successful at supporting the people at the point of attack that have value. And you think about, you know, I think kind of I don't remember the exact jargon part, but it's more of a manufacturing the chapel folks. I'm supporting them. I'm not top-down. It's my job to support and enable. And so I've become a big fan of that sort of leadership.

Martin Griffiths 10:25

Okay. D do you remember a specific time where you first really learned that lesson then?

SPEAKER_00 10:31

Oh gosh, I could go on for quite a while about that. But you know, just little things about, you know, giving people assignments without thinking through how that's going to be seen, right? Like if you're gonna give somebody, you know, here's an opportunity to do something different, a little bit of a move up, but not really sitting down thinking about so how could that be seen? How could that be heard? So I'm I had some some really serious conversations with folks who were really after me because I didn't handle that well at all, right? And it was it was very unpleasant. But you learn if you made mistakes. Fortunately, you know, I was able to do that and you know, move past it. But yeah, I think going at things a little short-sighted without thinking through things is you know something I've learned very painfully. And if we get to it, you know, if you're gonna try to make big changes in manufacturing, you know, if we need to grow quick, and how do we do that? You've got to approach that super carefully because you can really make a mess if you don't. And we'll talk about it if we have time, but you know, you've got to sit down and really think about chartering significant changes you're gonna make in your organization, thinking through critically, you know, where are we going, what are we gonna look like when we get there, what is good like look like, coming up with a really good problem statement that we're solving for, and then right, who's who's involved, right? And then what's your scope? And then, you know, think about a racy chart, responsible, accountable, informed, consulted. Who's gonna be impacted? And then who do you have to be concerned about from a change management perspective? Get all that in view first. Then go ahead, then you can begin to put together a Kaizen team or whatever to go after implementing whatever that might be.

Martin Griffiths 12:12

Okay, got ya. Okay. Yeah, that sounds that sounds really good. So so thinking about today now, say you're when you're in a typical engagement now when you're helped uh called in to help out a factory or manufacturing business that's under pressure. Are there any particular patterns that you've noticed that you see first when you come into that situation?

SPEAKER_00 12:36

There are. And then you walk in and you say, okay, now we're gonna do something different, right? We're gonna we're gonna produce a lot more and make some real changes. So that's a real issue that we have to be really careful about. And then the other piece is, you know, doing training. Like so I've I keep seeing this where organizations think, we're just gonna train them about lean six sigma, or more recently, let's train them about using AI agents and just hope something magical will happen. And it just doesn't work that way, right? So that's where I think you have to recognize that if you're gonna make significant changes or improvement, you need a structured approach.

Resistance And The Leadership Style Fit

Martin Griffiths 13:30

So that's the okay, so that's so you think when there's there are problems, it's maybe because there hasn't been that kind of vision set up front and a structure put around it. It's been just more of a general let's make some improvements, but no kind of clarity on where they should be leading got you. So when uh you slightly touched on this before. I'd just like to dig into this a little bit more. So when when people push back on change, what do you think kind of sits behind that resistance?

