Why Lean Fails to Stick — with Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant
Why does Lean fail to stick so often? Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant join me on Episode 547 to make the case that the missing precondition is psychological safety, and that it has to exist at the top before any Lean rollout ever begins.
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My guests for Episode #547 of the Lean Blog Interviews Podcast are Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant.
We structured this episode as a verbal A3. The problem we kept circling is one a lot of you have lived: Lean asks people to surface problems, admit mistakes, and stop the line, all without fear — and that depends on psychological safety as a precondition Lean itself cannot supply. The root cause Thomas and Andre keep tracing it back to is Chris Argyris's “Model 1” behavior (controlling, self-protective, blame-oriented, closed off from learning), the mode most of us default to under pressure. Andre brings the Toyota lens. Thomas brings Argyris, Deming, and what he calls the “ethical PIP.”
Andre DeMerchant is the president of DeMerchant Healthcare Solutions Inc. — informally, a former Toyota guy from Canada. He was hired as part of the first 100 people at the greenfield Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant in Canada, starting as a forklift driver and rising to manufacturing manager over the stamping shop before bringing that thinking into healthcare. He was previously a guest in Episode 307, where we talked about why you can't cut your way to success.
Thomas Cox describes himself as a “management bench builder” and is co-founder of the Transformative Leadership Lab. He has spent more than 25 years coaching the people who manage other managers. He is a certified Harada Method coach trainer, the approach the late Norman Bodek brought to the West (Norm and I discussed that back in Episode 176). Thomas came to this work from a software and database-architecture background before moving into management consulting in 2002, and he created a redesigned performance improvement process he calls the ethical PIP.
Together with Thomas's business partner Jim Prinzing, the two have been building an A3 on why Lean implementations struggle. It's available as a free PDF, and you can join the live document to comment, at txl-lab.com/lean.
What We Discuss in This Episode:
- The two manufacturing meetings: chaos hiding behind “everything's green” versus Toyota's “no problems is a problem”
- Why showing up to a Toyota meeting without a problem made Andre look like he didn't understand his own operation
- How the same miss was treated as a development opportunity, not a reason to shame anyone
- The ethical PIP, and why roughly 95 percent of a performance problem turns out to be management's job
- If we won't blame the frontline worker without checking the system, why do we blame management when Lean “doesn't stick”?
- Psychological safety as a precondition Lean depends on but cannot install
- Chris Argyris's Model 1 (controlling, self-protective, blame-oriented, closed) and Model 2 (calm, curious, empathic, non-defensive)
- Alan Mulally at Ford: banning sarcasm and applauding the first executive who reported “red”
- Carrots, sticks, and why a different experience is what actually changes behavior
- Tracing the root cause upward to executive behavior under pressure
- Why you practice your way into Model 2 rather than thinking your way in
- The consultant's dilemma: cherry-picking Model 2 clients versus converting Model 1 organizations
- How to download the A3 and the C-suite self-assessment.
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Automated Transcript (Not Guaranteed to be Defect Free)
Mark Graban: Welcome to Lean Blog Interviews. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Today I have two guests joining me together, Thomas Cox and Andre DeMerchant, for a conversation about preconditions for Lean and why Lean implementations often struggle or don't stick. Andre, I'll start with you, and I always love to hear a guest's Lean origin story. I'm guessing yours is a TPS origin story?
Andre DeMerchant: My introduction to Lean came from the time I spent at the Toyota Motor Manufacturing plant in Canada. I was hired as part of the first 100 people there. It was a greenfield plant. I had no idea about Lean, and no idea how to build a car to save my life, although I was a bit of a car nut. What really struck me was that this wasn't just marketing. Lean is about engaging everybody, and engaging everybody's brain and intelligence to make things better for the next person down the line, whether that's the customer or the next person you're serving.
Andre DeMerchant: I didn't believe that when I first got there, because I came from an industry that was always total chaos. I came from the meat-packing industry. We would sit in management meetings and talk about how well things were going, and then you'd walk outside the meeting and it was total chaos. Nobody really understood what was going on. There were no standards for anything. There was no standard work. Deadlines were missed, things were shipped incorrectly. You contrast that with Lean, which has very clear pathways you should follow. It sounds restrictive when you try to describe it to somebody, but it actually frees up a lot of your mind space to think about the meaning of the work and how to make things more valuable for whoever your customer is. It really took me a number of months to get there. But once I was there, I'm not sure I'd want to work in an environment that didn't have it. I'm not sure I could endure that kind of chaos again.
