The Edges of Lean

Episode 9: Continuous Improvement and the Law

If you made a list of organizations that were unlikely to implement lean practices, you might put law firms pretty high on the list.  But Barry Appleman Leiden, (BAL) a top corporate immigration law firm, would not be on that list, because they are a law firm that is lean at heart, priding themselves, and acknowledged by their clients for their effectiveness and their efficiency.  My guest is Jaclyn Harder, who is a certified Lean Agent and operational excellence leader at BAL, firm. Jaclyn leads BAL’s lean transformation, initiatives, training, and works with teams at all levels across the organization to pursue the exceptional. Jaclyn is also a lean gardener! We talk about lean in the legall profession and lean in the garden. 

Episode 8: Continuous Improvement and Root Cause Racism

Think back to your first continuous improvement training?  What did you learn about? Define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC)?  Or was it a lean training, and you talked about single-piece flow and how to define waste?  Did the topic of racism ever enter the conversation?  Probably not.  But the root causes of racism and the problems in the world for which racism appears to be a root cause are now hot topics in the continuous improvement community.  My guests are Deondra Wardelle and Mark Graban who join me to share the story of #RootCauseRacism.

You can find Deondra at www.deondrawardelle.com  and Mark at www.leanblog.org.  We all urge you to follow #rootcauseracism on social media and visit the website rootcauseracism.com

What is your one small thing to act on or to do differently to address racism ? How might your continuous improvement practice advance equity and justice?

Episode 7:Continuous Improvement and Planes, Trains, Automobiles and Ships

There are those places in our world that are arrival and departure points.  A port, a bridge that crosses a great river, an airport, a helipad.  At these places, drivers, transportation companies, airlines, shipping companies, passengers and more rely on a well-connected and continuously improving infrastructure.  Who is working on those improvements? Here to tell us how it happens are Lisa Dewey-Mattia of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and from the other side of the US, Jared Thatcher of the Port of Seattle.

Episode 6: Continuous Improvement and Your Old Computer

That laptop on your desk - where is it going when you are done with it? Most e-waste is not recycled to reclaim its precious metal components, and it ends up in in landfills. From a lean perspective, there’s a lot of waste n the e-waste problem!  That’s where organizations like FreeGeek.org come into play.  In this episode we hear from John Ashcraft of Freegeek, in Portland Oregon, and Maria Grzanka and Brion Hurley, continuous improvement professionals,  who volunteer with Lean Portland to assist non-profit organizations. Brion, John and Maria share how lean thinking helps to reduce waste with the folks who are working hard to address the e-waste problem.

Episode 5: Continuous Improvement and Artificial Intelligence

Teachers of lean practice emphasize the importance of human interaction and some even eschew the idea of automating processes.  Lauren Hisey has a very different perspective when it comes to our relationship with the machines that are everywhere – especially those that use artificial intelligence.  She's not afraid, and she works actively to help companies use human intelligence together with artificial intelligence. In a world where the next person you speak with might be a bot, how do we use our lean principles, especially respect for people?

Lauren is a consultant and coach who guides business owners to create effective change, bringing together her technical expertise and continuous improvement skills gained working for major technology based companies. You can find Lauren at laurenhiseyconsulting.com.

Learning Leadership in the Cockpit of an F15

At the edges of lean are the practices that look just like lean - but the people who practice them don't think of themselves as lean practitioners. My guest is Brandon Williams of LeadTAC. Brandon was an F-15 pilot for the US Air Force, and in this podcast we talk about what leadership lessons can be learned from the people who fly planes at 1,800 miles per hour, and how human factors and situational awareness can improve work for everyone. And we talk about how lean leadership is like the leadership Brandon learned in military, and focus on overlaps in the thinking patterns - and what's different.

Continuous Improvement and Mental Health

In lean thinking, we talk a lot about respect for people.  And that means we need to understand the physical and mental conditions affecting the people we work with.  I know that my training as a lean thinking, continuous improvement professional included very little about how our brains work – and even less about the effects of mental health and mental illness on how our organizations work.  Yet many of the people we work with, and even we ourselves, struggle with aspects of mental illness and seek better mental health.

In this episode of "The Edges of Lean" Michelle Dickinson and Gemma Jones share their learnings about mental health and mental illness - and we talk about what it means for anyone working in continuous improvement. 

September is Suicide Awareness Month, an important time to pay attention to everyone's mental health.

If you or someone you know are having suicidal thoughts, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24-hours a day at 1-800-273-8255

In the UK, you can ring the Samaritans (also 24 hours a day) on 116 123.

 

 

 

Continuous Improvement - For Kids!

How can you use lean thinking with your children?  Karidja Sakanogo, and Sam Morgan, two deeply engaged continuous improvement thinkers, share how they have taken lean thinking home to the family. We also talk about the challenges of raising Black and biracial children and what it means to teach kids "respect for people." 

The Edges of Lean: Episode 1 "Meet the Founding Mothers"

Every weekday morning at 10 AM Eastern, women from all over the world meet on Zoom for 30 minutes.  All these women are practitioners of continuous improvement, lean or six sigma. Who are they? Why are they meeting? And who got this started?

In this inaugural episode of "The Edges of Lean," meet three women who got tired of women's voices not being heard in the lean community, what they did about it, and what it has become.   Crystal Y. Davis, Karyn Ross, and Dorsey Sherman founded a unique co-creative group of lean thinkers that is growing every day. 

 

I'm Bella Englebach, and this is our first adventure at the "The Edges of Lean."