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Well, I think it's a failure by leadership to understand the what's in it for me question, right? For the folks that that that are going to be impacted. So, you know, I like to describe it as let's just talk about the Hershey Blanchard leadership model, right? Maybe that'd be a way to unpack this a little bit. And we think about you know, getting people to do something different. And if you're not familiar with it, you can Google this really easy, but it's it gets back to leadership style and recognizing that kind of a one-size-fits-all approach to doing something isn't really gonna get us there, particularly when we need people to do something different. And in the model, it talks about you know people going through four four levels of development, right? So if we're introducing something for the very first time, they know nothing about it, right? They don't have the skills, they don't understand it, et cetera, et cetera. We've got to do a lot of telling and teaching, right? We can't assume they're gonna figure it out, like just doing training and hoping they're magically gonna do it, that isn't gonna work. So we have to be very prescriptive about what we want, how we're gonna do it, and we're very, very hands-on, we're very directed, we're very supporting, we're coaching, we're right there with them, right? Moving it along. And then as they begin to understand, okay, so this is what it's about, then you're gonna kind of move into a selling mode of, okay, let's make sure we understand you with homes. Why are we doing this? What's the benefit to you, to the organization, to our customers, et cetera? And then as they get comfortable with that, then you can become very participative and really get them to become really engaging to do it. And then finally, if they if everything goes well, you can delegate to them. In other words, okay, now you get how we do this, and you can rinse and repeat and begin to do this on your own, right? So what's really important about this model is our behavior as leaders, us personally, has to shift. We have to consciously recognize that for this given problem with these given people, where are they? You know, do I need to be very directive, telling, teaching? Do I need to be selling? Can I work with them and they'll get there? Or can I literally delegate to them and step away? There's very different leadership behaviors involved with those. So I would call that out as on a personal basis, something that leaders in manufacturing have to be cognizant of as one of the keys.

Martin Griffiths 16:18

Maybe you could just illustrate that with this with the story. How would that work in practice, say with uh, you know, within the whole factory or a section of an area within manufacturing business, how would you go about, you know, picking that team and deciding what approach to take with that team?

Chartering Change With Clear Governance

The Three Factor Change Success Test

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Yeah, there's a couple approaches here that I'll that I'll share that should be helpful. And generally speaking, when you see resistance, that signals that we missed teeing things up properly as a leadership team, right? And that's usually because we didn't have good stakeholder alignment, there's a lack of understanding, there's a lack of clarity, there's a lack of agreement around what we need to do, right? So a basic tool that I highly advocate is the use of a charter document of some sort. And if charter, if you're not familiar with it, starts with what's our project? What's the label? What are we calling this effort we're going to do? And then the second piece is explain what we're going to look like when we're done. Give me a high level of idea. This is our situation, this is where we're going, this is what we want to accomplish at the end. And then you work down through what is what's the scope? What's in and out of our scope? What are the boundaries, right? Who's going to be the process owner? Who owns this, sponsors this? It's going to be the one to break down our barriers, make sure we get the resources we need. Who's going to be the leader of this project to really own the execution of it? Who are the critical team members? What are the metrics of success? You know, what's our baseline measure that we're trying to improve, and what is our target to improve? Right? So you've got to start with that, and then charge, you know, some have some kind of a steering committee is in play there. So you have a project owner, project manager, and maybe three or four functional and team members. They have to be ombudsmen, right? They need to be part of the communication strategies. Their job as the steer code to think about the change management challenge. Who's going to push back? Why would they push back? How are we going to address that? They need to walk the walk, right? Talk the talk. They need to demonstrate what we're looking for. You know, without having some kind of steering committee or some kind of governance, it's going to be really hard, right? And you can do that very large scale or small scale. So that that's one approach, to starting with a charter. Here's another tool I've had a lot of success with. I've used this with thousands of people, with good effect, is a real simple exercise you can do in an hour or less, is you say, okay, we'd like to achieve some sustainable change, but it's a basic formula. And I'll start with the formula. So it's the level of discomfort with respect to the ta the change we want to make. It's the vision that we have, how well we're articulating that vision, and it's the skills we have as an organization to execute. So so bear with me here, right? So I want to improve our throughput 25%, right? And to do that, we're gonna have to redesign the work. Okay. So we say, all right, so do our people even care about that? Right? The people that need to change and do things differently, do they think it's important to increase c increase our throughput 25%? And if they're like, no, no, I'm very happy with the job I have, I like it just the way we do it, I do not have a burning platform to adopt this change that we need to make. Right? So there's no discomfort. Well, that's one third of the success formula, right? So I asked the leadership team to say, look, on a scale of one to zero, you know, one percent to a hundred percent, how much discomfort is there for the people that are gonna be impacted by this change with the current state? Now, if everybody's saying, you know what, we're gonna lose our jobs if we don't improve our productivity by 25% to give our customers some price decreases, which I've literally had that conversation. I've literally led those conversations, we're gonna not have a job, right? We're gonna our company will go out of business, right? Well, that'll give us a high level of discomfort. So we have to actually rate that, you know, zero, you know, one percent to a hundred percent, and give that a number. Let's just say we're 50% there, right? 50% of our stakeholders have a lot of discomfort. They really believe we need to change, and about 50% not so much. So you you peg that. Okay, so let's talk about our vision. How well have we articulated this change? How well is it explained? What it looks like. And we're able to basically explain to each individual all the way down to the last person that sweeps the floor, their job. You know, how does this impact you and what you need to do? How well do they understand the change? Because people will not accept the change they don't understand, right? That's just the basic thing about human nature. So if they don't understand, they're not going to like it. So we have to give that a number. How well have we articulated, communicated, and gotten people to really understand their role and what we need them to do? Yeah, let's say that was 50%. We're halfway there, right? Which some cases pretty good, in other cases not so much. And then we talk about skills. Adoption of AI would be a great example, right? Teaching everybody how to use AI agents. Okay, we're gonna use AI agents, but have we taught them how? Have we set up a process for that? Have we developed, you know, help teaching them how to develop a good problem statement, you know, defining the problem that you're gonna use AI for as an example is crucial. You've got to ask the right question, or you're not gonna get an answer you need. So we have to assess with respect to implementing these changes, do we have the skills? Well, do people that need to do that actually have the skills? Let's let's say for the sake of discussion that we're halfway there. 50%, not so bad. Give the 50%, not so much. Well, do the math, right? 50% times 50% is what? 25%. 25% times 50% is what? 12.5%. So in the current state, based on that, our likelihood of success is only 12.5%. Right? So now we have to say, okay, what do we need to do to get the discomfort there? Do we need to help people understand the burning platform? What do we need to do to make sure we perfectly and well articulate the vision and accountabilities for each of our stakeholders? And what are we going to do to make sure they have the skills? So you understand where your gaps are, and then focus your energy where the biggest gaps are to get you there. That's a different way of doing it. And now that I've got there's a one pager that I can send, right, just to define that little exercise, and you can use it very, very quickly just to have a very, you know, self-assessment, right? A little come coming home and really thinking about, okay, so what are we really up against here? And leading, you know, a quality conversation toward what we need to do to increase our chances of success.