Mark Graban: Was the shift gradual, or was there a moment where you realized there wasn't the gap you expected between the words and the action?
Andre DeMerchant: There was a specific moment. At the meat-packing plant, you'd go around the table — “How's it going? Any problems?” “Nope, everything's good.” If you brought up a problem there, you'd probably be the biggest idiot in the room, and yet you could walk outside and see things were not going well. Contrast that with one of my first manufacturing meetings at Toyota. You'd go around the room and everybody had a problem to bring to the table. If you didn't have a problem, you'd be seen as the idiot — not that anybody would say it out loud — because you didn't understand how your business was working. Every business has problems every day. So when I showed up to that first meeting without a problem, it became apparent that I wasn't behaving properly in that room. That never happened again, and it made me realize these people were serious about how this was supposed to work.
Thomas Cox: I have to ask, Andre — when you made the faux pas of not having a problem when everyone else did, were you blamed, shamed, or criticized for it?
Andre DeMerchant: Not at all. It was acknowledged that I was new to the meeting, that I could learn from my peers about the kind of content to bring, and that I should reach out to anybody in that room with questions, including the executive vice president. There was no pressure, none of this “what a dumb guy to show up without a problem.” It was about helping me understand the process and come back better prepared. It was a development opportunity, and that's how it was seen.
Mark Graban: That sounds like a living example of “no problems is a problem.” It was a problem that you didn't bring a problem. But the corollary is that the problem is an opportunity to learn, rather than something to be chastised or shamed over.
Thomas Cox: Yes. Rather than affixing blame in order to deflect it from oneself. It's not my fault, it's your fault. No — it's nobody's fault. It's an opportunity.
Mark Graban: The problem is there. The gap is there. One more question before we turn to Thomas: what role were you hired into at Toyota?
Andre DeMerchant: I was hired as a forklift driver, and then graduated through the ranks to become manufacturing manager responsible for the stamping shop. Even when my career at Toyota ended, they were in the process of preparing me for the next level. Developing people, helping them get to the next step, was always a big item at Toyota. It supports the continuity of the business and a sound succession plan.
Mark Graban: So many people had that progression from team member up into formal leadership roles. Toyota develops people. Compare that to other companies. That idea of developing people from within seems to be a missing precondition in a lot of organizations. When I started at GM thirty years ago, you'd hire the young engineer to be the supervisor instead of promoting up through the ranks. Those differences compound greatly over time.
Andre DeMerchant: Not being able to develop people from within risks the DNA of your organization, because you're continuously bringing in DNA from outside. To build a strong culture and make sure each generation of leadership builds on the strengths of the last one, you have to be replicating the culture inside the organization.
Thomas's Origin Story and the Ethical PIP
Mark Graban: Thomas, I'd love to hear your origin story. It might be framed a little differently.
Thomas Cox: Many decades ago I read Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline and was galvanized by it. I started trying to see systems and ways to improve things systematically. In my engineering past I was a software guy, a database architect, and I started encouraging my peers to try out extreme programming, a precursor to agile. That got very little traction, which was frustrating, but I never lost my taste for it. When I switched in 2002 into management consulting and leadership training, I brought that with me. Around 2013 I helped kick off Lean Portland, a community of practitioners in Portland, Oregon. That whetted my appetite.
Thomas Cox: At one point I started thinking about how to use the Toyota Production System, as I understood it from the outside, to inform how managers manage and how leaders lead. For some reason I got onto the topic of performance improvement plans — telling someone they need to shape up or ship out. So many of those are terribly done. I wanted to take a Toyota-style approach to it. What I ended up writing was that about 95 percent of what had to happen was the manager getting clear on what quality was in the job, what skills and abilities the person needed, whether they had the tools, the training, the supplies, the inputs. It became a very long list very quickly: is management sure this person is capable of delivering quality? In many cases they aren't.
Thomas Cox: Only after you've exhausted that do you turn the page. If they don't have the skill, did we select for it? Is it trainable, and did we just not train it? By the time you're done, if a worker isn't working out, it's about 95 percent management's fault, because they picked them, put them in the role, trained them or didn't, gave them the supplies or didn't. If you haven't inspected management's 95 percent, blaming the worker for their 5 percent through a PIP feels premature. I turned that into a product I call the ethical PIP, and I got hired to help create them and coach executives to succeed on them. That helped me feel like I had my feet on the ground about what management needs to do to make it possible for workers to succeed.