Martin Griffiths 23:08

Yeah, okay. That was really interesting. I have one quick follow-up question on that then. In the in the kind of in the vision statement or vision setting part of that of that exercise, in that example you mentioned before, where the company might have been in a we're going to lose business from a key customer, that means you know, we're out of business. Would would you include that? Is that something you would include in the vision? Like this is the potential bad state, but the future positive state we want is this. Yeah.

Kaizen Done Wrong And Power Tools

SPEAKER_00 23:39

I mean, I've literally done that with teams. If you write the charter, is, you know, you've got here's the project, right? We need to improve our throughput by 25% without without having more people or buying more machines or anything. We have to produce 25% more than we are. The reason why is these 20 people are going to lose their jobs because that customer is going to take their business elsewhere. Literally put that right in there. This is the threat. This is the existential threat to you as employees and us as an organization. And that's if that isn't enough of a burning platform for most folks, I don't know what to say. So the more that we can be transparent and disclose the reason for the change. And if we cannot do that, we've got work to do. Okay. And if we can't do it, then you then you have to res we have to resort to other methods. Okay. And Kaizen, the practice of Kaizen, which we may unpack a little bit here later. In the early days, you know, Kaizen kind of got a bad rap, right? Because the way like General Motors had this program they call Picos, right? And basically they'd go into a supplier and I got to be the victim of some of those events. And they would send their engineers in and they would redesign the work, right? Either time to motion study, kind of apply some mean techniques, and they'd redesign the work, move machines around, change the job descriptions, and then you would implement all in less than a week. You'd literally move the equipment, move everything around, and you'd have a different workflow. And at the end of that, the engineers would calculate, okay, we just found 15% improvement. And then purchasing would reach out the hand and say, guess what? Yeah. Can we have that 15%? Yeah. So in that particular case, there was no buy-in. There was no burning platform. We we forced it in. That is one of our options as a leadership game, by the way. If you can't build a burning platform and get people to willingly go along with that, you have no, you have to use power tools. There's another whole discussion around the tools of cooperation and cooperation and management. There's some really cool stuff out there about that. But we have to physically structure the work so they cannot do it any other way. We may be forced to do that.