Thomas Cox: Then I said, wait a second. Instead of asking how this worker succeeds, what about managers? Who's got that same setup for the manager? What's the manager's output, their tools, their inputs? You take it up to the C-suite, and that's how we got to this A3 about the preconditions of Lean. I'd been reading Deming and the early Lean material, and Deming would say “get rid of slogans,” or “drive out fear, substitute leadership.” Everywhere I looked, I'd ask, okay, what does that mean? And he never quite says what he means. It's a slogan.
Thomas Cox: It occurred to me that if you can't blame Joe on the line for not putting the bumper on correctly unless you've made sure he has a flawless bumper-installation process, then why do we turn around and blame management for not installing Lean correctly? Our explanations are things like “you didn't establish a Lean culture.” Okay — would you say “you don't have a bumper-installation culture”? It's a circular definition. You don't have a Lean culture because you didn't install a Lean culture.
Mark Graban: Everybody works as part of a system, even management.
Thomas Cox: And what Lean doesn't have, I'd claim, is an installation system. Lean doesn't install cleanly and reliably. If a bumper was installed badly 70 percent of the time, you'd say there's a problem with the installation process. But Lean seems to struggle a lot more than it succeeds, which for a problem-solving methodology is a bad sign.
Mark Graban: I'm glad you mentioned Deming. One of his expressions, and I'll paraphrase, was that the role of a leader is not to judge but to help people succeed. Compare the once-a-year annual review, where you're being a judge, with what you're doing every day to help somebody succeed. The other thing about the PIP is the cynicism that builds when people say the PIP isn't about improving performance — it's the documentation so we can fire the person.
Thomas Cox: Without getting sued.
Mark Graban: Do you know what percentage of people on a PIP actually survive and are allowed to improve?
Thomas Cox: It's completely variable by industry and company. But I can say with confidence that I have a track record of getting people to beat their PIPs, in part because the first thing we do is examine the thing and discover how badly it's written. We negotiate a better one that's actually well-defined and sets them up for success, and then we do the work to help them succeed. By the way, that improves the entire organization, because if the organization isn't giving one person what they need to succeed, the odds are good they're letting other people down too.
Framing the Problem as a Verbal A3
Mark Graban: So let's talk about this A3. When we got together to plan the episode, it felt natural to structure it like a verbal A3. How should we go through it?
Thomas Cox: First, credit to my business partner, Jim Prinzing, who isn't on the call. He's from outside the Lean tradition entirely, and I haven't seen him this excited in years. Between Andre's contributions and Jim's and mine, we created what I think is a good description of this problem of getting Lean implementations to stick. Let's frame up the problem statement. We know Lean works. We know it doesn't install cleanly or reliably as often as we'd like. So try this: Lean requires people to surface problems, admit mistakes, and stop the line, all without fear — which requires psychological safety. But psychological safety has to be a precondition. It's not provided by Lean. It has to be there before Lean gets rolled out and as it's being installed.
Thomas Cox: And we have good research that most humans, and especially leaders, default under pressure to what Chris Argyris called Model 1: controlling, self-protective, blame-oriented, and closed off from learning. That's the exact opposite of Lean. So I've got this methodology to be installed, but the people at the top responsible for its installation have inside them, by default, a way of responding to pressure that is inherently anti-Lean. It's the default state of humans under stress, which means if we're going to install Lean successfully, we have to address that Model 1 behavior at the executive level.
Thomas Cox: The positive opposite is what Argyris called Model 2: calm, curious, empathic, non-defensive, willing to share. “Huh, I wonder what the answer might be,” as opposed to “I know the answer and we'll talk until you see it my way.” Model 2 is the operating mode executives have to be in the vast majority of the time if they're going to make Lean install and persist.
Mark Graban: So the Model 1 behaviors would crush people's sense of psychological safety, and people would learn not to speak up. Model 2 behaviors are more likely to build it. I think we can illustrate Model 2 with Andre's story of showing up without a problem.
Thomas Cox: Exactly. He was met with calm, empathic curiosity. No blaming, no judging, no controlling, no “come up with a problem right now or get out.”