Martin Griffiths 26:13

We'll move on to the second, but I just had one other quick follow-up question that that dropped into my mind because earlier in the episode you talked about working in a unionized plant. I was just wondering if you think whether you know a business is unionized or not, does it change the approach to this method at all?

Union Partnership That Made Change Work

SPEAKER_00 26:33

As far as the steps we go through, it's process, right? So it doesn't really change the process we need to go through. It does dramatically change the people side of it. Okay. So I can tell you a brief story about how to be successful in a union environment. But you have to be listening, you have to have you have to have the real appetite for engaging. So I was working with an organization that was uh handling retirement benefits for one of the major unions. So they were providing retirement benefits services to unionized organizations. Okay. All the employees in this organization were that union. Okay. They were facing an ex existential threat with the advent of 401ks, this is you know 15 years ago now, with the advent of 401ks and other options for employers to move away from defined benefit plans, they had a problem. An existential threat. That if they didn't start doing things differently and figure out how to develop more top-line sales, because employers were moving away, and if we don't find other ways to employ the people, the 600 people that work in this place, we're going to be out of the job. So I sat down with the leaders and I said, look, for us to be successful here, we have to have the buy-in from the union. And I got them to agree to form a steering committee that was half management and half union to own the enterprise plan. I put together a workshop, so what that's following my meta ops operating system, which my customers got into. And we got into a room, we talked about and we agreed to the three key things this organization had to do. The first is we had to increase sales, because without more customers to replace the customers we're losing, we're going to lose jobs. And they were also providing defined benefits, right? Defined benefit support for like through medical insurance and stuff like that. Though that was a growth opportunity for them, right, with the same employers. Number two, our customers didn't like us. They thought our customer service was terrible. And if we wanted to keep the employers in particular, and we wanted to keep the unions, because remember we had two buyers, but we had the union that would advocate to use this company, and then we had the employers that had to pay for it. So we had two different constituencies we had to sell to get business, right? So the customer service was terrible. So we had to improve, measured customer satisfaction at least 50%. Because it was terrible. I mean, we had we had to make a move there, right? The third thing is quality, right? There was way too much mistakes. A lot of the customer service concern was, you know, they'd file a request and they get stuck, right? And, you know, paying their medical benefits wasn't happening as quickly as it wasn't consistent. Way too many things were going into a pen a PEND pen status to be dealt with. So, you know, we had to we had to improve our quality. So we got everybody to agree there at three critical things. We needed to grow sales, we needed to improve our quality. In other words, our ability to get it right the first time when request was made of us. And number three, measured customer satisfaction. So we had complete agreement and we set goals for those. Then we came up with 14 principles of behavior. In this union management partnership to transform this business, we had 14 points in a code of honor, basically, of how we were going to behave. How we were going to treat each other. And then from there, we moved into a basic form of policy deployment. Lean recognition to call it Hoshan Conry. And what were the control metrics? What were the change metrics and the handful? And then we started chartering projects to drive the changes that were needed. And amazing success story, dramatically increasing their uh customer base, dramatically increasing measure customer satisfaction, and dramatically increasing the rate at which first-time requests got through the system right the first time. It would not have happened without that stir co, right? Because I'll tell you this. Every single time in the past that this organization tried to introduce technology to have improvements, oh, this was not pretty. Right? They just rock them. So after we had the steer c in place, they had they wanted to implement uh uh the automation, they were moved away from microfiche, this is how antiquary it was, to scan documents. So the future workflow was mail gets open, it gets scanned and electronically directed to the individual that need to act on it. All kinds of benefits to that, right? Because it would go from being open to in front of somebody to work on it in minutes versus days with physically moving mail through these various processes. Okay, but well, in the past they would have had all kinds of issues with right grievances and all kinds of pushback. But because steering the actual union stewards were part of the team that designed that work, when there were issues, management did not have to be involved. Because the union stewards were going to articulate for the people pushing that. Look, this is a piece of the puzzle. If we don't go along with this and support it, we're not gonna have jobs at all. So shut up, basically. So that that's key, that's that's really interesting. Sorry for the segue, but you asked a really good question, and that's crucial as a leadership team to figure out how are we gonna bond with and unite and come up with that burning platform and get in front of this. Because if you can't do that, you have to use other tools and other methods to make those changes, right? Ideally, though, you want to do that together.