Mark Graban: I was swimming in a sea of Model 1 behavior at General Motors my first year. It was bad. Here's my question, though: how often will senior leaders agree with that problem statement, versus saying, “No, no — come fix my people,” or “cycle times are too long,” or “defects are too high. That's the real problem”?
Andre DeMerchant: Part of the problem, Mark, is that at the earliest engagement we tell organizations they need a couple of things: a burning platform for change and leadership commitment. But in those early days we don't really define what that commitment actually is. So the default becomes, “Yeah, I support this Lean stuff,” without defining what support means. My conversations with Thomas have led us to believe that while most of the installation pieces are effective, the miss at the beginning — making sure the executive leadership understands what kind of commitment they're signing up for — is a big one. We just ask, “Is leadership engaged?” “Oh, yeah, they come to the meetings, they're letting everybody else do it.” Without anyone realizing that the way they behave, the work they do, has to change too. It's more than standard work. It's the mental models they use day to day.
Mulally at Ford
Thomas Cox: Here's an illustration. When Alan Mulally went to Ford, the company was in deep trouble, and one of the first things he did in his C-suite meetings was ban sarcasm. I read that and thought, you're kidding. He told his people, “You can't tell me everything's green while we're hemorrhaging a billion dollars a month. We have to talk about reality.” Finally one guy, Mark Fields, was the first to step up and report red. He later wrote that he expected to get fired that day. Instead, Mulally started applauding. “Yes, this is excellent. Mark isn't the problem. Mark has a problem. What can each of us do to help Mark?”
Mark Graban: His program was behind schedule, so it wasn't green.
Thomas Cox: Right. Culture is created by what the person with more power than you pays attention to, and how they behave. What Mulally was saying is, “If you report red, I will applaud you and help mobilize resources to support you.” As opposed to the prior administration, where admitting a problem out loud was a career-limiting move. That's the opposite of Lean, where we talk about problems openly. It starts at the top.
Mark Graban: I've heard the story where nobody was reporting anything but green, Mark Fields was the first to do it, Mulally applauded, and Fields eventually became his replacement as CEO.
Thomas Cox: Years later. But in the weeks after, everybody started reporting yellow and red, and they started having constructive conversations. Now I won't be thrown out the window for reporting something other than green, and I'll get help. What he created in microcosm is exactly what we're trying to create on the front line with Lean. We bring up problems so we can solve them together.
Mark Graban: And the telling part is that even after Mulally encouraged them to speak up, Fields still felt fear. That reminds me of your experience at Toyota, Andre. It took you a while to realize they meant what they were telling you. Belief without evidence is hard.
Andre DeMerchant: Exactly. When you come from an industry that isn't structured that way and you hear it for the first time — and I'll acknowledge I'm a bit of a slow learner — you're waiting for the punchline. You're waiting for the shoe to drop, where somebody says, “Aha, I knew you were incompetent.” When it doesn't come, it takes a few cycles before you can believe it.
Carrots, Sticks, and Changing Behavior
Andre DeMerchant: We talk a lot about culture. What is it? Culture is basically a bunch of people exhibiting more or less the same behaviors. But what a lot of people don't realize is that I can't influence behaviors directly. I only have a carrot or a stick. I can make Thomas do something by dangling a carrot or hitting him with a stick. As the Japanese saying goes, “When the donkey is full or the donkey is hurt, the donkey stops walking.” If it's had too many carrots or been hit too many times, it won't do anything. The thing that actually drives behaviors is giving people a different experience than what they're used to. The different experience changes the behaviors, which, with a force of numbers behind it, changes the culture. A lot of people don't understand the mechanism.
Mark Graban: A quick detour, indulging myself as the host. I've read that the original phrase was the carrot and the stick, because the stick is what you use to dangle the carrot in front of the donkey. And if you hit a donkey, it locks its legs — you can't hit it and make it move forward. Why we're comparing people to donkeys at all is its own weird history.
Thomas Cox: I think it speaks to the fear the person in charge has: “If I don't make something happen, bad things will happen to me. I must make people do what I need with carrots and sticks.” Rather than understanding how people work internally and partnering with them. Finding out what makes someone feel fulfilled at work, asking them to help co-create some success. Share authorship.
Mark Graban: That Model 1 of “I have to make people do something through rewards or punishment” seems to map, maybe not perfectly, to Douglas McGregor's Theory X versus Theory Y. Theory X says people are lazy and need to be motivated. Theory Y, more like Deming, says people want to do good work and have intrinsic motivation. If you hired people who don't want to work, that's a system problem — why are you making bad hiring decisions? It's easier to blame individuals.
Thomas Cox: There's a screen grab I think about from a Weird Al Yankovic music video, a parody about corporate buzzwords. You've got a guy on a treadmill, a carrot dangled in front of him, and a guy in a suit with a gun behind him — dangling the carrot and threatening him at the same time. He's incentivized. He's running, sweating, and getting nowhere. It captures so much of what we all hate.
Note: The Weird Al song is called “Mission Statement”:
Root Cause Analysis
Mark Graban: Do we want to talk about the causal analysis? I was picturing a very big fishbone diagram. As I look at the A3, it seems like you narrowed the problem into a particular sub-problem you've dug into.
Thomas Cox: Our root-cause section is probably a week of back-and-forth, mostly Jim and me, with Andre contributing. When Lean is failing, it's because people at the front line aren't doing Lean — they aren't reporting problems or stopping the line. And that's because it isn't safe. They don't feel safe because there's at least intermittent punishment. It doesn't have to be every time. Even one out of five is too many. If I occasionally get smacked around, it doesn't take many of those to shift my behavior. That intermittent punishment comes from people above falling into the Model 1 pattern: controlling, self-protective, blame-oriented, closed.
Mark Graban: Is it worth reading through the whys?
Thomas Cox: Why one: frontline workers stop surfacing problems. Why two: experience teaches them it's not safe — career costs, scrutiny, blame, dimmed future prospects. The risk is too high. Why three: the risk is too high because there's at least intermittent punishment. Why four: there's intermittent punishment because the people above them, ultimately the executives who set the tone, are blame-oriented, defensive, and self-protective at least some of the time. Only a blame-oriented or self-protective person would punish somebody, or do something that felt punishing, when they surfaced a problem.
Mark Graban: And why are those executives that way? As I was leaving GM, I had less to fear, so I asked the number-two in our plant about it. He'd been chewing out an area manager over speakerphone — typical behavior. I finally asked him to help me understand why that was what he chose to do to Todd in that situation. He traced it back to “that's how we are here. My boss yells at me. His boss yelled at him.” He blamed the board of directors. “That's the way it's always been at General Motors.”
Thomas Cox: It's almost certainly a subjectively accurate summary. I was listening to one of Andre's stories about Kimberly-Clark, where they tried to do Lean organization-wide, and it survived only in pockets — defined by geographically separate plants with a top person able to protect the people below them. When the chain of yelling hit that person, they didn't pass it down. They had P&L responsibility and enough power to deflect it.
Mark Graban: The cycle of blame. And at some point that protected plant performs better, and the people above might leave it alone.
Thomas Cox: Or feel threatened by it and come attack it. If the person above is sufficiently blame-oriented and self-protective, they might see somebody else's success as a threat. Stupid, but it happens. People suboptimize all the time. It's all Model 1.
Mark Graban: There's also a dynamic where consultants who are very successful say, “Well, because I've been super successful, everyone else is doing it wrong.” That might be Model 1 thinking too.
Thomas Cox: That's the fundamental attribution error. When other people fail, it's because of their character. When I fail, it's because of special circumstances. When I succeed, it's because of my character. Classic human foible, and speaking as a consultant, I'm not immune to it. Although I try to have countermeasures.
Countermeasures and the Consultant's Dilemma
Mark Graban: So are the more powerful countermeasures about finding the Model 2 people you can work with, or getting better at influencing the Model 1 leaders? A lot of Model 1 leaders, by definition, won't be very self-reflective. When I hear leaders like John Toussaint talk about looking in the mirror and realizing the problem starts with them — not everybody has that humility or strength.
Andre DeMerchant: Finding a client that already has some Model 2 behavior is the easiest road. But at some point you run out of those clients. You have to face the fact that you have to go into a fundamentally Model 1 organization and get them on the road to Model 2. There are prerequisites — they have to want to change. We're all the hyenas trying to eat the same zebra, and we can't all be going after the Model 2s. In my career, I've worked with D-minus companies that ticked all the boxes otherwise. They had the burning platform, they wanted the change, the senior leadership was “engaged,” and they had the money. And it's not until you get in there that you realize the executive leadership really wants somebody else to do this. They have no intention of changing how they think. Without that psychological safety that's part of the Lean formula, we're never going to get this to work.