Digital Transformation And AI Job Reality

Martin Griffiths 32:43

Yeah, yeah, don't skip that step. That's that's that's good. Okay, slight change of tack now. Have a section called Myths and Truths. I'll throw out a couple of statements, you let me know if you think it's a myth or a truth. Of the digital transformation projects that fail, it's usually because the team implementing it can't absorb or are against the change. Absolutely true. Not a myth. Yeah, based on what we've just talked about, really. You've mentioned AI a couple of times. AI's gonna take jobs away from people in manufacturing.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Let me answer it in this fashion. So I was at an event in October, this last October in Texas with uh one of our partners, our customer software, and they sell a platform that basically automates a lot of the identifying suppliers and creating a basis to do markets and be able to very quickly source lots and lots of stuff very, very quickly and help drive cost savings, improve delivery performance, and some other cool stuff. And purchasing organizations, right, struggle with that because all these workers and up you know in that whole end-to-end, you know, working with suppliers thing have to change how they're doing business. And one of the things they talked about is, you know, this pushback, and that is a challenge. That's one of the things we're helping them with. But I think it's Jeff Lymel, he used to be one of the he was one of the CEOs for GE, General Electric. He worked for Jeff Welsh, and then he ended up being president. He said something really profound. He said, I get to ask this question all the time, is AI going to take our job? And the answer is no. People using AI will take your job. So as a practical matter, depending on the business and the basis of the work you're done, AI will take jobs away. But I don't see it so much in manufacturing. Maybe in certain manufacturing functions, like accounts payable, receivable, and and transactional processes, there'd be some impact. But we talked about getting the product made on the shop floor. People using AI are going to be successful and they're going to be around. The people that that do not adopt will then not be marginalized or be pushed into roles where they don't matter. Okay. I mean, to be blunt about it, we still need people to drive the garbage trucks. We still need people to dig ditches. And so maybe there's another job for them. But the workers of the future in manufacturing are going to be multi-skilled and they're going to have the capabilities to understand and interface with technologies and automation more effectively than we have in the past.

Martin Griffiths 35:23

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, it's going to be an evolution, isn't it? And you know, like you said before, if companies don't keep up with that change, they'll be competed out of the market, really. So, okay. Thank you. Thank you for that. Just thinking about what you're focused on now and in the future, what keeps you motivated in the work that you do day to day? That's a good question.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

You know, I really like making a difference in people's lives, right? So I've when I see the light bulbs come on, to see people accelerating their adoption, the awareness of what they can do to make their lot better in life, and have that line up positively with what the organization they work for is trying to accomplish. You know, I feel really good about that. So that's part of you know what I like to do is give back and being here on your podcast as a piece of that, is you know, helping people to wrap their head around that, wherever they are, right? People that run the company and own it all the way down to the people with Superfours, you know, we all have a role. And we've got to figure out how to interact and be successful in a changing world. So where I'm able to help foster that understanding and adoption makes me feel like I've done something to make the world a better place.