Andre DeMerchant: My question about other consultants who've had success would be: how many of them, once they've left those companies, have sustained results? Or did the organization slide back into Model 1 once it wasn't being poked consistently? I don't have data on that — I'm speaking rhetorically. I'm fortunate to work with a client on the West Coast, Salem Health, where the CEO when I started was definitely Model 2, and the current CEO is too, and has influenced the executive team that way. It's not perfect every day, the same way it wasn't perfect every day at Toyota. But they're trying to do the right thing. And honestly, until I started talking to Thomas, I didn't clearly understand Model 1 and Model 2. If I had, I would have done a much better job engaging executive teams up front in earlier work. It would have been less laborious, because we could have decided early whether this is an A-rank engagement or a complete waste of everybody's time.
Mark Graban: To recap, Andre said “I don't want to disparage anybody,” and then called consultants hyenas. The more serious point is that wanting to make a difference for an industry or a society means figuring out how to deal with the Model 1 organizations.
Thomas Cox: I'll take a stab at that. Everybody has Model 1 and Model 2 in them all the time. When we're not under extreme pressure, it's easier to get into Model 2, because the amygdala isn't clamoring “we have to get safe” — and scared people do stupid stuff. There isn't a single strength anybody has that doesn't get turned into a self-defeating pattern as soon as fear grabs the wheel. So the path forward, speaking as a consultant, may be to make this the first part of the sale: “I can only work with you successfully if you commit to a Model 2 transformation at the top.” The first part of the engagement is a neuroplastic training — the one I use is positive intelligence — followed by an agreement that this is how we'll operate, and that the greater the pressure, the more deliberate we'll be about staying calm, curious, and empathic. If they aren't willing to tackle that first, maybe you say it isn't ethical to take their money and go through a song and dance teaching things they'll sabotage as soon as they get scared.
Mark Graban: Sometimes people talk a good game. They fake the behaviors, or say what they think they should say, but don't mean it.
Thomas Cox: “I'm committed,” he said defensively. The person saying it may say it in an angry, defensive way, so you get Model 1 from one person calling up Model 1 from the other. Saboteurs all the way down. Everybody gets to self-sabotage now.
Get the A3
Mark Graban: Are you willing to share this draft of the A3 with people?
Thomas Cox: Yes. Jim Prinzing and I have a page at txl-lab.com/lean. You can download the PDF of the current version for free — just click the thumbnail. We're also setting up a short form where you can give us your name and email, and we'll make you a contributor to the Google Doc that is the live version of the A3, so you can make suggestions there. And I'll add a third thing: we've come up with a simple assessment that anybody who has visibility into the C-suite could fill out, to assess how close that C-suite is and where the gaps are. It's not binary — it's all degrees. The assessment tries to tease out how close they are and where they need to get even better to have the preconditions in place to succeed at Lean.
Mark Graban: We spent most of our discussion on the left-hand side of the A3. We get a gold star for that, I hope.
Thomas Cox: Staying in problem space is absolutely appropriate.
Mark Graban: Maybe later this summer we come back and do a part two that focuses more on the right-hand side — the countermeasures, the implementation path, confirming the effect.
Thomas Cox: Absolutely. I'll make myself available for that, because this is very important work.
Closing Reflections
Mark Graban: A lot of food for thought. I'm not very familiar with Chris Argyris, and I'm being pulled into reading a lot more of his work. Let's keep pulling together different influences. John Shook says it takes two to A3 — but you can have more people involved. Is there anything you want to say to wrap up?
Andre DeMerchant: Just thank you for the opportunity. It feels to Thomas and me that there's a bit of a breakthrough here. Certainly there is for me, and I've been doing this work for more than a couple of decades.
Thomas Cox: I'll add one thing. If we can figure out how to get Lean to succeed more often, it will lead to better workplaces and an improvement for society. Separate from the process and efficiency gains, there'd be psychological improvements — people wouldn't hate going to work. That is so worth doing. So if you have even a thought of helping with this, act on that impulse. Help us make this take its next step.
Mark Graban: Thank you both for sharing, and thank you for the invitation to others for input.