Value Stream Mapping To Build Buy In

Martin Griffiths 36:37

Yeah, that's that's good. Yeah, that's I'm sure that would uh keep everyone kind of motivated. What when you think then about the future of manufacturing, what what would you like to see? What changes would you like to see across the manufacturing industry?

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Well, just some advice, you know, for folks listening to this podcast, because there's a wide wide variety, right? You've got people that actually own these own companies, you know, the CEO, we've got the people of the next layer that kind of have functional responsibility all the way down to the individual contributors. And no matter what level we are, you know, my advice and suggestion is if we're going to do something differently, adopt technology, whatever it may be, we need to get hyper-focused on what a good outcome is. We have to start with what does good look like? You know, we need to be able to baseline that somehow, right? Somehow put a measurement to that, say this is how we're performing, and this is the result we're getting. It's speed, cost, quality, customer experience, employee retention. You know, what is it that really matters? But you gotta put a measurement to that somehow. And then think critically about what does good look like? Okay. And and be able to articulate that. You know, we need to build a burning platform for that. We're gonna have to do that. I don't care where you are in your organization, you're gonna have to sell changes, you're gonna have to bring people along. Okay, so you've got to get really hyper-real, focus on the outcome, think through the what's in it for me, right? Find a way, that's on us, find a way to engage those that need to buy into this, right? The people that need to pay for it and the people that are gonna be doing things differently. And for the people that need to do it differently, figure out how we can get them to own this. How can we lead them down the path? And one of the tools that I would advocate, particularly when we're talking about a process, complex processes where there's lots of people involved and we need cooperation. There's a technique called value stream mapping. And it's part of the Lean Six Sigma toolbox. And I'm a big advocate of using some form of visualization, right, to try to visualize the process. You know, D. Edwards Deving, you know, great father of quality, once said, if you can't describe what you're doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. Okay? So generally speaking, the big gains are going to come from improvements to processes and the results of the business processes. So I think value stream mapping, which is another hour-long discussion, is a great technique to make that visual. And it's a way to bring people in, engage their minds, understanding where they fit into the bigger picture, what the needs of all the stakeholders are, what's our customer needs, what's our supplier needs, what's our needs as an organization, what are our pain points? You know, why are we doing this? And what does good look like in the future state? Wonderful way to visualize that. In my opinion, really important if we want to engage people to get them to buy into the change, we have to create a platform for those meaningful conversations about the change and what it means for the organization, for our customers, and for us as individuals. It's very powerful. So that I would advocate for that is you know, closely followed, hyper focus on the business outcome, understand the what's in it for me questions from the stakeholders involved, and it's trying to make that visual and inclusive as you define where we're going, how we're gonna get there, and how we're gonna do it.

What Makes You Crazy Exercise

Martin Griffiths 39:54

I'll I'll thinking about the what's in it for me question for the for the stakeholders. How how would you approach that? Do you think it just need do you think someone just has to have a lot of empathy to put themselves in the stakeholder situation to, you know, to understand that clearly? Or do you have any specific kind of like methods or techniques of how to understand that yourself?

SPEAKER_00 40:15

Getting to the what's in it for me depends on who it is you're you're in front of, right? And where they are on the org chart in general. But here's a technique I've had a lot of success with in the past is if we're about to embark on, you know, a Kaisen or a process improvement initiative, one of my favorite things to do is just say, you know what, let's just start with a blank piece of paper, click chart, and let's just talk about what makes you crazy.

unknown 40:38

Right?

SPEAKER_00 40:39

So give boundaries of that with respect to, okay, so bear with me here. Let's just say it's the customer service organization that deals with customer complaints. So I'm just making that up. With respect to the process that we're doing to serve our customers, what is about the process that makes us crazy? And just let them talk, right? So don't turn it into a beef session where they're just complaining. Make it focused, right? If with respect to providing those services for customers, what is about that process? It kind of makes you crazy every day. And then people start putting stuff on there, like, you know, the customer's angry with us, they don't give me enough information, my computer's too slow, and they start talking about it, and you just capture that stuff. So these are pain points. These are the things that people involved with doing that work see and feel every day. But we have to start there. To continue that exercise, if you want to go somewhere with that, then I like to say, great, let's go back to that list now and take a look at combining any of these that makes sense, right? Okay, well, this one and this one are very related. Let's kind of merge those skills. Kind of get yourself down to a discrete lead of uh list of those pain points, right? Kind of get those commingled so they're like an act, they're like a potential action item, right? You kind of get there first. So you so you kind of have a focused conversation. So, okay, with respect to the computer being slow and linking and being very frustrating, how many times a day does that happen? Oh, it happens once a month. Okay. Once a month. It happens 55 times a day. Okay. Bear with me here. And I say, okay, so every time that happens, what's the consequence? Well, I waste about five minutes to go find. But then you just do some math, right? And you can have a lot of fun with that with people in the room, do it pretty darn quickly. And you get and you run through the math exercise, you can say, well, here's these 20 things that make us crazy. But when we kind of monetize that, put a value to it, we found out five things are 80% of everything. So let's go back to each of those five things and talk about. So what do we what would good look like? In other words, this is the frustration. What would good look like? So if it's a relationship problem, we talk about fixing relationships. If it's a computer problem, we talk about fixing computers. If it's a business process problem, you know what I mean? So then we get to zero in on what's the right countermeasure to make the pain go away. And that's just an incredibly powerful exercise that I would advocate, you know, leaders become very good at.

Martin Griffiths 43:15

Okay, so I guess the key, well, the key thing that stood out to me in that exercise is you're really involving that stakeholder, that person in the decision maker, like they're kind of almost coming up with the solution themselves rather than there being the what to fix.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

Not necessarily how to fix it yet, but they're definitely agreeing that this is a problem we need to address. So you're indirectly, but you are answering the what's in the for me question. Those are the things they care about.

Where To Start Tomorrow

Martin Griffiths 43:44

Yeah, that's clever. That's clever. Good technique. We need to keep an eye on time because we're just coming up to an hour now. I really appreciate your time, Ron. It's been a really fun conversation. What's the best place people can go to to find out more about you? About MetaOps.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Well, just search for me in LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn, that would be great. You can go to metaops.com. I have my own podcast called Metapod, which I didn't talk about, where I bring in thought leaders to talk about the three common challenges manufacturers face. You can watch an episode. Connect and get on my calendar if you're willing to work down to the webpage if you want to talk.

Martin Griffiths 44:21

Perfect. That sounds great. Ron, we'll drop links to those in the show description. So yeah, thanks very much for this today. So if you're enjoying this episode, please give us a follow on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That would help us to keep bringing authentic manufacturing conversations with the people who are shaping our industry. Thank you. Just one final thought. If you were gonna leave a final takeaway for a team working in manufacturing, if they could do one thing tomorrow to prepare better for change, where would you suggest they started?

SPEAKER_00 44:54

They would start with getting really hyper focused on the outcome, right? And the more specific you get about you know the outcome, and the better you can define the problem we're solving for. So if you can just hyper-elevate your problem definition skills, if you haven't already done that, that would be you know really good first step. Because you know, one of the old sayings is be careful what you ask for because you might get it. Right? So let's get really good at what we're asking for.

Martin Griffiths 45:28

Okay. Wise words. I will uh I will think about that for the rest of the day. Today, I appreciate that, Ron. Really enjoyed today's chat. Thanks for your time, and hope you have a great day, Ron. Thank you. Take care. Take care of you.